GetUp! pulled its Tony Abbott lifesaver ad after a week of real drownings

The ABC reported on 24 April 2019 that lobby group GetUp! pulled an election ad depicting former prime minister Tony Abbott, then defending his seat of Warringah, as an apathetic surf lifesaver who refuses to help a drowning swimmer. In the ad, an Abbott impersonator sits on the beach in uniform munching an onion while a swimmer gets into trouble; when a woman urges him to help, he replies 'I think you'll find the science isn't settled on that' — a jab at Abbott's 2017 claim that climate science being settled was 'absolute crap'.

The ad was slated to run in cinemas across Australia the following week. Its release came after seven drownings across the country over the Easter long weekend, including two surf lifesavers. Royal Life Saving Australia's chief executive Justin Scarr tweeted 'terrible week for drowning or lifesaving references. Poor taste. Nothing funny about drowning', and Surf Life Saving Australia called the ad insensitive. Abbott said the country's lifesavers deserved an apology; Labor leader Bill Shorten called the ad 'grossly disrespectful' and 'stupid' and stressed GetUp! was independent of his party.

GetUp! apologised 'for the insensitivity of the timing and subject matter of our planned ad' and said it would replace it with a 'more literal' ad using footage of Abbott laughing with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton about 'water lapping at [the] door' of Pacific islands. The group said the campaign's intention was to focus on Abbott's 'callous inaction on climate change', citing a World Health Organisation warning that the annual death toll from climate change would reach 250,000 a year.

The cinema ad was scrapped and replaced with a different cut; GetUp! publicly apologised to Australia's lifesavers, and Labor's leader distanced his party from the group.

The ad's premise — indifference to a drowning swimmer — collided with a weekend in which seven people actually drowned.

The lifesaving organisations whose uniform dresses the ad's villain condemned it, attacking the ad from the very quarters it borrowed from.

Political allies distanced themselves, turning a pointed attack on Abbott into a story about GetUp!'s judgment.

Satire needs distance from fresh tragedy: an ad whose villain ignores a drowning swimmer cannot run while the country is mourning real drownings, however sharp the political point.

GetUp! replaced the ad with the 'more literal' version and continued its campaign against Abbott in Warringah, where independent Zali Steggall was running against him. The ABC report does not say how the rest of the campaign fared. Advance Australia, an opposing activist group, had suffered its own backlash days earlier over a video of its parody character gyrating against a Zali Steggall billboard.