The reason the hashtag 'Cory Bernardi Wank Puffin' is trending
It's the oddly amusing hashtag on Twitter, that's symptomatic of the frustration some Australians have towards the treatment of LGBT kids in the the country by its government.
#CoryBernardiwWankPuffin is the hashtag that made the rounds on Twitter late Wednesday, consisting of the terms "Cory Bernardi," a conservative South Australian senator, and "wank puffin," a baffling insult that has its roots on Twitter.
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Who is Cory Bernardi and why are people calling him a wank puffin?
Bernardi has been a vocal opponent to the Safe Schools Coalition, a program aimed to help promote the acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer and intersex students.
The senator has called on the government to withdraw funding for the program, on the basis that it was "indoctrinating children into a Marxist agenda of cultural relativism," according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
The pressure from right-wing politicians has since sparked an independent review of the program by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, looking into whether the program is age-appropriate.
Supporters of the Safe Schools coalition are furious the government has succumbed to coercion by conservative politicians. On Wednesday, leader of the opposition Labor party Bill Shorten even labelled Bernardi "a homophobe" as he walked behind Shorten during a press conference.
Who is behind #CoryBernardiWankPuffin trending?
Richard Watts, from Melbourne, is the man behind the hashtag.
On Wednesday, Watts tweeted the hashtag and asked if he could get it trending nationally after he saw a similar insult directed at U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump a few days ago.
His wish came true.
"It's a ludicrous insult for a ludicrous man," Watts told Mashable Australia. "So at around 8:30 p.m. last night I was a bit bored in the laundromat, and thought 'why not,' after [Bernardi] has been insulting LGBT kids around the country.
"The name wank puffin won't scare him, but he's been scaring LGBT kids."
Watts said he was "gobsmacked" when he saw the hashtag take off, watching it spread for hours as it was tweeted constantly on the platform.
"I think part of the reason why it's gone so big is that people like taking the piss out of politicians," Watts said. "And that they're sick of the resentment and the misrepresentation of the Safe Schools program."
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But what does 'wank puffin' even mean?
No one is entirely sure. The first mention of "wank puffin" on Twitter was on Christmas Day 2015, when a man in the UK discovered it was his elderly mother's Wi-Fi password. It set off a flood of tweets using the term, which was perhaps the inspiration behind Milk the Cow Podcast's insult to Trump in February.
The only earlier mention is on a bunch of random chat forums in 2014, but the word didn't appear to gain any traction then.
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To define the words: wank means to masturbate, while puffin is a orange-beaked bird. Putting the two together gives us "masturbating bird." Huffington Post UK mused this may be some strange Australian lingo. Mashable Australia can confirm this is not the case.
So all we can conclude is that Cory Bernadi is an elderly woman's Wi-Fi username. That hurts.
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