Former Liberal candidate Katherine Deves, James Morrow, Rowan Dean and Rita Panahi appear at a live filming of Outsiders at CPAC Australia (Image: ADH.tv)

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) began with a ceremony, a show of patriotism, and some trolling.

First came a welcome to country ceremony, followed by an acoustic performance of “We Are Australian”. Country Liberal Party Senator and rising star Jacinta Price then gave the opening address.

“First, I’d like to pay my respects to…” she began, pausing for effect, “…every proud Australian!”

After being on hiatus for COVID-19, CPAC Australia came at a crucial time for conservative politics in Australia. The federal Coalition was shellacked at the last election after nearly a decade in power, and now just two states are led by right-wing premiers — both of whom have led moderate governments.

I was among 1000 attendees who made their way to the ICC in Sydney to hear from a mix of Australian right-wing politicians and commentators and a few headline international names like Nigel Farage, former Trump adviser Jason Miller, and former Trump acting attorney-general Matt Whitaker. 

What the audience heard over the weekend, the speakers promised, was the way out of the wilderness for the conservative political movement. Speakers listed their many enemies — most common were climate scientists, indoctrinating teachers, unelected bureaucrats, Dictator Dan, and the radical and woke left — but one group earned more opprobrium from the crowd than almost any other: “conservative cowards”, said Farage. 

I saw some attendees and speakers clearly thought some of them were inside the room. Through the weekend, a sense of conflict and contradiction bubbled barely below the surface, only to erupt towards the end. 

When I walked into the conference on Saturday morning, I noticed a heavy police presence around the ICC’s entrances. The centre’s staff — masked — checked my ticket at the doors before I went up to the CPAC registration where my ticket was checked again. They gave me a tote bag, which included a copy of the far-right conspiracy-promoting newspaper The Epoch Times, The Spectator and a flyer advertising Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) memberships for “only” $99. 

I was running a few minutes late and the conference had just started so the conference lobby was mostly empty, barring a cardboard cut-out of Donald Trump. I hurried into the back of the full auditorium as the welcome to country was happening. The front section was roped off for golden-ticket holders (“only $479 for members”). I was in the back with everyone else. The audience appeared to be, for the most part, older, white and fully engrossed in Price’s speech.

The Voice to Parliament was the major target of the weekend. Much of the first day was dedicated to the case against it. Price promised that constitutionally enshrining an Indigenous advisory body would create “racial separatism”. Former prime minister Tony Abbott said a Voice wasn’t necessary because of existing Indigenous federal politicians and would be “discrimination”. Even international speakers weighed in. Whitaker warned against altering Australia’s constitution, citing America’s near-religious obsession with its own founding document. 

The rest of the conference’s Australian speakers focused on the other ideological battlegrounds. The IPA’s Bella d’Abrera declared students were being “indoctrinated” by a national curriculum including criticism of Australia’s colonial history as well as sex and gender education. Professor Ian Plimer (falsely) claimed that no one had ever proven that humankind’s carbon emissions have contributed to climate change. One Nation’s Mark Latham declared that long COVID wasn’t a disease — despite huge amounts of research showing its biological impact — but a “mental state” caused by watching the mainstream media. 

References to somewhat obscure right-wing memes regarding the likes of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Labor’s promise of a $275 power bill reduction, and eating bugs all landed with the audience without much explanation. Similarly, the audience seemed to get references to US politics, including boos for Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and even Republican Liz Cheney.

During the breaks, we filtered back into the lobby. Attendees who’d bought general tickets stood around in the mostly empty room while the golden-ticket holders went to the “golden-ticket room” where there were chairs, tables and refreshments. There were huge queues for the general bathrooms, but I was able to skip the line by using a gender-neutral toilet ignored by everyone else.

I spoke to some other attendees over the weekend. Sheree told me she didn’t like some of the more “extreme” parts of the conference but was worried about gender and environmental policies. Duncan told me he flew from Tasmania to see Zuby, a speaker billed as a “popular rapper” who gave a TED Talk-style speech based on a Twitter thread he wrote that went viral. After Zuby’s session, I overheard an elderly man say: “I was expecting him to do a rap dance.” 

A major theme of the weekend was how conservatives were demonised for their views. Many of the speakers talked about how they would be criticised or attacked for what they said.

“It’s obvious from looking at us that CPAC is a racist organisation,” joked its Australia chairman and Indigenous man Warren Mundine during a panel of Indigenous speakers. 

“They want to call us anti-Semitic … or white nationalists,” said CPAC USA chairman and former White House political director Matt Schlapp when talking about other CPAC conferences in Israel and Japan. 

“Opposing a Voice to Parliament doesn’t make you anti-Aboriginal,” Abbott quipped.

