Vale Norman Gunston and Hoges: Satire is dead and buried in Australia

July 2, 2026 — 11:40am

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The dress code was strictly black tie and elastic-sided boots for the barbecue beneath the stars on the red dirt outside Longreach, Queensland.

It was quite an occasion.

John Howard and his entire cabinet were meeting in the little old central-west Queensland town. It was May 1999, and such a thing had never happened before.

Howard, it happened, was celebrating his 25th anniversary as a politician, and he wasn’t about to let it be the last.

Unmatched in sniffing the political wind, he knew large sections of country Australia, angry at his government, were beginning to turn towards a woman named Pauline Hanson and her then two-year-old outfit, One Nation.

And so the prime minister flew to the outback to deliver the message that he was not only listening to rural Australia, but his cabinet was working on policies to help the bush.

In celebration, Longreach threw an outdoor concert featuring country singer Lee Kernaghan. Howard and his wife, Janette, in evening wear appeared slightly perplexed at the crowd dancing in rum-fuelled abandon to the massively amplified strains of “We’re the boys from the bush, and we’re back in town / And we get high when the sun goes down”.

The outback outing also coincided with the 20th anniversary of the National Farmers’ Federation’s founding.

The NFF’s leadership headed to Longreach, too. Their offering was the black-tie dinner beneath the stars.

National Party bigwigs........

© The Sydney Morning Herald