Sympathy for the Devil's supermarket.

Who would have imagined that Peter Dutton would become one of the most powerful political figures in Australian history? For only a man of boundless power could unite so many millions of people and lead them somewhere they could never have seen themselves reaching: feeling genuine sympathy for Woolworths. Lo, but great is the Horror Spud’s Awesomeness and terrible to behold his TuberForce Hulk Strength.

Funny, though, how he’s hardly been seen since calling for a boycott of the fresh food duopolist, not because it’s a ruthless, price-gouging corporate monster, of course. No, Spud wants to cancel them because they won’t give up shelf space to carry a decreasingly profitable line of cheap Chinese Australia Day imports. Let us pause to entertain ourselves with the Mandelbrot complexity of this particular moment of asshatting: the free market champion picking up the bludgeon of cancel culture to lay into a predatory hyper-capitalist megacorp for prioritising cents on the dollar over immaterial feely stuff.

It’s almost as though he’s not entirely acting in good faith.

Add to this the curious instance of a man who has fashioned himself as a fearless, two-fisted political brawler afraid of nothing and nobody suddenly wetting his pants and running away because the fight he started got a little too sporty for him.

Understandable though.

Suppose he’d hung around outside the local Woolies all week, photo-opping like a champion. Somebody might have pointed out the background vision of the bloke with the smoke bomb and the spray can, amplifying Dutt’s message for those in the audience without the sophistication to decode his many-layered comms strategy.

After all, “5 days 26 Jan Aussie Oi Oi Woolies FUCK U" does rather cut to the heart of the matter, doesn’t it?

It’s a little awkward, though, given Dutt’s broad acre manuring of his cop-on-the-beat cred to have the Leader of the Opposition not simply sharing a platform with a bogan street criminal but finding himself upstaged by the other bloke’s much more transparent rhetoric.

A little awkward, too, that the victims here are the villains more generally.

Nobody should feel any sense of sympathy for a corporate threshing machine like Woolworths, which chews up vast human heaps of employees, suppliers and customers to extrude a multi-billion-dollar profit sausage every twelve months for the benefit of a relatively small cohort of wealthy shareholders.

An Opposition Leader who wanted to hold the blowtorch to the government’s belly would be leaning into the hard truth of more and more people going hungry because they can’t afford to fill their grocery carts at the supermarket. Instead, Dutton lobbies on behalf of a handful of Chinese factory owners who might have to retool their production lines of boxing kangaroo merch into something more bankable, say camouflaged ponchos for the PLA’s upcoming 2025 Taiwan line of tactical athleisure-wear.

It does raise the tantalising promise of Dutts not being able to get out of his own way this year. Having tasted success deep-sixing the Voice referendum with an old-school brew of stoking fear and racial loathing, he might miss the only game that really matters. A lot of people are really fucking hurting. They can’t pay their bills, their mortgages or their rent.

Meanwhile, Woolworths banked $1.7B in profits after tax.

Coles trousered $1.04B.

Between them, the Big Four banks made nearly $32B.

But yeah, the real issue is whether Woolies should be charged with treason for not selling shitty tee-shirts to people who can’t afford their shitty home-brand fish fingers.