The video, which was made for Triple J radio station, which operates as part of the ABC, shows Gillard “addressing” the nation with a serious, deadpan expression on her face.
The address begins “My dear remaining fellow Australians. The end of the world is coming.
“It wasn’t Y2K, it wasn’t even the carbon price. It turns out the Mayan calendar was true.”
It seems however that the good people using Weibo didn’t quite get the joke.
Hours after the video was posted to Triple J’s website Weibo users began forwarding one another the video with the heading: “Australian Prime Minister states end of the world is approaching this month: this is real,” Fairfax media reports.
Even though Chinese subtitles accompanied the video bloggers couldn’t understand either that the video was a joke, or why the PM was ‘misleading her country’.
User Chen Yue Cyanni wrote: “Why has the Prime Minister of Australia been convinced that all this end of the world business is true when this type of thing has no scientific basis? She’s misleading her country.”
Another user sleepeat posted: “This can’t be possible, that a head of state is talking this way.”
To be fair though, this is not the first time China’s computer savy have been mislead by an online joke.
One of China’s major newspapers, the People’s Daily, ran a story originally made up by fictional news team The Onion saying that North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un had been voted the ‘sexiest man alive’.
They’ve obviously never heard of Matt Lucas.
