I wrote For Pete’s Sake out of a strange kind of frustration, the kind that comes not from disliking someone, but from watching someone I’d quietly come to respect start behaving in ways I didn’t recognise.
For a long time, Peter Malinauskas struck me as South Australia’s consensus premier, someone who at least gave the impression of listening. Somewhere along the way that slipped, and it felt less like a gradual drift and more like he fell through a trapdoor into something more contentious, more autocratic, more willing to just decide things and let the rest of us catch up.
What tipped me over into actually writing the song was his language. When you take a stand against the wanton destruction of trees in internationally renowned parklands, and the response from the person who’s supposed to represent you is to call you a “ragtag extremist” or part of the “cultural elite,” something in you wants to write it down and set it to music. Because the real elite, as far as I can tell, will be the ones clinking champagne glasses in the exclusive, money-can’t-buy VIP areas at the MotoGP, not the people standing in a park trying to keep it a park.
There’s an irony in all this that I couldn’t ignore either. In the same fortnight I was working through those feelings, I found myself publicly liking posts from two Liberal politicians, Jack Batty and Ashton Hurn, for the first time in longer than I can remember. Not because I’d shifted my politics, but because they sounded like grown-ups having a grown-up conversation, which is a low bar that’s rarely cleared these days. It made me wonder aloud, on The Adelaide Show podcast, whether Peter is inadvertently doing the Liberal Party a favour: whether his own missteps are the thing softening up people like me, people who’d normally never look sideways at that side of politics, and making us receptive to it.
So For Pete’s Sake became my way of holding both of those threads at once. Musically it’s ska, because ska has always had that gift of being upbeat and zany on the surface while carrying something sharper underneath, and that felt exactly right for a song about politicians who set sail toward their own goals and interests while telling us they’re still listening. Lyrically it leans into that Animal Farm feeling, of watching people in charge grow stronger by the hour while the rest of us are meant to nod along gratefully.
It’s not a protest song in the traditional sense. I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. It’s more a release valve, my way of saying the quiet part out loud with a kick in the step, because sometimes the only sane response to being told not to disturb the speech, not to march in the streets, and to save it all for election day, is to write a song that does all three at once.
For Pete’s Sake lyrics
[Verse 1]
When you have a leader
Who thinks they’ve become St Peter
Get ready for some time in hell
Coz angels do not hear you
And don’t like getting near you
When they can smell your human smell
[Chorus]
For Pete’s Sake
Don’t disturb their speech
For Pete’s Sake
Don’t march in the street
For Pete’s Sake
You can have your say
It happens now and then, and it’s called Election Day
[Verse 2]
When you have a Party
That prefers verbal ka-rar-tee
Than doing things considered hard
They will not pay attention
To anything you mention
They’ll only show you disregard
[Chorus]
For Pete’s Sake
Don’t disturb their speech
For Pete’s Sake
Don’t march in the street
For Pete’s Sake
You can have your say
It happens now and then, and it’s called Election Day
[Verse 3]
So when they get the power
That grows stronger by the hour
Like the pigs in animal farm
They start to slash and burn
Give their mates an extra turn
Announced with manufactured charm
[Chorus]
For Pete’s Sake
Don’t disturb their speech
For Pete’s Sake
Don’t march in the street
For Pete’s Sake
You can have your say
It happens now and then, and it’s called Election Day
[Bridge]
So what can we do to change our fate
That’s better than just sitting down to wait
We can’t pray to St Peter coz he’s on the other side
But we can expose the shadows where the dirty laundry hides
[Final Chorus]
For Pete’s Sake
DO disturb their speech
For Pete’s Sake
COME march in the street
For Pete’s Sake
You can have your say
It happens every moment, from now til Election Day
It happens every moment, from now til Election Day
It happens every moment, from now til Election Day
Listen to For Pete’s Sake
For Pete’s Sake scratchings
Here are photos of the pages where the song took shape through my pen.
[Photos coming shortly]