Source : the age
Hughesy, do we have a problem? That question has been top of mind since mid-May, when Dave Hughes, one of the most successful and popular comedians in the country, began venting his intense disapproval of the changes to the tax system Labor unveiled in the federal budget.
In a series of video posts to his social media accounts, and in interviews on breakfast TV and with businessman Mark Bouris, Hughes has unleashed on the changes, painting himself as a lifelong Labor supporter who is ditching the party in disgust at the fact Anthony Albanese and Jim Chalmers didn’t reveal their plans prior to last year’s election.
“You can’t not take that to an election, that’s not the way the system works,” he tells me. “That’s just not democratic.”
Regardless of the accuracy of that claim, there’s nothing remotely funny about the way Hughes hammers his points home. Sure, he delivers his video rants with the bug-eyed, gap-toothed, deranged-grin demeanour he’s always employed in his stand-up comedy work. But here it’s deployed in service of a campaign that is deadly serious.
And while it’s getting plenty of attention for Hughes, whose peak popularity as a performer was arguably behind him, it’s also made him a figure of ridicule for some in the comedy scene, where suspicion runs hot that his outrage is merely naked self-interest at play.
Fellow comedian Dave Thornton tapped the mood last week in a pair of video shorts in which he impersonates the former radio host as he goes about his daily business, finding endless reasons to be furious at Albo.
“Trying to get some milk for Hughesy,” he says, imitating the real Hughes’ Strine-whine as he opens the door of his fridge. “Awww, there’s none heeere. I reckon Albo’s taken the milk! He’s taking everything.” Door slams.
In the second video – A day in the life of Hughesy pt2 – he takes a cold shower after voting for the blue tap rather than the red, then cries that “Albo’s taken hot water away from hard-working Australians”, before noting there’s “shrinkage … it’s like the economy, it’s getting smaller”.
Together, those videos have racked up around 2 million views on Instagram, and about half that on Facebook. They’ve also drawn approving comments from many of Hughes’s fellow comedians – Celia Pacquola, Luke McGregor, Merrick Watts and Rhys Nicholson among them (journalist and author Antoinette Lattouf is a fan too).
Even Hughes’ former radio co-host Dave O’Neill has apparently chipped in on social media.
If Hughes is hurt by this, he’s trying hard not to show it.
“A few comedians having a swing at me because I’m not supporting Labor – I couldn’t care less, honestly,” he tells me.
Still, it must sting.
“I’m not holding a grudge,” says Hughes (Thornton and O’Neil both declined to comment for this story). “Anyway, whatever. Fair enough.”
Hughes did take Thornton’s bait, though, posting a comment of his own on his first video. “I don’t drink milk and I don’t negative gear and everything in Australia isn’t on the left,” he wrote.
For his detractors, it was just more proof that he’d lost both the plot and the ability to laugh at himself.
He tells me he reached out to Thornton directly. “I called him, I said, ‘Mate, you know I love the impersonation, but can you just stick to the facts of what I say’. I don’t say all I hate is tax, and I’ve never said I hated negative gearing because, mate, I never negative geared any property.”
Hughes says his beef stems from the fact Labor did not take its plans for tax reform to the election in May 2025, and in his view that means it does not have the support of voters for those changes. “There’s no mandate for it,” he says.
It’s true that Albanese repeatedly promised there would be no changes to property taxes, and it’s true that many people besides Hughes see that as a breach of trust. But it’s also true that Labor broke that promise because home ownership was rapidly becoming an unobtainable dream for many young Australians, and something had to change.
If you already own property, you benefit from escalating prices. And as his critics readily and rightly point out, Hughes already does own property – quite a lot of it, in fact (including a house from The Block that he bought for a bit more than $3 million in 2017, and the 1930s bungalow he “accidentally” bought in 2010, then demolished to make way for the home in which he and his family still live).
Though he and his wife Holly Ife have had mortgages in the past, Hughes claims he doesn’t owe the banks any money now – which is one reason the changes to negative gearing make no impact on him.
The trouble is, the fact he carries no debt on a property portfolio likely worth around $10 million does little to counter the argument he’s wealthy, out-of-touch, and simply trying to pass off self-interest as speaking for the little person.
He told Bouris’ Straight Talk podcast this week that he once made the mistake of borrowing a large sum of money to invest in the stockmarket, shortly before the GFC, and then found himself having to repay a chunk of the loan at short notice when the bank made a margin call. It was, he said, a sobering lesson he has taken to heart.
