Let me tell you the quickest way to work out whether something is a joke.
A joke has a joke in it.
Sounds obvious. And yet here we are, in September 2026, watching a grown woman get adopted as a folk hero for painting her face with white markings, chanting, dancing about barefoot, and pretending to sniff petrol. Her name is Lisa Jane Spencer. You might already know it, because she has made very sure you would.
I want to walk you somewhere with this one. Not to lecture you. I promise. If you've ever felt a bit ambushed by the whole "is this racist or am I allowed to laugh" thing, you're exactly the person I'm writing to, and I'd like you to stay.
Because I'm going to show you a road. It starts at a spot most people wouldn't even call racist. And it ends somewhere that should stop all of us cold. The whole point of this piece is the road between those two places, and how short it is.
My name is Jessica Staines. I'm a Wiradjuri woman, an early childhood teacher, and the director of Koori Curriculum. And I know this road because I live on it.
First, the joke that wasn't one
During National Reconciliation Week 2026, which is the one week a year specifically set aside to build respect between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and everyone else, Spencer posted a video. In it she plays a character called "Aunty Lisa" who announces she now "identifies as a black fella." What follows is the greatest hits of 1950s bigotry. Chanting. White face paint. Bare feet. And a mime of petrol sniffing, in case anyone at the back missed the point.
People told her to take it down. She doubled down instead. "I stand by the jokes," she wrote. "This is comedy. I make fun of everyone equally. Plenty of people loved the video. I find the welcome to country offensive."
Now, I'm not here to police comedy. I love comedy. It's one of the oldest and best tools we have for telling the truth. What I'm here to do is help you spot the difference between a comedian and a person hiding behind the word "comedian" like it's a hi-vis vest that gets them onto any site they fancy.
Let's do the test. Where's the joke? Not the shock, the joke. Is there an idea, a twist, a target, a point? Or is the stereotype itself meant to be the funny thing? Because if naming the stereotype is the entire act, there's no joke in there. There's just a stereotype with a laugh track.
Spencer's video had no joke in it. An audience reviewed it and found it contained no comedy. That's not censorship. Nobody arrested her. An audience deciding you're not funny is not oppression, it's Tuesday, it's the single most normal thing that happens in show business. The professional response to a joke dying in the room is to go home and rewrite it. The amateur response is to announce the room is broken.
She announced the room was broken. And here's where the road starts to slope.
The road, step one: "you just can't take a joke"
The first move is always the same, and it's sneaky, so watch for it. When the laughter doesn't come, the line becomes "you just don't have a sense of humour."
Sit with how clever that is, in a grubby sort of way. It takes a badly made joke and turns it into your personal failing. Suddenly you're the one on the back foot, wondering if you're uptight, while the actual question, where is the joke, quietly slips out the back door. You never get to ask it, because you're too busy defending your own funny bone.
There's a bigger version of the same trick. "The woke brigade." It gets waved around like proof of a coordinated plot against fun. Most of the time it's describing something far more boring: market demand. Audiences change. What played in 1985 often doesn't play now, the same way we stopped laughing at plenty of things our grandparents found hysterical. A crowd going quiet, or scrolling past, or clicking unfollow, isn't a mob. It's audiences choosing. Calling that "woke" is a way of being cross that the audience grew up.
But the trick works. That's the problem. It works well enough that a person can build an entire public identity out of being the brave truth-teller the humourless mob tried to silence. Which is exactly what happened next.
Step two: the martyr costume fits better than the face paint
Spencer lost her job over the Reconciliation Week video. There was real backlash. In a just and tidy world, that might have been the end of it, a lesson learned, a quiet exit.
Instead, something else happened, and it's the part I really need you to see.
She got adoted. Across the last weekend of August 2026, Spencer turned up at a rally organised by white supremacists. She came dressed, again, in fake Aboriginal clothing and face paint. And she performed a fake Welcome to Country, for that crowd, as entertainment.
The "just a joke" from Reconciliation Week didn't stay a joke. It didn't even stay online. It walked out of the phone, put on shoes, and went and performed for actual white supremacists, who welcomed her as one of their own. She has become a darling of Australia's far right, held up as a free-speech martyr, a folk hero for the aggrieved.
The "harmless" joke was never harmless, and it was never going to stay small, because it was always pointed in a particular direction. It just took a few months to find the room where that direction was applauded instead of questioned.
The costume didn't change. The audience did. And that audience told us exactly what the joke had been about the entire time.
The compass hiding inside every joke
Good comedy has traditionally pointed its cannon upward. At kings, prime ministers, billionaires, bishops, bosses, anyone with more power than the person telling the joke. That's punching up. It's satisfying because it takes a little air out of the powerful, and the powerful can more than cope. The court jester mocked the king because the king had the army, the gold, and the final say. The jester had a bell on his hat.
