Having spent well over a decade bemoaning the slide into un-Australian behaviour in its annual summer ad campaigns for lamb, Meat & Livestock Australia (MLA) has now decided to put the very concept on the rack instead.

The latest ad, which was created by The Monkeys and directed by Yianni Warnock, debuted during the cricket on Thursday, runs for more than three minutes in its full form (there are shorter versions too) and features people disappearing for committing acts deemed un-Australian.

Their sins range from boasting to dobbing to using a “cheat stick” in pool. As each is accused in turn, they disappear.

A woman in a bar asks the female bartender what’s going on. “There’s a word, the worst thing you can ever call an Australian,” she explains.

“Where do they go?” the customer asks.

“Oh, just an infinite cultural exile from which they can never return. It’s getting a little out of hand. We’ll have no one left soon.”

When someone asks the barmaid to turn up the volume on the TV and she accidentally changes channels – to one with subtitles, quelle horreur – it’s her turn. As she disappears, a punter complains that now he can’t get a drink. “This whole pub is un-Australian,” he says. “Oh f---” and the pub disappears.

The scene then cuts to a desolate landscape where the bartender meets a man who was exiled for trying to eat a meat pie with a knife and fork, another for not knowing the words of Khe Sanh, and a woman who was cast out for charging meat-pie man a dollar for tomato sauce (well, fair enough).

And then in drops Sam Kekovich with a barbecue full of lamb chops. How is that un-Australian, someone asks him? “All I said was ‘bon appetit’,” he replies.

It’s a neat 180-degree switch for the campaign, which began in 2005 with former Aussie Rules footballer and media personality Kekovich railing against the decline of Australian values in a putative Australia Day speech.

“Un-Australianism is everywhere,” he thundered in a style that was at once exaggerated and typical of the man. “Your long-haired, dole-bludging types are indulging their pierced taste buds in all manner of exotic, foreign and often vegetarian cuisine. Chicken-burger value meals, pizzas, a number 42 with rice: it’s an absolute disgrace. And people ask why we need capital punishment.”

For the next decade, the gag was repeated, ever more elaborately, and always with references to the more outrageous episodes of the past year: the GFC in 2009, Mel Gibson’s meltdown in 2011, Shane Warne’s dalliance with Liz Hurley in 2012. (where Kekovich complained that the old Warnie “would never have chosen a starlet over a cutlet, or tweeting over eating”). In all of them, the faces were exclusively white, the tone simultaneously expressive and mocking of Anglo-Australian chauvinism.

From 2015, though, the ads began to take a turn to something broader. That was the year Richie Benaud invited a bunch of people over for a barbecue. The guest list included Captain Cook, Burke and Wills, Ned Kelly, Don Bradman, Ita Buttrose and, of course, Kekovich. A faux Bill Lawry was snubbed, as was anyone not white.

The following year, Lee Lin Chin topped and tailed an ad built around the idea of bringing Australians abroad home for an Australia Day barbecue. It was the first real glimpse of modern Australia.

In 2017, the campaign finally embraced the idea of Australia as a truly multicultural nation for the first time. That ad opens with a bunch of Indigenous people on the beach, having a barbecue; Indigenous actor, writer and activist Meyne Wyatt is among them. Soon a sailing ship heaves into view. It’s the Dutch. Then the Brits rock up, and the French, the Germans, the Italians, Serbs, Indians and more.

As a modern vessel emerges on the horizon, someone yells “boat people”, and TV chef and painter Poh Ling Yeow says, “Aren’t we all boat people?”

It’s an explicit celebration of the idea of Australia as a nation of immigrants on top of an Indigenous culture. In the years since we’ve had topical ads: political polarisation (2018), envy of New Zealand’s cool PM (2019), the obsession with social media (2020), COVID-induced border closures (2021) and isolation (2022).

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Throughout it all, insists Graeme Yardy, domestic market manager for MLA, “we’ve been pretty consistent with the message – that’s getting people together over lamb”.

The latest ad doesn’t mark a complete break with the original position, he says. But he does concede that there was a deliberate attempt in the older ads to “make controversy”.

“Shock and awe was seen as a way of getting attention,” he says. “But things have evolved. It’s important for us to be topical and relevant, and actually have a perspective.”

That perspective is that Australia is a place of great diversity, and there’s room in it for people of all persuasions, backgrounds and world views – so long as they eat lamb, of course.

Humour is still key to the way the message is imparted, but is he concerned that MLA might be accused of virtue signalling with its new-found position in which being un-Australian is, in fact, just about the most Australian thing you could be?

“It’s not for lamb to tell you what is Australian or not,” he says. “We’re not the arbiter of that. Our job is to point to the ridiculousness of calling something un-Australian.”

That may be a bit hard to swallow given where the campaign started, but you’d have to say it feels a lot more suited to the modern Australian palate all the same.