Australia has come up with some absolute shockers when advertising agencies have been tasked with promoting the country around the world.

Laura Bingle’s “Where the Bloody Hell are you?” (thank you Scott Morrison) was one of the worst but “put a shrimp on the barbie’ with Paul Hogan was not much better.

Now Tourism Australia has appointed David Droga of the advertising agency Droga5 to come up with a new approach. After the appointment was announced he told The Age (8/8): “I don’t want us to just to be seen as the cheeky chappies or the sort of great sidekicks. We’ve got a young country. So being a young country means you’re not as confident. We’ve got the confidence of a 15 year old boy, where you get a sort of bravado and your cockiness but there’s a bit of insecurity behind that.”

Perhaps true in the early to mid 20^th century but arguably untrue at least since the Whitlam years.

The good news, however, is that his vision for Australia is one in which the country is ambitious and empowered, and takes the future by the scruff of the neck “as opposed to sort of just dig it out of the ground,” The Age reported.

Well, the comments about Australia are probably reasonable for someone who has lived outside the country for decades and for the times many of us remember when we were farewelling friends leaving for overseas from Station and Princes Piers in Melbourne and not returning. But perhaps not so much for 2024.

As for what he brings to the party to achieve this he says: “One of the superpowers I have is to dumb things down and simplify things.” But the most worrying comment from Droga was that Australia was a ‘young country’.

True in terms of the rhetoric politicians and others employed for much of the 19^th and 20^th centuries and onwards. But not so true for those who recognise the 65,000 years of Indigenous Australian history which precedes that of later Australians.

Ignoring thousands of years of our history is hardly a good start for someone who claims he has ‘superpowers’ but it is certainly a very good example of dumbing things down.