3 weeks ago
10
Opinion
February 3, 2026 — 7:30pm
Pauline Hanson’s short Please Explain cartoons are usually a scream. They can be blunt, fast and indiscriminate – the sort of political satire Australia used to do well, back when sacred cows weren’t protected species but targets.
Many of us grew up with How Green Was My Cactus, broadcast on radio across cities and country towns, taking the piss out of whoever happened to be in charge. Left, right, ego and hypocrisy all lined up for slaughter. No exemptions.
Australia once had a deep bench for this kind of work. Barry Humphries, Max Gillies, Shaun Micallef, the Chaser boys, The Wharf Revue, Clarke and Dawe – a culture that understood satire as a public service. Politicians expected it. Nobody confused being mocked with being oppressed.
A Super Progressive Movie clearly wants to sit in that tradition. It just badly overestimates how long one joke can survive on screen.
The animated film opens with: “This is a true story, if you don’t believe it, you are racist.”
Its plot centres on Pete, a “cisgender straight white male”, which in the universe of this film is enough to land you on death row. Pete hasn’t done anything especially wrong. His crime is existing incorrectly, saying the wrong things at some point, and not knowing the approved language to wriggle free. For this, he is sentenced to death by the Feelings-Based Court in Naarm.
The Naarm portrayed in this film is a progressive dystopia sealed under a literal bubble-dome, held together by a glowing rainbow called “The Virtue Signal”. It is ruled by King Albo and staffed by caricatures who enforce daily humiliation rituals on the city’s disfavoured citizens. Pete is paraded, punished and nearly executed not because he is dangerous, but because he is convenient. Victimhood is currency, and Pete is the wrong denomination.
Just as things peak, prophecy intervenes. The Virtue Signal flickers, elders warn of “Naarmageddon”, and Pete is suddenly reclassified from nuisance to essential. Alongside Uncle Murray (who is 1/16th Aboriginal and very much in charge), Princess Stacy and a purple-haired non-binary prison guard, Pete is sent to Uluru to recover the magical “Victim Hood” – a cloak that grants infinite grievance, moral immunity and the power to end any argument instantly.
Stacy is royalty by decree rather than bloodline: the King’s very masculine transgender daughter, drawn with a square jaw, flowing gown and permanent air of outrage. She exists largely to deliver lectures, demand affirmation and demonstrate the film’s central joke – that in Naarm, identity outranks achievement. The point is not subtle. Like many of the film’s sacred cows, it’s wheeled out, poked repeatedly, and left standing long after the audience has got the idea.
Pete, meanwhile, is not a hero. He’s there to soak up lectures and punishment while the satire does its work. He’s a walking stand-in for anyone who feels permanently on the wrong side of the cultural conversation.
It’s crude, silly and funny – a proper swing – but the movie never really moves on from there.
The film is written by Mark Nicholson and Sebastian Peart of Stepmates Studios, who clearly want to revive a style of political comedy that has thinned out in Australia. There’s no shortage of appetite for offence here. What’s missing is discipline. The same points are hammered again and again until the satire starts to feel less like comedy and more like a very long argument with cartoons attached.
This is where the contrast with Britain’s Dead Ringers is instructive. The long-running BBC radio show lampoons Keir Starmer just as happily as it does Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Power rotates; ridicule follows. No one is spared, and no one is crowned the grown-up in the room.
In A Super Progressive Movie, Hanson increasingly positions herself as exactly that. With her polling higher than she has in years, the film drifts from satire into self-congratulation. She governs calmly while everyone else melts down. That may play well politically, but it’s poison for comedy. The film loses its edge when it stops making fun of everyone and starts spelling out who’s right, who’s wrong and who should be in charge. Certainty kills the laugh.
There are some rather funny moments, particularly early on. Some ideas are genuinely sharp. But once the film commits fully to its politics, the jokes flatten. What works as a five-minute cartoon cannot survive an 80-odd-minute victory lap.
The surrounding controversy has been louder than the film. Cancelled screenings, free speech debates and high ticket prices have done much of the marketing, with Hanson declaring: “You can’t have real free speech unless you’re able to take it as well as you give it.” It’s a neat line – and sharper than much of what ends up on screen.
What begins as sharp and provocative ends up narrow and preachy.
If you like Hanson’s cartoons, you’ll recognise the spark that’s trying to break through. You may even laugh more than once. And too often, when Labor is in government, political satire seems to thin out or retreat, as though lampooning the left is commercially risky or culturally impolite.
But A Super Progressive Movie is the moment where satire gives way to sermon. It needed fewer talking points, more mischief, and the confidence to butcher sacred cows without insisting we applaud the butcher.
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