Political division and the culture wars

Political division and the culture wars became the campaign’s explicit subject matter from the late 2010s onward. The stance is critical of the division itself: the campaign mocks both sides and explicitly endorses neither the left nor the right.

The turning point is 2018 “Lamb Side Story”, the first ad where political polarisation is the premise, the conflict and the problem to be solved. Two “gangs” — labelled as extreme left- and right-wing commentators — stage a West Side Story musical confrontation until a barbecue stops the fight. This is both-sides satire at its most direct: the two camps are made visually and comedically equivalent, and lamb is positioned as above the fray. The same logic extends to 2023 (cancel culture as mass exile), 2024 (generational warfare) and 2025 (online arguments).

The bilateral structure is a strong convention, not a universal law, and the sources are careful about its limits. The 2018 analysis notes that this “both-sides” neutrality could be read as promoting apathy or ignoring the substance of the debates, and that when two sides are not genuinely comparable the equivalence becomes dishonest. The campaign’s actual commitment is to avoid partisan endorsement, not to manufacture artificial equivalence — it has legitimately targeted single systems and institutions elsewhere without inventing an opposing side.

The stance evolved. The early era targeted adjacent cultural anxieties rather than politics directly; from 2018 the campaign began addressing polarisation head-on, and by 2023 it recast identity-policing itself as the damage. High-risk subjects — notably the Voice to Parliament referendum — are treated by the sources as inappropriate for the campaign’s affectionate register.

This target is the engine of the campaign’s later years and connects to political division as absurd but solvable and the un-Australian paradox.