Punching down runs the other way. It aims the joke at people who already hold less power, less wealth, less safety, and less say in how they're portrayed. Do that, and the mechanics quietly flip. The laugh stops being rebellious. It becomes the loud kid and his mates picking on the smaller kid, then insisting the smaller kid "can't take a joke."
You learned this in the playground. You've known where the line sits since you were about seven. That churn in your stomach when Spencer's video plays isn't you being fragile. It's your instinct working perfectly.
Where do Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people sit on that up-down map? Let's look at the actual numbers, because this is where "just a laugh" falls apart completely.
According to the Productivity Commission's Closing the Gap data, as of 30 June 2025 the age-standardised rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults in prison was 2,500.2 per 100,000, up from 1,925.4 in 2019. The Commission's own one-word assessment of that target: worsening. On life expectancy, the 2024 Closing the Gap data showed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women are still expected to die roughly eight years earlier than non-Indigenous Australians, with no improvement on that measure.
The causes are documented, not mysterious, and not the fault of the people living inside the statistics. Dispossession of land. Generations of children removed from their families. Being counted in the census only after the 1967 referendum. Deaths in custody that the 1991 Royal Commission investigated and made 339 recommendations, none have been followed.
When a comfortable comedian paints her face and mimes petrol sniffing, she isn't a plucky underdog speaking truth to power. She's the powerful party, taking aim at the group sitting at the very bottom of every graph the government produces, then acting startled when nobody claps.
That's not edgy. It's the oldest, laziest direction a punch can travel. And when she took it to a white supremacist rally, she simply stopped pretending it was pointed anywhere else.
Now let me show you where that same downward punch lands when it's thrown by a thousand hands at once.
Step three: the joke arrives in my inbox
I want to tell you about a message I received.
It landed on an ordinary day, the way they always do. No warning. Just there, between an email from an educator asking about our resources and a reminder that the school run was in twenty minutes. A stranger, hiding behind an anonymous account, had taken the time to call me a string of racial slurs I won't repeat here, and to tell me to rot in hell.
That was a Tuesday. Or a Wednesday. They blur together now, because this is not rare for me. It is Tuesday. It is the school run. It is my inbox.
Here's what my colleagues and I do for a living. We help early childhood educators, most of them non-Indigenous, bring Aboriginal perspectives into their classrooms. We share children's books. We celebrate culture. You'd think sharing a children's book would be about as controversial as sharing a recipe for lamingtons. You'd be wrong. We once posted about a sandpit. A sandpit. And still it came.
The hate is so predictable we plan our work around it. I can tell you almost to the day when it'll spike. 26 January. ANZAC Day. NAIDOC Week. Reconciliation Week, the same week Spencer chose. Any moment the nation is asked to think about us for longer than a heartbeat.
And there's a cruel twist most people miss. Social media platforms are built to reward controversy.
When a post attracts a swarm of racist comments, the algorithm reads that as engagement and pushes the post to more people. The abuse literally makes us more visible. So either we accept the abuse as the price of being seen, or we go quiet and disappear. Those are the two doors. That's not a marketing strategy, it's a trap.
Notice the pattern holding steady all the way up. Spencer said the room was broken. The anonymous accounts say we're "indoctrinating" children by teaching that Aboriginal people exist. Same downward punch. Same refusal to see the target as a person who might punch back. Just a bigger fist.
Step four: the booing at dawn
Let me give you the clearest example I have of the punch landing in public, in daylight, in front of children.
In the days around ANZAC Day 2026, we banned more than three hundred people from our profiles. Three hundred. We hid and removed hundreds of vile comments. Guess what we'd posted to provoke it. We shared an article about the brave Aboriginal servicemen and women who fought for this country. That's it. We honoured Australian ANZACs who happened to be Aboriginal. For that, we were buried.
That same season, for the second year running, Aboriginal veterans performing Welcome to Country at dawn services in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth were booed. These were Traditional Owners and veterans, people who wore the uniform, standing on the very Country their ancestors have cared for since time immemorial, honouring the fallen. And sections of the crowd jeered them.
Those same people stood silent and respectful for every other part of the service. The Last Post. The minute's silence. The anthem. Every protocol honoured with solemnity, except the oldest protocol on this continent, performed by Indigenous veterans. So this was never about ceremonies being "overused." It was about which people, which histories, some Australians have decided are worth respecting.
Imagine being a small child learning that your people are the part of the ceremony you're allowed to boo.
Step five: the silence at the top of the road
I know some of you reading this have quietly wondered whether it all gets a bit overstated. Whether the woke brigade has turned everyday rudeness into a crisis. I'm not going to lecture you for thinking that. If you don't spend your days alongside Aboriginal families, it's genuinely hard to see. That's the whole reason I'm walking you up this road.
