Some years before he died, the Australian comedian Barry Humphries – creator of Dame Edna and of the lecherous alcoholic politician Sir Les Patterson – gave an interview to magazine The Oldie in which he was asked to explain why Australians took such offence to Sir Les, of all his satirical characters.

He replied: ‘Australians are deeply conventional – deeply conventional! ‘On the surface, you get this easy-going thing. In fact… we like being bossed around.’

And there may be something in this, judging by the unhinged reaction to Australian Labour prime minister Anthony Albanese’s podcast gaffe this week.

In case you missed it, ‘Albo’, as he’s known, apologised over his appearance on the Bush Deep podcast, after the shock-jock host, comedian Nikki Osborne, fairly cornered him into making one or two laddish remarks.

Invited to play the ‘Shag, Marry, Date’ game (a more decorous version of the original ‘F***, Marry, Kill’), the prime minister was offered a choice – an age-appropriate choice, it has to be said, for the 63-year-old PM – between pop princess Kylie Minogue, 58, and actresses Nicole Kidman, 59, and Rhonda Burchmore, 66.

Albanese protested that he got married only six months ago (which he did, and to the women’s rights activist Jodie Haydon at that), but the host positively pressed him to choose, so he chose ‘Kylie, clearly’ for all three. ‘She’s terrific,’ he said.

To a man and woman, it seems, Australia did not react to this by saying ‘no worries mate, fair dinkum’. Tinnies were not cracked. Additional shrimps were not thrown on the barbie.

Instead, Australia fell into a paroxysm of indignation, with Albanese immediately being compared to Les Patterson.

A very po-faced op-ed in newspaper The Australian thundered: ‘The response was ill-advised, demeaning of the office of prime minister, a poor reflection on Albanese’s family, embarrassing for him and, most of all, a crude sexual objectification of Minogue.’

The Australian media site Women’s Agenda said the problem was not that Anthony Albanese is a big fan of Kylie but that ‘he agreed to play a game built entirely around sorting women into categories of male consumption: who to sleep with, who to marry, who to date’.

My word, what a to-do. I had no idea Australians took everything so seriously. Did everyone else know? How can a people who leave the ends off half their words be so prone to outrage? And are they forgetting that, on Albanese’s watch, Australia has acquired about equal numbers of men and women in its parliament, senate and cabinet?

And have they stopped to consider that it was a woman controlling this interview and leading the witness, not a locker-room bro? Trump’s Access Hollywood tape this is not. At any rate, Albanese revealed the lily in his liver by apologising ‘unequivocally’ for his comments, but that was not enough. Australia’s pearl-clutchers are not finished with him yet. Sky News commentator Andrew Bolt is still hopping mad, calling Albanese ‘Prime Minister Benny Hill’.

He also asked why ‘Labour’s noisy feminists are today so silent’, which was pretty telling as an example of a man holding women to account over the behaviour of a man, I thought.

But I digress. Really, it’s hard to see what else Albanese could have done, having agreed to take part in such a coarse podcast in the first place.

He could hardly have sat there with a poker up his fundament and refused to get into the spirit of the thing. If he’d done that, he’d have been scorned for having a poker up his fundament. And he could hardly have allowed the idea to get abroad that he didn’t fancy Kylie Minogue. That would be unpatriotic. So it was a no-win situation.

But it shows the risk politicians take when they try to reach younger voters by means of new media, without foreseeing how new media can spill over into old. A podcast is not a broadcast, after all; it’s a narrowcast. Albanese would not have been asked to play Shag Marry Date by an interviewer on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. But a podcast becomes a broadcast when the prime minister is on it, and when what he says makes all the headlines.

Our own political class have made numerous mistakes with new media too. Take that analogue soul, Bertie Ahern, forgetting that smartphones can do video while he was indulging in a bit of doorstep racism in Dublin Central. Take Leo Varadkar (another big Kylie fan) riling up farmers on the Path To Power podcast with Matt Cooper of this parish. Take even the social media-savvy Simon Harris accidentally describing himself as a penis in an AI social media post.

And it’s not just on new media either. Pee ‘Try It Sometime’ Flynn managed to make a tit of himself on the ancient television institution that is The Late Late Show. Brian Cowen came across as troublingly over-refreshed on the ancient radio institution that is Morning Ireland. They can put their foot in it anywhere, really.

We had David Cullinane’s ‘Up the Ra’ rant after the 2020 general election (which no doubt he hoped to have lived down by now, but nope). We had Enda Kenny apologising for using the N-word; Gerry Adams apologising for using the N-word; Eamon Ryan apologising for using the N-word. This list goes on and on, and some of these gaffes are a lot more serious than saying you wouldn’t throw Kylie Minogue out of bed for eating whatever the Australian equivalent of Tayto is (and one shudders to imagine what Vegemite-flavoured abomination that might be).

Amid this week’s fuss, and stunned by her new-found global fame, host Nikki Osborne said: ‘It was a massive risk for him. 

‘I was not censored. They didn’t ask for approval of the edit. They just let me in, do the craziest political interview ever, then leave with comedy gold.’

And across the world, politicians and their advisers will have been saying: ‘What?! They didn’t ask for edit approval?!’

Because this is why there is such serious vetting before politicians do interviews, with appraisals of the interviewers and demands that questions be supplied in advance. This is why we get the politicians we get – wary, colourless, inauthentic, boring. And this may also be why the ones who defy the convention – without apologising – win elections, or think they do.

I see Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill launched the latest Women’s Health Action Plan yesterday. It’s to include €2million ring-fenced for women’s health research and an ‘upscaling’ of the free contraception scheme and specialist menopause and postnatal hubs and every good thing. Fair play, Minister, but if I could just stop you there for a second. What we women – and men – in the midwest would really like instead is a flipping hospital, ideally one we could drive to in under two hours and one that would not be packed to the rafters with the sick and injured of four counties once we finally got to it. If you wouldn’t mind, thanks.