One of the Voice to Parliament No campaigns is promoting a video from an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist who rose to fame as part of the freedom movement.
The Warren Mundine-led Recognise A Better Way campaign website includes a list of video and audio content endorsing its opposition to the Voice.
The latest video is a YouTube clip from Turning Point Australia’s Joel Jammal warning of the “dangers of the Voice”.
Jammal, wearing a hat that reads “Team Cook”, tells viewers to watch a clip from right-wing New Zealand politician Winston Peters who criticises the Voice.
Jammal has been the face of the far-right organisation that’s been involved in the Australian tours of former UKIP leader and Brexit campaigner Nigel Farage, and Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, whose controversial anti-trans rally in Melbourne last month was attended by a group of neo-Nazis.
Jammal’s own beliefs in conspiracy theories and far-right fearmongering are laid out in his extensive online history, as Crikey has previously reported.
Jammal describes himself as a Christian journalist and conservative political commentator. After unsuccessfully trying to usurp Fred Nile as head of the Christian Democratic Party as a 22-year-old in 2019, Jammal launched an online interview series with one of Australia’s most extreme conspiracy theorists, Riccardo Bosi.
During these interviews with Bosi, where he laid out his violent fantasies of Australian political leaders, doctors and journalists being executed for their role in COVID-19 restrictions, Jammal also shared his own fringe and extreme beliefs. He is against vaccines, denies human-made climate change and has cast doubt on the Port Arthur massacre.
Crikey has previously reported on the appointment to the Recognise A Better Way board of Yodie Batzke, an anti-abortion former UAP candidate who has been repeatedly caught out promoting false information during prior election campaigns.
Neither Jammal nor the Recognise A Better Way campaign responded to a request for comment.
It didn’t realise that the No campaign would have to scrape so low to the bottom of the barrel to get people to promote it.
Like a giant dog dropping these sorts of outfits attract only flies and roaches.
Surely recommending that we watch the views of a NZ politician is an admission that this lot have no genuine arguments to contribute to the No case.
I’d hope the clip comes with subtitles, as Winston Peters speaks fluent gibberish………….
It would be a surprise to find that the No campaign didn’t have fringe loonies supporting it. And apropos of nothing, what exactly is a ‘Christian journalist’? Are they Christians who are journalists, or journalists who only report on Christian matters?
Journalists who only report on the doings of Christ…………..
(AKA “unemployed”)
Winston Peters should only be cast in none speaking roles, such as imitating the heads on Easter Island.
Not just a NZ politician, an anti-immigrant, homophobic one
I remember Warren Mundine when he was just a local nuisance in Dubbo. Big noter, disloyal to those around him is my recollection. Looking for a pozt above his skill, though he would fit right in with Dutton’s worthless front bench. To be involoved with this pond scum mob should be a matter of shame, but I don’t think he knows the word.
In the past both Labor and Liberals were used to having extremists hanging on their edges, trying to influence them while usually also condemning them as sell-outs. These days the Liberals seem to have reversed it, hanging on as peripherals to the extremists, fellow travellers to the far right at best.
If these conspiracists didn’t have a platform to spread their misinformation the world would be a better place. I’m all for free speech but there is a point where enabling that free speech to go unchallenged and promoted by mainstream media outlets becomes dangerous. Media and for that matter politicians who use these conspiracy nut jobs to sell content and secure votes should be held accountable when their actions cause any adverse effect on society or individuals.
The damage these people are causing to civilization as a whole is utterly tragic.
Using the Port Arthur massacre as a tool to delegitimise the government and gun laws is an import from the country with the most gun deaths of any developed nation. A country where the number one cause of child death is by firearms. Every time Jamal opens his mouth about Port Arthur and some poor lost individual latches onto him and his conspiracy lunacy the truth is weakened. This type of behaviour should be illegal. Sure promote your opinion about why gun controls should be different but public misinformation of this magnitude should come with consequences.
Likewise, climate change denial and it’s delay on positive action will be felt for generations to come. Australia could have been the worlds super power for renewable energy. Instead we will end up being a net importer of manufactured and value added technology because politicians from both sides of the house put votes ahead of the wellbeing and prosperity of the country.
And how many needless deaths have there been from Covid misinformation? It is quite staggering to see the amount of “belief” in the community that masks and vaccines are some kind of deliberate attempt by the government/s to drive a (pick your) hidden agenda.
Social media may have it’s champions and may have benefits, however from where I sit it appears to be driving the world further apart and is enabling some of the most dangerous people to promote lies, hate, division and outright lunacy on an ever increasing scale.
End rant…
The cry of the Too Often Spotted Quisling – “I’m all for free speech but...”!
