I may have been labouring under a misapprehension. In all my years in the advertising caper I’ve always believed that if an ad is shown to be dishonest or misleading it will be immediately withdrawn, and the people responsible for it will be prevented from running further advertisements until they get their house in order. Depending on the seriousness of the deception they might even be made to publish or broadcast some kind of grovelling apology. It is to avoid such censure and penance that I have never created advertising which suggests, for example, that the length of a man’s penis is determined by the kind of beer he drinks, or that washing your children’s socks with a particular laundry detergent will increase their life-expectancy.

So imagine my surprise when, several days after Labor’s claims about Mr Turnbull’s Medicare privatisation plans had been exposed as a fiction, the ads which made the claims were still on air – and indeed continued to air right up until the eve of the election. For a while I wondered if perhaps the rules had changed in the years I was overseas or at least that, to make the most boring Australian election in living memory a bit more interesting, political parties had been granted a temporary immunity to them. But then I remembered that a few days prior to the launch of the Medicare mendacity a group of outraged Labor supporters had accused the Libs of featuring a ‘fake tradie’ in one of their ads. The grounds for the accusation were that the man in the ad is wearing the kind of wristwatch which, CFMEU entitlements notwithstanding, no real tradie could possibly afford, and that he is drinking from a girly ceramic cup rather than the fair-dinkum, true-blue, chipped enamel mug a real tradie would favour. So when it transpired that this latte-sipping, Patek Philippe-sporting dilettante was the genuine, ute-driving article, the leftie critics found all they’d really done was draw attention to the fact that seven years of Lib fiscal policy certainly hasn’t diminished the spending power of blue-collar Australians, and may even have given a few of them ideas above their station. We can barely begin to imagine what kind of hell awaited ‘true tradie’ at his next Bunnings car park sausage sizzle. In the weeks since the election I have seen more evidence of what looks like disingenuousness in advertising and cannot help wondering if some of these campaigns were not inspired by Mr Shorten’s brazenness. Did Telstra really believe that by buying the rights to ‘I go to Rio’ and running it over a commercial showing people doing sport and accompanied by a caption flagging their relationship with the Australian Olympic team’s official broadcaster it would not give people the impression that Telstra itself was an AOC partner? I suppose we must give them the benefit of the doubt.

Mr Shorten’s ‘Mediscare’ – or rather the panic voting which it triggered – showed that most Australians, like me, assume that you wouldn’t be allowed to say something in an ad if it wasn’t actually true. In light of which I confidently predict that one of the next year’s biggest selling products will be something called a Varidesk. If you haven’t seen the ad, a Varidesk is a simple contraption which elevates your desk so that you can work standing up. Why would anyone want to stand up all day? I hear you ask. Because, as the voiceover explains, ‘sitting is the new smoking’.That’s right; what you’re probably doing right now with your bottom could be taking years off your life. So far the media has not really picked up on this terrifying discovery, but once they do it won’t be long before it begins to shape every aspect of our lives. Commuting on trains and buses will become a full-contact sport. Parents will start having serious conversations with their teenage children after finding cushions in their room. We will see newsreaders’ legs. At some point a cartel of furniture manufacturers will commission some research whose findings will suggest that sitting may not be quite as dangerous as was first supposed. But the effects of this will be negated by another report which will show that while sitting in moderation may not be life-threatening in itself, it is almost certainly a gateway to kneeling, slouching and lying down.

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