Life Imitates Veep in Australia

Even Julia Louis-Dreyfus is 'dumbstruck' at Malcolm Turnbull's word choice
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 24, 2016 11:34 AM CDT
Life Imitates Veep in Australia
In this image released by HBO, Julia Louis-Dreyfus appears in a scene from "Veep."   (Patrick Harbron/HBO via AP)

Malcolm Turnbull is either unable to come up with meaningful campaign slogans or is a closet Julia Louis-Dreyfus fan. The Australian prime minister has gone on a bender lately with the words "continuity and change," hoping to convince Aussies that he'll keep some policies of the country's Liberal Party in place while simultaneously putting some distance between himself and ex-PM (and fellow LPer) Tony Abbott, whose own policies were not exactly well-received, Quartz notes. But some who've heard Turnbull enthusiastically put forth this slogan of late—he threw it out there several times on state TV on Monday, as well as on an Australian radio station, where he used it four times in under two minutes, per BuzzFeed—may feel a twinge of recognition upon hearing it.

That's because Turnbull, who wrested the PM title from Abbott in September, appropriated (either coincidentally or on purpose) what Quartz deems an "intentionally stupid campaign slogan" from the HBO show Veep, in which Louis-Dreyfus' character, Selina Meyer, uses the slightly different term "continuity with change" during her reelection campaign in the show's fourth season. "We needed it to be hollow and oxymoronic, to say absolutely nothing but seem to have depth and meaning," Simon Blackwell, the show's writer and executive producer, tells the Guardian. "It did make me laugh a lot when I saw that the Australian PM's people had been on the same mental journey and come up with the same meaningless phrase." Even Louis-Dreyfus got wind of the sort-of homage and replied with a three-word tweet: "I am dumbstruck." (The official House of Cards Twitter account got into it with Turnbull a few days ago, per Business Insider Australia.)

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