Australia’s most active anti-vaccine group has joined forces with Clive Palmer and Craig Kelly’s United Australia Party (UAP) to campaign for the next federal election.
On Monday night, Reignite Democracy Australia leader Monica Smit announced during a live-streamed interview with Kelly that her group would be “joining” the UAP. She said they reserved the right to promote other parties too, but urged her followers to join and to run as UAP candidates.
Smit is a committed conspiracy theorist with links to the Victorian Liberals, and was recently detained for three weeks after she refused to agree to bail conditions after being arrested for breaching COVID-19 health restrictions and inciting others to do so.
Despite making her way onto mainstream media outlets like Sky News and ABC Radio, and even while claiming she is a citizen journalist like her companion Real Rukshan, Smit and her groups’ beliefs are extreme. They’ve claimed that vaccines are deadly, contact tracing is unconstitutional, and chief health officers should be tried for crimes against humanity.
Likewise, Reignite Democracy Australia members have protested testing and vaccination centres, stormed an MP’s office and coached people how to get around vaccine mandates and apply for exemptions. They’ve been banned from Facebook for spreading misinformation (although they easily get around it due to Facebook’s lackadaisical moderation policies) and have amplified medical misinformation and conspiracy theories. Their members harass and abuse individuals, business owners, and MPs who encourage vaccine uptake or abide by COVID-19 restrictions.
Kelly has been chummy with Smit and Reignite Democracy Australia for a while. But his embrace of COVID-19 denialism has been confined to social media posts and speeches in Parliament (which are clipped up and shared online too).
The union of these groups brings together two of the major forces that were set to compete for the anti-vaccine, anti-lockdown vote for the next election. And importantly, both groups have something that the other lacked.
Reignite Democracy Australia is an online first group that has organically grown an enormous online reach and been able to channel that into action in just over a year of operation. It claims to have 1000 paying members for its “political party”, tens of thousands of people on a mailing list, one hundred subgroups for different locations, and hundreds of thousands of followers across social media.
A fundraiser for Smit’s legal defence on the group’s website shows that more than $300,000 was raised, despite admitting Smit was being represented pro bono. Some of these claims are impossible to verify from the outside, but they are consistent with other publicly known information. Even more remarkably, the group has managed to avoid the discord and self-cannibalisation that so often befalls fringe groups, while bringing an unusual amount of organisation and professionalism.
Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer’s UAP has bankrolled some of this popularity. More than a million dollars has already been spent promoting Kelly’s election ads on YouTube, about 20 times the next closest spender during the same period. Palmer has reportedly pledged to spend as he has in elections past. But they have no real party structure. It’s all top-down, with two blustering public figures at the top.
The combination of the two forces is worrying for public health: what can a group with both an organised ground game and a penchant for going viral and using social media to reach millions do with the resources of a mining magnate who’s willing to spend?
It could run YouTube ads for Smit or her partner Morgan C Jonas’ misleading and deceptive videos, which spread misinformation about COVID-19 testing and vaccines. It could mass-text everyone in Australia a link to Smit’s unmoderated Telegram channel.
Clive Palmer and Craig Kelly were already dangerous. Bringing in Smit’s Reignite Democracy Australia could have disastrous consequences.
I had an anti vaxxer tell me at last Sunday’s roast lunch that we are just sheep being led on by the Government who want to poison us with their vaccines. I reminded him that the millions of sheep we have in Australia are also fully vaccinated and have been so for decades.
I also asked him if he and his family enjoyed being poisoned by the roast lamb we had for Sunday lunch.
*Silence*
Bloody ell, whats a good lamb roast got to do with it.? are you a vegan, anti meat, har har.
LOL!
Unfortunately, consistency is not a requirement…
Should have told him to do his own research, although your riposte was much more pointed.
At the risk of being overly optimistic are’t Kelly and Christensen just too plain stupid to make much difference?
Unlike that reptile Matt Canavan, neither of them even pretend to be fluent or knowledgable.
Effluent more like it.
You forget that stupid occupies a broad church and one that is growing broader.
So now rural America begins ‘conservative’ march into Australian politics. Start with fear ie vaccine, morph into racism and appeal to, sweep up, less educated, advantaged. Australia has already been alerted to extreme right-wing growing influence. After all, we already have our own Trump-lite?
Do we have a Trump clone in charge? Seems to have all the attributes Collect all the nutter’s preferences add $60million and call it a MIRACLE.
Where this may be astute politics is that any votes the UAP and Smit’s party receive will eventually be fed back into the Liberal party’s vote. And that presumably is the intention of their looney message, though for Palmer it is ensuring the LNP stay in power at any cost.
The average voter will struggle to realise the direct connection between these two parties and the increasing number of extremists in the LNP, and I wonder if the purpose of the UAP (out of which the Liberal party initially grew) and Smit’s party is really to rework the LNP even further to the right.
Might we also say that their extremism is being matched by the much more measured and intelligent body of independents worried about climate change who will be standing at the forthcoming election? Given the profusion of parties, the average voter will be perplexed–though this implies some thought will be given to the different parties–and simply vote for the two main parties, or the Greens.
Method in seemingly random madness of MPs or fringe parties but in QLD especially with supposed independents of Palmer, Hanson et al. it’s all too cute and only benefits the LNP…. confuses voters and/or compels them not to vote Labor, while it impedes both Labor and the Greens.
OF course it is.
This is that fat git Palmer and his $90M of preferences @ the last election redux.
All this has shades of the Joh for PM campaign. They can fire up a vocal and energetic bunch of vaxo-fascists, but what they don’t see is the degree of disgust and contempt they create amongst the overwhelming majority. These characters can chew up a bunch of votes from the LNP Anthropocene Troglodyte sector but they make life more and more uncomfortable for the supposedly ‘mainstream’ LNP centrists, you know, the ones who get vaccinated and think we should be getting to net zero well before 2050. In my regional area of Victoria we are running at 92.5% >16 first dose and 69% fully vaxed. It is a very politically conservative area and pissing on the shrine did not go down at all well.
Remember too, southern NSW mid/late ’80s, National voters turned on Federal Nats due to Joh’s interference and grandstanding, then of course 4 Corners doco…..; were complaints directed at Joh of being too much of a ‘bible basher’ and some voted Libs, Democrats or heaven forbid, Labor.
Think Chester in Gippsland represents the issue many have with the National Party nowadays, channeling QLD and fringe views over more moderate SE Oz wanting sensible policies not just power.
Yep. Well done Vic. ACT at 98.8% >16 first dose today. Which is bloody amazing. As almost no-one gets a first dose and doesn’t bother with the second we can expect to be 98%+ in four weeks time. Basically the anti-vax don’t infringe my rights nutters have lost. Good riddance. Reminds me of the SSM plebicite. Lots of angst and dire predictions ahead of time – especially in the LGBTI community – and then the rest of the Australian population did the right thing. Just cos there’s a lot of noise doesnt mean they have a lot of support.