(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)
(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

After so many years of importing US culture war talking points and conspiracies, the Victorian Liberal Party could have set a template for the Republicans to follow. As The New York Times sketches here, following the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, baseless conspiracy theories made the hop, skip and jump from far-right fringe websites to mainstream media via senior figures in Republican politics.

But in a far more low-stakes way, Victorian state politics has its own version of this. In March 2021, while on holiday with his family, Premier Dan Andrews slipped on a staircase and sustained a horrific back injury.

Far-right politics researcher Cam Smith told Crikey that “within hours” of the news breaking of Andrews’ accident on March 9, right-wing anti-lockdown conspiracy groups on Telegram were posting content along the lines of “I hope he was really bashed”. Soon, this morphed into people in the same groups speculating on whether he had, and before long the same circles were posting that as though it were an actual rumour: “I heard he was bashed”.

Other conspiracy groups on Telegram posted the “strange trend” of politicians needing time off around this time (former federal minister Greg Hunt was hospitalised around the same time and Christian Porter and Linda Reynolds were also taking leave for completely different reasons), ultimately concluding it may have something to do with adverse vaccine reactions.

Contributing to this were conspiratorial Facebook groups and pages — some with tens of thousands of followers — where conspiracies about Andrews’ injury percolated beneath the surface of the mainstream for months.

There it might have stayed, but for Louise Staley. On June 10 2021, the then opposition treasurer and holder of the most marginal seat in the state put out a press release asking 12 questions of the recovering premier, including:

  • What is the address of the house where the accident occurred, and who owns it?
  • Who called the ambulance and what time did it arrive?
  • Were the police contacted and did they attend?
  • Has Daniel Andrews been interviewed either informally or formally by the police in relation to anything that occurred over that long weekend?

As Michael Bradley noted in Crikey at the time, these questions alleged nothing but implied a great deal. Staley, for her part, was last seen briefly sharing the baseless rumour that a peaceful protester had been shot dead in Victoria during COVID lockdowns.

And over the weekend, in one of those moves typical of the post-Trump era — somehow both shocking and drearily predictable — “stairgate” was resurrected on the front page of the Herald Sun, in dutiful campaign mode ahead of this month’s state election.

The piece, again, alleges nothing in particular but notes, “Neither the premier nor his office have ever fully detailed what he was doing in the days before the incident or exactly where it happened.” And that, “Several alternative theories about the fall have been put forward since the incident, mostly asserting that Mr Andrews was intoxicated and it happened at a function on the Monday afternoon or night.”

Beyond that, the piece reveals… that it was quite a small staircase the premier supposedly fell on, and rich lister Max Beck didn’t play golf with the premier that weekend.

This may end up being a turning point in Australian politics: the online conspiracy fringe finding its talking points on the front page of a major city’s biggest-selling paper.