On 26 January 2026, a homegrown terrorist attacked Invasion Day rallies in Perth. Aboriginal people who had gathered peacefully to grieve and protest were targeted with violence.
Picture the response you'd expect to a terrorist attack. Wall-to-wall coverage. Politicians tripping over each other to condemn it. Vigils. Flowers. "We stand with you" everywhere you looked. Now picture how much of that you actually remember hearing.
The silence was the point. It says, plainly, that Aboriginal lives are not grieved the same way. And that devaluation doesn't fall out of the sky. It's built, brick by brick, through a thousand small acts that whisper the same message: these people don't quite matter.
The face paint builds it. The slurs in my inbox build it. The booing builds it. A comedian performing a mock Welcome for a white supremacist crowd builds it. When you tell a whole society, over and over, that a people's identity is just content to be mocked and consumed, you lay the foundation for someone to decide their lives are worth even less than that.
That's what I mean when I say the joke and the violence sit on the same line. One end normalises the other. The road is short. Spencer walked a good stretch of it herself in a single winter, from a Reconciliation Week skit to a supremacist rally, and she did it in the same face paint the whole way.
The good news, and it is good
Taking the piss is a national treasure, as Aussies it’s in our DNA, it’s how we show each other that we care. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander comedy is some of the sharpest in the country, and it goes everywhere Spencer thinks she went, except it lands.
In October 2014, the ABC aired Black Comedy, the first all-Indigenous sketch show since Basically Black back in 1973. Written by and starring Indigenous performers. Nothing sacred. One storyline followed Jerome, a 14-year-old Indigenous boy who prefers physics to football while his school throws its entire sporting budget at turning him into the next Greg Inglis. "We're not some posh school that's got black kids coming out their arse," the sports master reasons. The joke isn't Jerome.
The joke is the school, and the lazy assumption underneath it. That's punching up at a stereotype instead of hiding behind one.
Actor Aaron Fa'aoso put it beautifully at the time. "Comedy has always been such a big part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture. Our ability to laugh at ourselves and at tough situations is what's gotten us through 250 years," he said. "Life's far too serious as it is to not take the piss out of yourself, or your culture." Writer and performer Steven Oliver said the quiet part on purpose. "Comedy's a great tool to get a message across. I've always felt that if you can make people laugh, you can get away with other things. When I write, I like to plant seeds in people's heads to get them thinking about issues."
Same taboo territory. Same willingness to be rude. But there's a seed planted, a target chosen with care, and the people being laughed with are the people telling the joke. That's the craft Spencer's skit was missing entirely, and the craft a white supremacist rally has no use for.
Even the tradition of the backyard barbecue proves the rule. Taking the piss runs on three things. You tease people you know and respect, not strangers you've never met. Half the joy is the target firing straight back, and a joke built so they can't reply isn't banter, it's a monologue with a victim. And it points at people getting a bit up themselves, never at people getting stepped on. Taking the piss, done properly, is punching up in miniature. It keeps a group close instead of splitting it apart.
Spencer borrowed the language of "just having a laugh" while breaking every single rule the tradition runs on.
So how do you tell, in the moment?
You don't need a rulebook. You need three questions, and Noongar-Yamatji woman Brooke Blurton, responding to Spencer's video, named the stakes plainly: as boring and lazy as the content is, it isn't harmless, because it reinforces the exact stereotypes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have spent generations fighting.
So, three questions:
- Where's the joke? Not the shock, the joke.
- Which way is the punch travelling, up at the powerful or down at the people already doing it tough?
- And would it survive a comeback, could the target fire back as an equal, or has it been built so they can't?
Run those three and you'll be right nearly every time. Notice not one of them is about whether you're allowed to be offended. They're about whether the thing in front of you is the craft it claims to be.
The bit I want you to take with you
You are allowed to love comedy and still call rubbish rubbish. Those two things have never been in conflict. The people who love comedy most are usually its toughest critics, because they know how good it can be and they hate watching someone drag its good name through the mud to dodge a bit of accountability.
I made my submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs for their Inquiry into racism, hate and violence directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Twenty recommendations. The full story of the inbox, the platforms that punish the victim, the AI-generated fake Aboriginal man built to sell wildlife videos, and what I'm asking the government to do about all of it. I've attached the whole thing to this article, and I'd love you to read it. Sit with the parts that are hard.
Because I keep coming back to one image. On ANZAC Day, after being booed, those Aboriginal veterans kept going. They finished the Welcome. They extended their hospitality anyway, with a grace I'm not sure I could summon.
That's who we are. Still here. Still generous. Still not going anywhere.
The next time someone tells you that objecting to a racist bit means you can't take a joke, you can smile, sip your tea, and ask the only question that ever mattered.
"Right then. Where's the joke, love?"
If they had one, they'd have led with it.
