Do we like them?

Do we like Kirk Pengilly?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent on the record we could open, with one cringe-worthy remark in 2017 and no pattern of harm turning up.

Kirk Pengilly is a founding member of INXS, the guitar-and-sax bloke in one of Australia's biggest bands. The pages we could open were thin on his early years, so we won't pad that out. What matters here is how he has talked and acted in public.

The stoush that follows him is from late November 2017. At a Movember charity event in Melbourne, with sexual harassment allegations against Don Burke and Harvey Weinstein in the news, he told AAP he preferred earlier decades, when “you could slap a woman on the butt and it was taken as a compliment.” He added that some men now feel they can't even pay a woman a compliment.

It was a remark, not an accusation or a court matter, but it landed badly. Social media users criticised him, with one saying it was never acceptable and that society had evolved. Neither article we read reports an apology or retraction from him, so we can't say he took it back.

On the harm check, that comment is the stain. Our searches found nothing from him on trans or gay people, vaccines, climate, migrants or politics. We also found no pattern of working with people who push that stuff, though we couldn't confirm a full list of his recent projects.

On the good side, a 2020 Mercury report had him taking part in a Big December Breakfast in Hobart for the Royal Hobart Hospital Research Foundation. He is also tied to Movember, which is where the 2017 comment was made. Our searches turned up no court rulings or lawsuits against him, and no credible accusations of mistreating anyone.

Nothing new on him lately that we could find, and the record is thinner than for most of our cards. One clumsy comment about women is a real mark, but one comment is not a campaign. Until something else turns up, he gets a pass with an asterisk on harm and a pass on being a decent bloke.