The Shot writers reflect: 2024 can go and get fucked

Rather than publishing five separate articles, which, at this point in the year, I cannot be fucked doing – and you probably can’t be fucked reading – we have collaborated on the one piece. Before sailing off into a turkey and pudding fuelled oblivion, here are The Shot’s writers recounting their personal 2024s. 

Jo Dyer
Whilst ‘enshittification’ is a worthy word of the year, for me, 2024 has been all about kayfabe and paltering, two words I learned from Royce Kurmelov’s excellent Walkley-nominated book, Slick: Australia’s Toxic Relationship with Big Oil (available now from your local independent bookstore). 

To palter has its origins in Middle English and means to actively use truthful statements to convey a misleading impression. Unlike lying, when one tells outright falsehoods, paltering involves the strategic deployment of truthful statements for the sole purpose of misleading. It involves cherry-picking facts, or sneakily parsing words – saying nothing untrue but artfully arranging the truth to deceive. Like the gas industry claiming they need to develop more gas fields so Australia doesn’t run out of domestic supply without mentioning local shortages are caused by their mass export of our gas at sky high prices, for example. Or this skeet from Tanya Plibersek promoting Labor’s climate credentials for not approving any new coal mines despite allowing the massive expansion and lengthy extension of 11 existing operations, four on the same day as this post.

Kayfabe, on the other hand, originated in the 1960s in the world of professional wrestling and is the act of presenting staged performances as genuine or authentic.  Donald Trump’s political career. The promotion of the eye-wateringly expensive and technically improbable creation of a local nuclear industry from scratch as a genuine solution to climate change.

Very 2024.

As the year whimpers to a close, we must now gird our loins for the coming election. In the spirit of “why lose your majority in March if you can lose it in May”, I predict the Government will run full term and head to the polls almost exactly three years from the momentous election that turfed out our most distastefully eccentric PM since Billy McMahon and ushered in an historically expansive crossbench.

The major parties haven’t learned that election’s lessons and cling hopefully to the idea of a duopoly. A senior Labor figure – out of the game but still well-connected – told me he thinks the fiercely tribal Albanese will come good in the next parliament and recognise he can work for and with the country’s progressive majority rather than Labor voters alone. Odds are he’ll have to: a hung parliament awaits. Can a powerful crossbench galvanise a minority Labor Government to finally deliver to a dispirited electorate the policy shifts they voted for three years ago?  The dead-weight dud of AUKUS seems tragically unavoidable but can Labor find their inner not-so-radical and do something meaningful on housing? On JobSeeker? On defending immigration? With David McBride in jail and Richard Boyle still before the courts – on the meaningful protection of whistleblowers?  

We shall see. From his minority within a minority, Peter Dutton has managed to steal oxygen and headlines with loud dour negativity. His promotion and then quiet abandonment of key policies on immigration, tax and Indigenous Affairs may go shamefully uninterrogated by the media but leaves him with only a multi-billion-dollar joke of an energy policy and signature relentless racism to prosecute on the campaign trail. Australia deserves and will surely demand better than that. 

Let 2025 be a year of courage: courage from our leaders to tackle big complex issues with evidence and integrity; courage from we the people to insist that they do.

John Delmenico
2024 has been a fucked year. It’s been hard to push through a year of skyrocketing grocery prices and Peter Dutton existing, while the entire time civilians and journalists are being killed in Palestine and Lebanon.

Australian media right now is a scary place. We’ve ended up in a weird reality where saying ‘Genocide is bad’ is a fireable offense at many outlets, leaving many journalists too afraid to do their fucking jobs.

At least the journos aren’t Penny Wong, who seems to think her job is to be a tape recorder saying ‘deeply concerned’ over and over, considering whether to wag a finger in disapproval of an ongoing genocide.

Personally, through The Shot, I’ve been supported to write articles that I was uncomfortable doing, like breaking down the modern era of ableist TV content and the radicalisation of Gen Z men. Topics that feel important and need to be told from people who have experience with it. It’s nice to know that even in a year where hope is hard to find, independent media can still have an impact. As clearly shown by the creator of Love on the Spectrum checking in on my LinkedIn account a couple times since my article on ableist shows came out… Clearly a big fan of autistic people getting platforms!

Ultimately, 2024 has felt like Barnaby Joyce after falling off a planter box and needing a lie down.

Joel Jenkins
If bushfires were 2020, COVID was 2021, the war in Ukraine was 2022, and 2023 was the cost-of-living crisis, then 2024 was the year of genocide. The previous years have done much to damage the social contract essentially in place since WWII, with the realisation that today’s cohort of leaders and their powerful friends cannot manage a crisis situation, nor dream up a solution in the national interest. But the year of genocide demonstrated something even more alarming: an ideologically detached political class totally beholden to foreign controlled state, business and media interests, prepared to hold unthinkable positions in stark contrast to the public interest. The omnicrises that enveloped Australians between 2020-2023 changed the national psyche and bought our attention to the malpractice and incompetence of elected democratic representatives, but it was 2024 that saw the bipartisan blob wilfully push a genocide up a hill, while attentive and resilient Australians standing in horror watching it unfold on live feeds. 

