The Left Drawn and Quartered

By Mark Lopez

31 January 2026

Political correctness has become so dominant and so aggressive in Victoria that conservatives need police protection to see a movie. And this was a movie that, the day before its Melbourne release, was the victim of cancel culture. However, it was reprieved at the last minute, the concerned ticket holders receiving a welcome email notifying them that their tickets were still valid. When I stepped off the tram in front of the Crown Casino to go to the Hoyts cinema complex housed within, I was well aware that this was not just a movie premier, it was a day in history. And, of course, I knew I just had to be there.

The film was A Super Progressive Movie, a Pauline Hanson-inspired animated feature that mercilessly lampoons the woke radicalism of the demonstrators outside the cinema who were using a loud hailer to try to disrupt this event, their predictable outrage validating the film’s parody of them with embarrassing accuracy. Fortunately, the police had quarantined them across the road, relegated to the steps in front of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre where they loudly shouted ‘Racist!’ and other all too familiar insults intended to hurt and defame.

Once inside, I knew there would be more trouble. That was because, outside, I noticed that Antifa were among the hundred or so protesters (their distinctive black and red T-shirts worn proudly). These advocates of political violence, doxing and vandalism have enjoyed free reign in Melbourne for more than two years as vital contributors to the routine Sunday pro-Palestinian demonstrations that have either excited, bored or tormented locals for way too long.

Suddenly, three deliberately scruffy young activists leapt from the queue to the film and blew on whistles and kazoos with an ear-piercing loudness intended to hurt and disrupt the peaceful filmgoers and anyone else in the vicinity. Crown security and the police took what seemed like ages to overwhelm them and escort them from the scene. And as they did this, the grateful filmgoers cheered.

I have been to political events of all persuasions, a great many of them, but I have never seen anything like the adulation of a political leader that I saw with Senator Pauline Hanson. She was here, with a long column of eager people queued to have their picture taken with her.

The filmmakers Sebastian Peart (director and writer), and Mark Nicholson (writer), live in the leftist stronghold of Melbourne, a notorious place where the sobriquets of ‘protest demonstrator state’ and ‘machete crime state’ vie for supremacy. And don’t forget it endured cumulatively the longest COVID lockdown in the world, just ahead of Buenos Aires, from which the state’s economy has never recovered.

In regards to the targets of the filmmakers, namely political correctness and postmodernism, these guys know their stuff. Their humour is biting, the kind of humour purged from comedy stages and television shows but which yet survives in private conversations among trusted individuals around kitchen tables, or in sarcastic comments made sacrilegiously in front of dishonest nightly news bulletins. (Chanel Nine, please lift your game, you were good once.)

This South-Park-style cartoon is set in Australia after the loss of the Culture War to the political Left. Verbal and visual gags fly thick and fast to tell the audience that Melbourne has been renamed Naarm (an Aboriginal name promoted by the woke) and every kind of left-wing political activist reigns supreme, strutting and denouncing to their heart’s content. Their favoured target is heterosexual white males (the only group in the hierarchy of victimology totally denied victim group status). They are persecuted, even imprisoned. They are repeatedly told they can never say or do anything right. Left-wing Prime Minister Albo and his gruesome-looking cabinet are triumphant.

Much of the plot revolves around the quest for the ‘victim hood’, a garment that bestows incredible powers in this woke society but ultimately degrades and destroys those who wear it. This dystopian world exists in a ‘bubble’ sealed off from the real world and powered imperfectly by intermittent wind turbines and frequently in need of the ‘virtue signal’ to stay viable. But outside the bubble, the real world is a land of equality, fairness, compassion, and reasonableness, governed by Prime Minister Pauline Hanson who has the super powers to confront the social justice warriors head-on.

The gags are so zany or vulgar at times that you can imagine the creators laughing so hard they can barely contain themselves. ‘Can we get away with this bit?’ they may have asked. ‘Bugger it, it’s going in,’ they probably concluded. Of course, they would pay a price for their sometimes hilarious political blasphemy, and pay a price they have.

The film endured attacks on it at almost every stage of the production process involving third parties, each intending to see that this film never came to light. But somehow, it did come to light. With One Nation rising in the polls, the establishment is bound to line up against this film. Apple Music banned the movie’s theme song, the Holly Valance hit ‘Kiss Kiss (XX) My Arse’ despite it topping the Australian paid-download charts. It was forbidden to screen it in Parliament House in Canberra, and movie theatres cancelled scheduled showings.

Will they succeed in suppressing it, or inadvertently make it more desirable and successful? In woke Australia, this film is prime contraband. Whether the film circulates openly or in secret, A Super Progressive Movie will become a cult classic and signifier of dissent.

Published as: ‘The Left Drawn and Quartered’, Quadrant Online, 31 January 2026. https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/review/325122/