Brendan O’Neill is churning out the hits on stage in a hotel ballroom in Fremantle. “Did you know that gardening is racist now?” the podcaster and professional opinion-haver tells the crowd of mostly white-haired readers of The Australian. According to The Guardian, says O’Neill to big laughs, “gardening has racism baked into its DNA”, as does the countryside, professionalism and “getting a good night’s sleep”.
The British contrarian’s tight five went down a storm at the “Australia: The Road Ahead” conference on April 17 in Fremantle, which also flew in Janet Albrechtsen and former deputy PM John Anderson to join the tribute concert to local libertarianism. Linda Reynolds is in the crowd. Gina Rinehart receives an Ayn Rand Award at the end of the day (presumably for paying for the event), which gives her another opportunity to breathlessly hail the “bravery of President Trump” before the rank and file repair to the hotel bar afterwards.
Stalls out the front for the Institute of Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies (and a pared back Centre for Western Civilisation) give the game away. This is about taking back control, and it’s tightly coordinated by the network of think tanks who are also represented on the stage.
“You’ve got many of the senior people that run the two major think tanks in Australia on stage,” says Jeremy Walker, a UTS professor and global expert on the network of right-wing think tanks that are organising resistance to any attempts to combat runaway fossil fuel extraction.
“The degree of coordination is difficult to really know,” he says of the organisers, “but the point is to just create confusion and defeat their enemies, which is any kind of democratic effort to rein in the fossil fuel sector.”
Going pretty well then, you’d think. So why did everyone on the stage sound so defeated?
Maybe it was the Bruce Lehrmann verdict two days earlier casting a pall over proceedings. Albrechtsen’s talk is on the rule of law and halfway through she calls up Steven Whybrow SC, the pro bono defender in Lehrmann’s aborted criminal trial.
He shyly apologises for wearing jeans on stage — “Janet said if I turned up that’d be good enough” — and immediately advises the crowd he hasn’t read Justice Lee’s civil judgment. “Think of it as a 300-page book you’ve been prescribed in Year 11 for a subject that you’re sick of.”
Or maybe it’s all the doomscrolling. Forget ripping up environmental regulations, enabling live animal exports or reining in the NDIS — the toxic influence of social media was the hot topic all day.
Seven West impresario, WA Liberal candidate and heir apparent to the iron ore throne Basil Zempilas took an RDO from being Lord Mayor of Perth to MC the event with all the brio of calling the 4x100m freestyle final. When he wasn’t repeatedly acknowledging “Mrs Rinehart” (his wife works for her), he was rolling out Liberal Party election policies a year early.
“If I was ever elected, if I was ever part of the government, I would ban mobile phones from school completely and no child would be allowed on social media apps before 16,” Zempilas thundered early in the piece. “They are a cancer for our young people and we have to cut that cancer out.”
As the potential premier said later, it was a topic that “resonated strongly at the conference” — but he declined Crikey’s attempts to get details about how a local politician would enact such a sweeping embargo.
The federal opposition has now taken up the refrain. While Elon Musk was in the Federal Court last week, Australia’s libertarian thought leaders could have been mistaken for censorship commissars in Perth the week prior. Unlike Victorian Senator Ralph Babet, they weren’t telling “the Australian government and the eSafety commissioner go fuck yourselves” — these free speech absolutists demanded more regulation to protect our kids.
Conservative young gun Freya Leach honed in on the pernicious influence of “algorithms” on a later panel.
“These are designed to get kids addicted, they can be manipulated by foreign governments, as in the case of Tik Tok, or via troll farms using millions of bots to manipulate the algorithms like what Russia does,” she warned.
As another panellist emphasised, it was social media that shot Leach to prominence ripping down pro-Palestine posters at Sydney Uni last year, but its untrammelled use clearly has dangerous consequences.
“Currently, we have absolutely no idea how these algorithms work, what content they promote, or what impact they’re having on young people or Australian society,” Leach said.
For Walker, the apparent contradiction in the free marketplace of ideas is unsurprising.
“Their ideology is totally flexible for the present needs of the fossil fuel industry and its backers,” he tells me.
“It’s never a question of needing to be coherent with any particular philosophical position — because their ideology is based on disinformation.”
If you want to hear more post-phone propaganda, this audio dispatch from The Last Place on Earth gives a flavour of the free speech on offer at this late stage of the culture wars.
