Clive Palmer and George Christensen (Image: Mynewsfeed)

“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Clive Palmer!!!”

The audience of 400 or so in the Springlife auditorium — blond wood and bright colours, happy-clappy standard issue — burst into applause as Clive, in a red-white-and-black check shirt, barrelled down the aisle to the stage, big smile on his face.

The dozen other candidates ranged across the stage looked less pleased. From Matt Canavan in the centre, Cro-Magnon brow darkening, to a couple of microparty women in cardies and sensible shoes, to Drew Pavlou bouncing around beneath his haircut, there was a collective scowl. At the centre, George Christensen paused mid-speech, his Rasputin beard splayed, bobbing above the lectern, like a cat mid-fall out a window. There was mild amusement and not a little annoyance. 

Not hard to get to, after all. We were in Springwood, in the vast web of Brisbane’s southern suburbs, not that far from the Gold Coast but a million miles away, a place of orange-brick houses on stilts on vast blocks, of churches like garages, and the vast Springwood Hotel, pokies and two bistros, where the seafood buffet that night had a queue of Islanders and Anglos snaking all the way out the front door and into the carpark.

Everyone had turned up on time for this Senate forum, staged by Voting Matters, a right-wing outfit hooked up in some way with conservative publisher Connor Court Publishing, but flying under a neutral flag. Labor and the Greens had declined the invite, and those who remained were a veritable bestiary of the right. They’d been on time for this Queensland Senate candidates forum, and Clive, who has his own jet, gets a hosanna for being 45 minutes late? 

“He’s smaller than I thought,” someone behind me whispered to their companion, and so he is — towering on TV, neatly rounded in real life, in his check shirt stuck forever in the ’70s, like a man who runs a weekend trad jazz band. 

Smaller but still the centre of attention. For the moment. Gorgeous George has the lectern and he is hammering this rotten, decade-long government that gave him no choice but to jump out into an unwinnable position for One Nation and get a cool hundred thousand. He knows his audience; he starts obsessive:

“This government is telling us that the mandates were the states’. But if they were guilty of sins of commission, the federal government were guilty of sins of omission!”

And takes it up to mad:

“We say no to being under the digital control of Klaus Schwab and the UN!”

George was the fifth? ninth? 27th speaker? in this vast array, and most of them were hitting the same note. Jason Miles, the gleaming man from the Great Australian Party — leather choker under his crisp shirt, inevitably a lifestyle coach — spoke of the vaccine and that the High Court and Parliament were sitting illegally from as far back as 1931.

Allona Lahn of the Informed Medical Options Party spoke of the invasion of our bodies and “the poisoning of the planet, the skies, the earth, our bodies”, and Debra Yuille of The Silent Majority of the sovereign inviolability of the body. Only Isabel Tilyard of the Australian Federation Party spoke little of vaccines, focusing instead on improving democracy and dialogue — for that, there were no questions put to her whatsoever.

As the evening wound its way through serial obsessions, Matt Canavan — who’d spoken first, and pitched the inside/outside thing (I hate the major parties, vote me back to continue their struggle from within) — focused on a fixed point in the middle distance, and as the crazy continued, became intensely interested in his phone. 

But it was Clive who gave the barn-burner, his honed stump speech a mix of trad politics and the crazy. 

“We can never trust Liberal, Labor or the Greens again! A lot of good people have told you about the vaccines. I want to tell you what’s going on!”

What’s going on, of course, is that the government has been ramping up the debt so that there’ll be an inflation crisis and a credit squeeze — everyone loses their houses and the government buys them back and owns everything. Only Clive can save us! With a 15% iron ore licence, a government-mandated 3% cap on home loans and a lot of rah-rah, with his sinister hippie gloss. “We need to love everybody!” “Love is the answer!”

It is all bollocks, of course. Neither major party would go near a 15% charge on iron; a rate interest cap is unconstitutional. And when Clive goes dark, he really goes dark.

“I’ve just been in Longman where a couple told me their seven-year-old twin boys died within an hour of being vaccinated.”

There is absolutely no record of anything like this occurring. God knows what was said to Clive (was it a mangled version of the “Lachlan Leary” hoax, in which a seven-year-old was alleged to have died of COVID? Longman? Lachlan? God knows). 

Still, it was a compelling act. Real pro stuff. 

And yet it pretty much fell flat. They wanted the crazier crazy, the garage-band stuff. Clive barely got a question through the first half of the whole long, long Q&A session that followed, until a couple of UAP faithful gave him a Dixer or two. Campbell hardly got a question at all. (“I’ve got a lovely wife and two lovely girls here tonight,” he had said in the intro section — which I presume meant two daughters.) 

