Pop Culture

I'm Sure They're All Out to Get Me

The Canberra Times, 27 February 2001

So Pauline Hanson has resurrected the theory that the Port Arthur massacre was a conspiracy by the Federal Government to justify tougher gun laws. Martin Bryant (like John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray) was just a patsy.

It's nice to know that the right wing can join in the art of the conspiracy theory, so often practised by radical left-wingers. Still, the most persuasive conspiracy theory to recently surface was from Stacey Stillman, a contestant on the original "Survivor" series, who is suing the producers, claiming it was rigged.

Surprise, surprise. How could "Survivor", or any of these "reality" TV shows, NOT be rigged. As we all know, real life is actually boring. That's why we watch television. The latest reality TV shows were so obviously the work of drama experts that I can't believe so few people noticed. Was it any wonder that the winner of "Survivor" was the guy with the most fan mail?

Even our own alleged reality programs were highly suss. Take "Treasure Island", in which two alleged teams searched for alleged pirate treasure, and contestants allegedly took a "test" at the end of each episode to decide who would leave the island. By the final episode, when the cast was down to four young spunks (two of each gender), it was all blatantly obvious. Forget reality; we want ratings!

However, while conspiracy theories are making a welcome return, we haven't had nearly enough. Without further ado, here are five more theories, based on the highly suspicious events of the past year. Hopefully, they will be discussed and expanded by believers, paranoids and One Nation supporters for decades to come.

THE MAGIC TELECARD CONSPIRACY: The revelation that Peter Reith's son had made over $900 in phone calls, using his Dad's Telecard, made the then Industrial Relations Minister look like a bad guy. No scoop there. But the extra, unaccounted-for $50,000 missing from the Telecard? How can anyone, even the mysterious Miss X, spend so much on phone calls? "Who spent that money?" is a political mystery up there with "Who erased those Watergate tapes?" Conclusion: The $50,000 debt was completely fabricated, Miss X (who never even gave a TV interview) looks much too stunning to be a real person, and Reith was the victim of a sneaky, underhanded conspiracy by his enemies. All in a good cause.

THE DYING KANGAROO CONSPIRACY: I obviously wasn't paying attention. Otherwise, I would surely have read a theory somewhere that all of Qantas's bad luck was engineered, as part of a dastardly plot to ruin them. From near-crashes to food-poisoning lawsuits to passengers contracting fatal diseases that nobody had even heard of, the last 12 months have been bad ones for Qantas. They couldn't even advertise on TV without playing over Susie O'Neill's gold-medal swim. (We will never forget that it was THEIR advertisement that totally ruined the entire Olympic Games for us.) Who planned this conspiracy against Qantas? Ansett? Perhaps the new airlines, Impulse and Virgin Blue, working together? Or maybe a group of passengers, driven to action after suffering from economy-class syndrome. No doubt America was involved.

THE ANDREA'S PILLS CONSPIRACY: It seems almost too bizarre to be true. One of the youngest, smallest and cutest of all Olympians, banned from Olympic competition and stripped of her individual gold medal because her coach had given her the wrong headache tablet. We were infuriated - which is exactly how they wanted us to feel! If public outrage is strong enough, the Olympics won't have such stringent drug rules - and athletes could get away with anything, just like they always have. A big ox like C.J. Hunter could never be loveable enough, but an innocent young gymnast like Andrea Raduccan? Who couldn't see the injustice?

To thicken the plot, the Paralympics gave us another patsy in U.S. amputee sprinter Brian Frazure. Not only did he lose his 200m title, but he fell over the line, painfully accepting his silver medal with his only arm in a sling. Now that we all felt sorry for him, it was "revealed" that he had accidentally taken the steroid nandrolene. The testers said something about ignorance being no excuse and gave him a four-year ban. Like Raduccan, he was the tragic victim of a dastardly plot. By whom? Probably someone in America; it usually is.

THE GUJARAT CONSPIRACY: You might have heard the theory that the Apollo 11 moon landing was all faked to scare the Russians. Some would even have us believe that the Holocaust was a myth. Ditto the stolen generation. Well if they want to say such outlandish things, let me suggest that the recent earthquake in Gujarat also never happened. It was simply a government plot to get more foreign aid. Twenty thousand dead? Name one! True, there was the news footage. Totally fake, of course. They probably filmed parts of India and made them look like sites of complete devastation. (Actually, that would have been relatively easy.) As for the "victims": weren't some of those guys in "Neighbours" a few years ago?

So there are a few theories to get you talking. Some of them might sound outlandish, but if I disappear mysteriously in the next few weeks, you'd better start taking them seriously.