“I f—ing hate debt,” he tells me. And in a sense, that hatred is what’s driving his tirades against Labor.
“The government have to come to their senses, because they’re sending us to financial oblivion,” he says. “The debt’s rising and rising and rising to the point where we won’t be able to do anything. It’s actually really dangerous for our future.”
Hughes’s delivery is insistent, chatty, persuasive … and not always accurate. In an Instagram post last week he claimed (incorrectly) that Australia is the highest taxed country in the world. He also claimed (again wrongly) that “most” of the money for Victoria’s Big Build – which is delivering massive once-in-a-generation infrastructure to the state – is being “stolen”. Though it is indeed beset by serious allegations of large-scale corruption which has contributed to a substantial rise in costs, “most” money is nonetheless going to the build.
In that video he explained his sense of mission. “That’s what I do,” he said. “I whinge for the people who don’t have a profile.” He claims he is stopped every time he walks down the street by people telling him to keep it up.
After he and I talk, Hughes sends me a barrage of messages he claims to have received from such people. “Keep going legend!” “Thank you so much for what you’re doing.” “So angry with Albo too.” “Keep pushing the word as you’re making a difference!”
“I’m drowning in these messages, mate,” he tells me. “I could send you thousands.”
I’m sure he could, too. His angry-rant videos are clocking up hundreds of thousands of views, occasionally millions. The comments there are as supportive as those on Thornton’s feed are critical.
Hughes, who grew up in a working-class home in Warrnambool, has built a career on looking and sounding like a regular working stiff with an uncanny eye for the absurd, and it’s earned him legions of fans. It also earned him around $2 million a year at his peak, across stand-up, television, radio and corporate gigs.
Hughes insists his wealth is principally a result of application, diligence and frugality. But it’s easy to paint debt as a product of lazy thinking, or laziness, when you don’t have any.
“I know people don’t understand what I’m talking about, and they get angry at me because they think I’m rich and I don’t want other people to be rich,” he says. “[But] I’m doing this because I want other people to have the opportunity to get ahead in this world.”
And that’s where his anger at the CGT changes – which mean all capital gains will attract a 30 per cent tax rate, regardless of income level – comes in.
“You don’t get ahead as a wage slave, mate,” he says. “You get ahead in this world by taking any spare cent you can find and investing it.”
Hughes holds himself up as an example of that maxim in motion. He glosses over the fact that his massive earnings in the 2000s produced a lot more spare cents than most people will ever have, or that the more significant impact on their material circumstances might be a change to the housing market.
Despite the perception to the contrary, he claims his rage isn’t about the negative gearing changes, which “have no meaning personally, because what I’ve already done [property holdings] is already locked in, so there’s no issue”. His concern is that the CGT changes will deny the young investors of tomorrow the chance to build independent wealth.
The cynical might wonder if Hughes isn’t merely dialling up the ante to sell some tickets to his live gigs; after all, his current show is called Cooked. He’s been venturing down the rabbit hole at least since COVID, and now claims that he checks his material against AI for accuracy and advocates for nicotine as a “healthy” drug.
But he insists not. “That’s ridiculous,” he snaps. “I haven’t really got many shows on sale, to be honest. I should have announced a shitload of shows after I realised the attention I was going to get, but I didn’t.”
The cruel are wondering aloud if Hughes – famously sober since 1992 – has fallen off the wagon; many of the comments take aim at his strange appearance and frenzied demeanour. Nothing to see here, he says.
“For whatever reason, I look like I’m on meth, but I’m happy with that,” he says. “I’ve got a f—ing cold sore at the moment. It looks like I’m a druggie, I’m not.”
And the calculating might wonder if he isn’t on the same trajectory as Karl Stefanovic, essentially becoming a mouthpiece for One Nation talking points.
He reacts to this suggestion from me with thinly veiled fury.
“Let’s not go down this One Nation track. Did you listen to what I just said,” he barks. “I’m not with One Nation. But I’ll tell you one thing that Labor do, they try to paint everyone who doesn’t agree with them as misogynist and racist. It’s f—ing ridiculous, mate. I’m not with any political party, and I don’t intend to be, but the facts are there.”
He has no interest in a tilt at politics, he insists, “because honestly I love comedy the most, I still do”. But he tells me in one of the many text messages he sends after we speak, “I’m backing [state Liberal leader] Jess Wilson in Vic election BTW”.
Whether he’s out of touch or just out on a limb, Dave Hughes clearly isn’t about to back off.
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