2024 will be remembered for Penny Wong cutting UNRWA as 2 million Palestinians were being starved as a tool of war. 2024 was the year that draconian legislation was passed under the guise of antisemitism to curtail public revulsion to Australia’s position in this genocide. 2024 was the year Peter Dutton projected a new form of aspiring authoritarian never seen in a major party leader. 2024 will be remembered for a year that the unacceptable was forced on us, and 2025 will be a year that forces us to take our democracy back from foreign genocidal maniacs. The next year is going to be a big one for our young and confused nation, and a big shock to the meal ticketed major party MPs who have sat on the lungs of our country for too long.

Ronni Salt
The magic of 2024 was people’s resilience. How human beings will move forward, continuing on, still looking for hope. We’ve had the US elect a mad man, and yet we still look for a better world. We elected a disappointment of a Prime Minister who’s only one chicken curry and a Bunning’s visit away from being Scott Morrison, yet still we look past him to a better Australia. 

2024 for me was the year I realised for about the first time in my life that I was actually that weird thing called a writer. It’s a title I’ve never wanted to give myself and yet in less than two weeks from now, my first novel Gunnawah is released. So I suppose it’s official then, I’m a writer.

But my novel wasn’t born on its own. It came from the encouragement and support I received on Twitter (I ain’t calling it X). For me, the magic of the old site that was Twitter has pretty much evaporated. That saddens me greatly because we once had a wonderful community there, especially the auspol community. I see many of the crew have migrated over to BlueSky (yes, me too) and I see the discussion and dialogue there growing and hopefully influencing democracy and creating great, fervent discussions once more. 

I hope whatever year you have had, that 2025 brings you and those you care about, love and health and joy and Tim Tams – always Tim Tams. 

Dave Milner, Editor
On October 10, 2023, I said to a distant memory, ‘This will be the end. There will be no more Gaza after this.’ 

A few weeks of unrelenting horror later and I published a piece called ‘This is genocide’, an outlier ‘opinion’ in Australian media, then and now, to put it mildly. ‘Has the IDF slaughtered enough children to keep Israel safe from terrorism yet?’ followed. And so on, and so on. Aside from one or two mandated breathers for my brain and heart, I wrote about nothing else for the next 14 months. 

Any conditioned fear of being labelled an anti-semite for doing anti-genocide work evaporated fairly quickly. I have been called that, and a “terrorist”, hundreds of times every month since. Ultimately, dickheads are gonna be dickheads regardless of what I do, and I just don’t give a fuck. Zionists have weaponised and abused the phrase so much so that its stranglehold on the truth around Israel’s depraved colonialism is waning. It needs to be shattered. 

The US election went by and I barely noticed. Both candidates wanted this slaughter to continue. I didn’t fall into apathy, I just ceased believing parliamentary politics held any real solutions. Raygun, Luigi the excessively attractive CEO slayer, Trump getting shot, and the UK finding another disappointing pseudo-Labor PM registered on some level, but the rest was noise.

I know I lost my sense of humour at points this year. I’m sure lots of my work has been deeply unpleasant to read. It has been shattering to write. Thank you for doing so anyway. 

Months back, I went with a friend from high school to see a gig. He said he couldn’t read my stuff any more for his mental health. I said I got it: once upon a time I was trying to make people feel better; this year I felt morally obliged to make everyone feel worse. A few weeks later, a kind man holding a yoga mat (the mat is unimportant but it stuck with me) stopped me on the street and said similar things. He had to stop following me on Twitter for his sanity but was grateful for the work. ‘That’s nice,’ I thought, ‘but I can’t unfollow myself, what the fuck do I do?’ Yelling at Penny Wong on the Internet was clearly not the entire answer. 

There is an alienation that comes with giving a shit in a psychopathic, deluded world. I needed to be around people that felt like me so I started attending the protest rallies more regularly. There, I reconnected with an old friend from primary school. Purging behind sunglasses together. Speeches. Marching. Shouting. Processing the emotions that come with paying this much attention, in this much detail, to the worst things I’ve ever seen – while my entire profession – one professing to be dedicated to the truth – lies about it all. My existential crisis had layers this year.

I am not a hateful person. Lacking religion, my philosophical core, basically, is that I am a Star Wars guy: balance in the Force, smashing empires, resisting the urge to fall prey to hatred, to the Dark Side. But of everyone, I come closest to hating these people: detached peddlers of lies that help destroy oppressed lives. 

If there is a positive side to the journey work has taken me on this year, the UpsideDown World slop the mainstream press farted out means I no longer have any lingering imposter syndrome about being a ‘real’ journalist because I swear and rant and work for indie weirdos and frustrated satirists. I actually found it quite easy to not pretend a genocidal cult expanding its borders is fighting a war of “defence”. No idea what I was worried about. They should be feeling inadequate, not me. I owned all their asses. 

If you’re feeling existentially battered by this year, please know that you are less alone than they want you to believe. Much of the world feels as you do, most of it by my reckoning, you just won’t hear it on television. Fuck ‘em all.

The Shot has had a good year. It is growing, and I have been proud to steer it. Our work, from Ronni, Jo, Joel, John, myself, Michael, Charles, and all the guest contributors – most definitely including the excellent cartoons of Fiona Katauskas that have illustrated this piece – stood on its own, embarrassing the dross you are shovelled in the corporate press. We will approach next year with more fire, more desire to build upon this wonderful community, but right now it is time to recharge and find some peace. Lean into love and joy where it exists in this world.

Thank you for being you. Thank you for being with us.