Much of the conference was defined by jabs at their political opposition. Multiple speakers mocked the idea of acknowledgments of country and using gender pronouns. There was not a hint of irony as Schlapp, shortly before talking about the different CPAC conferences around the world, spoke about his fear of the left’s “well-funded global movement”.

Speakers also shared anecdotes about their perceived run-ins with censorship and cancel culture. Abbott shared a story about how he was invited to officially open facilities at a primary school when he was prime minister. He was invited to tour the school afterwards and made his way into a Year 6 classroom where they were learning about how pollution caused climate change. When Abbott began to interrogate the 11- and 12-year-olds about whether they knew about the Ice Age and natural fluctuations in the world’s climate, he was, by his telling, hurried out of the room by the teacher. 

Later in the conference, Ukrainian think tank director Nataliya Melnyk spoke about her country’s battle for survival against Russia and the death of some of her friends in the war. (Almost simultaneously, Schlapp had to apologise for CPAC tweeting a message that criticised the US for “gift-giving to Ukraine”, featured a Russian flag, and used Putin-esque rhetoric by calling it “Ukraine occupied territories”.) 

Even as the conference attempted to present a buttoned-up, polished image of the movement, there were times when CPAC flirted with the fringe. Topher Field, director of the anti-lockdown documentary Battleground Melbourne, led a multimedia session featuring three Victorians who spoke about how Daniel Andrews’ COVID-19 restrictions had hurt them. The carefully choreographed performance — complete with lighting cues and dramatic orchestral background music — omitted the histories of their speakers.

One speaker, Matt Lawson, is an anti-5G conspiracy theorist who hand-delivered pamphlets with vaccine misinformation to aged care facilities during the 2021 lockdown. Another, Carly Soderstrom, spoke about how she went viral during the pandemic for videos blaming lockdowns for pushing her into bankruptcy. She reportedly lied about using GoFundMe proceeds raised for COVID-19 relief to pay back debts accrued before the pandemic. The session also featured footage and reference to Monica Smit, the founder of Australia’s biggest anti-vaccine group Reignite Democracy Australia. The session was given a standing ovation.

It wasn’t until one of the last sessions of CPAC that Peter Dutton was mentioned.

“Where is Peter Dutton?” asked One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts. During his noticeably short speaking slot, the Queensland senator took aim at the conservative party leader’s absence, the Coalition and the conference itself, which he derisively called “LPAC” (the “L” standing for Liberal Party).

It was enough to light a fire in the crowd. The subsequent session, titled “The Road Back of the Coalition”, kicked off with boos after former senator Amanda Stoker, one of the panellists, said: “Wouldn’t it be good if we spent a bit of time kicking the other side and not our own side?”

This soon grew into a full shouting match between the audience and former Liberal federal MP Nick Minchin. People in the audience began heckling when Minchin said: “I don’t know that the Liberal Party needs a whole lot of changing,” telling him that the party had sold out. 

In response, Minchin said they were “worse than a socialist audience” and accused one man, who began walking towards the stage while shouting, of being a “leftie” — earning an even angrier reaction from the audience. The host was eventually able to soothe the audience by guiding the conversation back to common ground: opposing lockdowns.

Throughout the weekend, speakers like Farage declared the need to elect strong, conservative leaders and criticised the Coalition for failing to do so. Liberal leaders like Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison were unpopular with both speakers and the audience. 

I didn’t attend the Saturday night gala, but footage shared online afterwards by Craig Kelly showed that NSW Liberal Treasurer Matt Kean won a “boo-off”, and he received the angriest reaction from the audience when mentioned during the conference. 

Even Liberal Party politicians who were or would have been celebrated by the party’s base just a few years ago were received coolly by the audience. A recorded address from former prime minister John Howard, which made the case for the Liberal Party’s embrace of both conservatism and liberalism, received a tepid response. The audience was significantly less interested in Stoker — who was selected to speak at multiple panels and was mentioned as a “future prime minister” by Liberal Party vice-president Teena McQueen — than it was in Latham or Roberts.

The feeling is mutual, at least for some. On the first day, near a protest against the conference, an attendee wearing a “Conspiracy Dundee” costume and another holding a “Make Australia Great Again” flag posed for photos. “Say ‘feral’,” the costumed man said. Nearby, I overheard a person wearing a CPAC gold-ticket lanyard saying: “Unfortunately the Crocodile Dundee guy is with us.”

The last major speaker, Alan Jones, was met with rapturous applause. I left the speech as the broadcaster began to lash Liberal governments for profligate spending to do a television interview about the conference. Someone from CPAC came over to speak to the camera crew while they were setting up with an offer of a “spicy” interview with Roberts or another speaker.

When the camera operators looked at each other and shook their heads, the man’s face fell and he strode off.