The questions went mainly to the micros instead, and they rambled through everything from child support to voter fraud, to chemtrails and protected paedophiles to a great stoush between the Australian Citizens Party — the old Citizens Electoral Council, the LaRouchites — and Drew Pavlou, the student who UQ tried to expel for staging Hong Kong protests that annoyed the Chinese.

Trouble is, Pavlou annoys everyone else as well. His schtick has become a big rap on the bravery and resilience of Pavlou and not much more. He got into it with the LaRouchites, who are pro-China, as a counterbalance against the Venetian banking conspiracy run by the British royal family. “I’ve been wanting to debate the Citizens Electoral Council for years! They wanted to have me arrested!” he said, leaping around the stage. “Ask a question then!” the MC ruled.

So Drew went down to the floor and the end of the line for the questioner’s microphone. Then someone posed a question to him and he came back on stage to answer: “When I stood up to the Chinese Communist Party…” Off on his frolic again, in his Kim Jong-un haircut — gutsy perhaps, from modest circumstances, but, as one expert noted, “just like one of those private school boys”. 

What a show. What a show. And one wants to say, what a sample, what burgess shale of unrecognised public obsession on display. With a side order of shonk. The Silent Majority is simply the flag that former One Nation senator Len Harris is sailing under these days. The Great Australian Party is the outfit of former One Nation senator Rod Culleton, now under AFP investigation for nominating while an undischarged bankrupt.

When a party isn’t a front for the shonky old right, it is the product of a basic excess of narcissism, though the person in the grip of it may be decent enough. Heston Russell of the Values Party, for example: ex-Afghan special forces and a man of such Greek god features — bull chest; chiselled; bearded jaw; tousled brown hair; straight out of a Diane Demetre novel; glowing amid the rest of them, this ID parade from the Island of Broken Toys — that my female companions for the evening, I think, let out a little sigh as he approached the lectern in his tight T-shirt and gave a moving speech about the plight of veterans before launching off into slightly messianic stuff about values.

Afterwards, as people milled about, talking excitedly to each other about brain implants and the New Order, the thing degenerating into a UFO convention, I asked him about the life of the micropartyist: “Why not just choose the minor party you least disagree with, if you think the majors are beyond saving, join and help build that?”

‘Well, eight parties asked me to run for them but I looked at their stuff and I decided that the only way to represent my values was to go it alone,” he said. “So my father’s my campaign manager, my sister’s doing the media, my cousin’s on logistics, my nephew’s…” (I may have got the exact roles muddled here.)

He talked of some complex internal democratic system for a party going nowhere, and whose organisation, bizarrely, mirrored the Taliban he had spent years fighting — using extended family to create trust networks, bypassing the difficult task of building a civic organisation. 

They all shine with this, this… grouping, the slight sense of having been called, the double tracking: “Of course I won’t win… but if I did I would…” Their whole way into politics is to studiously avoid what Weber identified as the essence of politics: a slow drilling through hard boards. The planet is dying. Industry has been sacrificed to the market gods. A technocratic order is being steadily rolled out. All things one can agree with, and which can only really be addressed by taking hold of the endlessly abstracting system we live by — which demands an understanding of such, the freeways and phone towers stretching beyond and around us, the vast circuit boards in which we live.

This politics appeals to people who lack either the education or the patience for that exercise, and so they are drawn ever deeper into the counter-knowledge of conspiracy theory, which combines concrete actions by a few people — cabals of specific types, the “WEF” — with a myth of the fall, a big Other, the state. They worry about Klaus Schwab watching over them, and book to attend the evening with TryBooking, which, like all online booking agencies, takes a dozen data points and banking details to issue a ticket.

Much of this “concrete resistance” could once have been harnessed by mainstream labourism, and by Marxism of a certain mythologised type. But the great split has now occurred along the knowledge line, and this is what remains. Conspiracy is catnip for George’s beard — irresistible. In the 7-Eleven afterwards, a UAP stalwart approached me to commend a question I’d asked of Canavan as to how he could give away our resources for virtually no tax and speak to an economic nationalist meeting with a straight face. “Great point, great point. Tax is really important, getting our money back, our money.” He paused. “Do you think they’re doing it so they can buy up all our houses?” 

This formation is probably good now for, what, 8% of the vote? 9%? Approaching the Greens, who may have twelve senators in the next Parliament. This group will have three or four. They leach support back to the majors, every micro-split a fissure that acts as a safety valve of sorts. Unless of course, I thought, as we streamed out into the suburban night, this time the vote is solid, the preferences hold, and they bump Clive and a few others back into Parliament. Many were eager to talk to him after — but having arrived as late as possible, he had gotten out of there pretty much as soon as he could.