The Government has posted short videos on its Budget Highlights web-pages to explain the key points of this year's budget. But judging by the video for the national security page, there presumably wasn't a lot of money available for the production, and there certainly wasn't much inspiration:
You really have to wonder what the point is here. The visuals add zero information to the voice-over, and the symbolism is either insultingly laboured or bafflingly inappropriate.
Let's start with the padlock, which we see when the voice-over refers to 'a safe and secure' Australia. Geddit? Then, for some reason, the declaration that the Government is 'determined to fight the threat on multiple fronts' is accompanied by a visual of an exclamation mark inside a triangle, which is usually recognised as the symbol for Work in Progress.
A little further on, things get even more weird: the voice-over refers to stopping terrorism, but that's accompanied by a visual of a newspaper with the headline 'Terrorism' at the top, soon overlaid by a big orange stamp marked 'STOP'. Is this a subtle reference to the Government's metadata laws, which media organisations oppose because they threaten journalists' use of confidential sources?
No time to answer that, as after a few more strained visual metaphors, the video reaches its unintentionally hilarious climax. As the voice-over refers to 'keeping everyone safe and our country secure', the accompanying map of Australia literally falls off the bottom of the screen, like Wile E Coyote plunging into a gorge. All that's missing is a whistling sound followed by a dull thud.
So there you have it: Australia has gone over the cliff, and ISIS didn't have to lift a finger.