Craig Kelly and Reignite Democracy Australia's leader Monica Smit announcing her group's support for Clive Palmer's United Australia Party

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.