Unfortunately, not a species on the Endangered list.
Glad to see you took the time to read the whole post, understand the context and respond with your own well thought out and articulate counter position. Any “I’m a contrarian and I’m not sure why” would have cherry picked a small part of a sentence and used that as a means of demonstrating an inability to come up with any reason why the spread of misinformation is a good thing.
I read it again in case I’d missed something other than poor punctuation and weak gruel.
Nope. I hadn’t.
What’s your opinion on numerous European countries plus at least Canada and Israel banning Holocaust denial?
Free speech absolutist, me.
If garbage can not be countered, perhaps it’s not garbage.
Also, very big on owning consequences.
The problem is rarely that the garbage cannot be countered.
Free speech absolutist ? So no problem with swindlers fast-talking granny out of her life savings then ?
See above –
1) that which cannot be countered may be true even excluding incompetence on the part of the naysayers.
2) consequences.
How’s the reading comprehension course going? Try taking off the kneejerk specs.
Cool. Safe to assume you’re also OK with verbal sexual harassment, bullying and rallying up a lynch mob then.
For the third and final time, see above re “responsibility” & “consequences” – you’ll need to consult a dictionary for those two words, probably a picture dictionary given your reading level.
You can repeat the words as often as you want, without context they mean nothing.
Isn’t that an oxymoron ?
Ignorance cannot be questioned from the inside
The good news is that people who believe in and propagate these nonsenses, usually in response to some emotional or psychological deficits of their own, compounded by other life circumstances, are actually not numerous, in fact they are marginal. Sometimes below 5% of the population and rarely seen here in Australia above 10%.
The issue, as you point out, is that the digital mediums give them broadcast reach and there noisiness is amplified by media and politicians treating them as voices worthy of attention. The (intellectually bereft) defence is usually “balance” when, in fact, it actually isn’t being applied. Balance would require, for example, about 95 plus opinion pieces about the dangers of climate change for every three or four by naysayers.
However, of course the underlying and real reason for platforming the cranks and haters is because they sell. Most of the media is in the business of attracting and holding audiences via pushing emotional buttons, both prejudices and outrage at prejudices. Even the ABC, funding anxious, falls victim to this more often than it should.
Thus the internal logic of media is revealed as counter to a purpose of informing, educating and providing a forum for good faith discussion. So what to do? Some form of regulation seems called for but doing that has its own pitfalls. So it must be done carefully, lest the cure be as bad as the disease.
I was about to make the same point but you have eloquently made it. Nut jobs and fringe dwellers do have the right to stand up in the public square and shout their nonsense into the wind. The problem is, as you say, media picking this noise up and amplifying it, worse yet presenting it as a balance argument.
Just because these people do have the right to make their noise, doesn’t mean the rest of us are under any obligation to listen to it or be forced to hear it. Publication or ignoring is an editorial decision. Perhaps editorial responsibility could be enforced somehow?
Australia does not have any legal protections for “Free Speech”.
There is an implied right to political discourse and that is it.
The trash about “Free Speech” only come to the fore when hate speech, racial vilification and/or other anti-social behaviour is trying to be justified publicly.
Pathetic statements like “You may think I am a racist and misogynist but…” are laughable.
I think the anti=discrimination laws makes us a safer and healthier democracy.
Oh, don’t get me wrong I believe that websites should be required to take down lies and delusional rantings.
I also believe that we could follow Germany under Angela Merkle with legislation to suit.
That may save us from the UAP and Clive Palmer’s delusions of when the National Party ran Queensland.
There’s an old song about horses & carriages etc, which illustrate that you have it back to front with ““Free Speech” only come to the fore when hate speech, racial vilification and/or other anti-social behaviour is trying to be justified publicly.”
In the West, it was a given and it was the rise of the Precious Petal generation in the 70s – over educated, under achieving space wasters – who first agitated for vilification laws in Britain where Room Vacant signs routinely specificied “No Irish, Blacks, Pets, Unmarrieds”etc.
I even recall a country quite nearby where, until the 80s the major newspapers had Positions Vacant pages separated between Men & Boys and Women & Girls with concomitant differing pay rates.
Once the P/P brigade tasted power it quickly morphed into the P/C brigade and sensible people realised the slippery slope had become a very steep ski jump but to no avail.
So that I know whom to avoid, which businesses and establishments not to patronise etc, I’d much prefer that people made their druthers plain rather than remain schtumm and exercise the prejudices, bigotries and religious in the dark when they inevitably metastasise, feeding on resentment.
Your “rant” as you put it, is far from ranting. It’s a passionate call out and I endorse your post one hundred percent.