Politics

Scott Morrison’s Coal Speech Has Gone Viral On TikTok During A Climate Change Disaster

Perhaps we should be afraid of coal, Scott.

scott morrison tiktok

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A TikTok video has gone viral after dubbing footage from Australia’s various climate change-fuelled disasters with the sound of Prime Minister Scott Morrison spruiking coal as the answer to our problems.

TikTok user @bitofpud shared the video on Thursday with the caption “Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.”

Within hours, the video went viral, amassing 454,000 views and nearly 100,000 likes.

The video shows clips from the devastating 2019 bushfires, as well as the floods that are currently plaguing most of the east coast, expertly spliced together with flash backs to Morrison’s 2017 coal speech.

For those unfamiliar, back in 2017, then-Treasurer Scott Morrison brought a fat lump of coal into Parliament — telling the chamber “this is coal, don’t be afraid.”

But in a stunning display of irony, it turns out we were probably right to be afraid of the stuff, considering all of the massive natural disasters we’ve endured in the years since.

Thousands of social media users have shared the video on other platforms, using it to point out Morrison’s failures ahead of the next federal election — likely to happen in May.

It goes without saying that the clip gives Morrison the sort of supervillain edit you’d expect in a Marvel film, which is obviously not a great look when we’re weeks out from a federal election.

Thankfully, for Morrison, parliamentary footage is still not allowed to be used in any party’s political advertising, which means Labor leader Anthony Albanese couldn’t whip up his own version of this video.

However, that hasn’t stopped politicians — like Labor’s Stephen Jones — from retweeting the video, which is still completely legal, despite the political advertising laws.

The now-viral TikTok goes to show that Australians have some serious feelings to share ahead of the next election, and likely won’t shy away from creating their own political advertisements before we head to the polls in May.