Gerard Rennick, the Queensland LNP anti-abortion and pro-Putin senator who was dumped from the party’s Senate ticket last year, has defected to the crossbench, with plans to launch his People First Party at the next election.
In contrast to the defection from Labor of WA Senator Fatima Payman, which saw extensive backgrounding of the media by the government and tens of thousands of words written demonising an invented threat of Muslim sectarianism, the defection of a middle-aged white guy from the LNP has caused barely a ripple of interest among political journalists. Not, of course, that there are any double standards in the treatment of Muslim women in politics.
Where Rennick has gone further than Payman is in committing to establish a new party, though mainly because he wants to be reelected — he wants “to get my name above the line on the Senate ticket”. In response to a query on Twitter, he appeared to be open to the idea of joining One Nation, though “Malcolm [Roberts] is already on their ticket“. He told Nine newspapers he wanted to focus on “bread and butter issues”, but an examination of Rennick’s tweets shows what he’s really interested in: conspiracy theories.
Rather than detailing which conspiracy theories Rennick believes in, it’s probably quicker to identify which ones he doesn’t. He’s a long-term conspiracy theorist on COVID vaccines and the origins of COVID, with the Health Department, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Therapeutic Goods Authority, the CIA, Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci and the Democratic Party all involved in the planning of the virus and cover-up of the lethality of vaccines. He believes the climate emergency is fake, created by the Bureau of Meteorology (helped by the CSIRO).
He thinks foreign bankers are running Australia (the polite form of the traditional “financial power” trope), he holds a complicated conspiracy theory about the Reserve Bank failing to hold our gold reserves onshore (what is it with conspiracy theorists and gold?); he worries about a cover-up of creeping ownership of land by “Aborigines” or “Aboriginals“; in line with the need for conspiracy theorists to always warn that the apocalypse is just around the corner, Rennick believes the West is “slipping into military style dictatorship” while Anthony Albanese is a “globalist puppet” of Gates (on the up side, Rennick worries Black Caviar was abused in retirement).
In short, Rennick is a standard-issue cooker who can’t stay away from conspiracy theories for more than a couple of tweets. The problem for Rennick is indeed Malcolm Roberts: Roberts, who is in the Senate courtesy of Pauline Hanson, shares many of the conspiracy theories of Rennick, and has been around longer, having entered the Senate in 2016 before being turfed out over his citizenship. As a result, Roberts has greater name recognition than Rennick, and of course the Hanson factor, and is up for reelection in 2025 as well.
The chances of there being two Senate spots for a cooker candidate are — even though it’s Queensland — probably slim. Erstwhile One Nation senator Fraser Anning failed to get back into the Senate in 2019 when he was up against Roberts for the far-right vote, after the latter had sorted out his citizenship.
Of course, something might happen to Roberts between now and the election. But until then its Rennick versus Roberts, two fairly interchangeable Queensland blokes going head to head for the conspiracy theory vote. How soon before one accuses the other of being part of a sinister globalist-Gates-CIA-RBA-BOM-ABS-“Aborigine” conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of the sheeple?
