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War against Woke: Tony Abbott launches Liz Truss book in big CPAC week for the Right

by Rosco Jones | Oct 10, 2024 | Comment & Analysis, Latest Posts

Rupert Murdoch’s latest News Corp director, Tony Abbott, is launching the biography today of former British PM Liz Truss tonight. Rosco Jones reports on a big week for the conservative movement in Australia and the weekend CPAC conference.

“There’s too much wokery,” former UK prime minister Liz Truss told 2GB’s Ben Fordham on radio this morning. Britain’s shortest-serving PM is out in the Antipodes to sell her book Ten Years to Save the West, which is to be launched by none other than conservative stalwart and former Australian PM Tony Abbott.

Having been appointed a director of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox, the influence of Abbott appears to be on the rise. A recent report in the Nine press revealed that Abbott and his former adviser Sky News host Peta Credlin are counselling Opposition Leader Peter Dutton behind the scenes, although Dutton has denied they are his influencers.

Tony Abbott. Liz Truss book launch

Tony Abbott to launch Liz Truss book

Truss was the international drawcard for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Brisbane, where Australia’s right-wing identities gather to discuss their gripes about wokeness, climate science, gender and the decline of Western values. This reporter attended. The agendas have not changed for the right of the right; the culture wars and the climate wars remain afoot.

The National Party was better represented than the Liberals at CPAC, with Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, Bridget McKenzie and Keith Pitt all in tow. Other politicians included Gerard Rennick and Alex Antic.

A weekend at CPAC

Tumbling in from all around Australia, there were roughly 1,000 people in attendance on day one. This is the right of the right in Australia, MAGA adherents, Donald Trump’s supporters in Australia, and those fearing that the Liberal and National Parties are a bit soft, left-leaning.

MAGA hats and Vote No merch were very much in vogue with the largely elderly audience. Between the attendees’ members of the media, emblazoned with “FAKE NEWS” passes, wove through the crowd while young volunteers bustled people aside to let premium ticket holders through. As we moved into the convention hall, audio technicians and cameramen occupied the rear of the room, running Foxtel’s Sky News livestream.

Kicking off the conference, Mick Harrington, a previous winner of The Voice, delivered an admittedly stunning rendition of the national anthem, followed closely by an introduction from CPAC’s chairman Warren Mundine, conservative Indigenous rights advocate and leader of the No Campaign.

Andrew Cooper, national director of CPAC, gave a brief address to the audience, asking them to question the real values that being a conservative entailed and whether the notions of “God, Family, Country” were still appropriate given the decline of faith, families and common heritage within the movement.

To follow this, the chairman of CPAC USA Matt Schlapp gave a video address, stating the “work you guys did stopping The Voice was inspirational” while discussing his plans for the upcoming CPAC meetings in Japan and Argentina.

The substance of the conference began with the arrival of Liz Truss to the stage. Despite the majority of attendees apparently having misgivings about her (she did manage to record the lowest popularity rating in British political history at 9% approval), the room was packed out to hear her speak.

Rosco Jones and Barnaby Joyce

Rosco Jones and Barnaby Joyce

Wokeism and DEI were immediately lambasted by Truss, and “the red mist of socialism” (Albanese, Biden, Trudeau and Stamer were cited as red misters) attracted boos from the crowd.

Truss made a point of saying her infamous mini budget “was undermined, by the economic establishment of Britain, most particularly the Bank of England”, and that she bore no fault for the economic disaster during her minuscule rule.

To close out, she discussed The Voice, saying that the 60% of people who voted against it represented the number of right-wingers in Australia, comparing it to the 52% of people who voted for Brexit, asking those listening to “imagine how bad it is back in Britain”.

Liberal Antics

Continuing through the day, the messaging from the more radical speakers continued. Alex Antic as the sole current representative from the Liberal party in attendance due to a ban for all candidates imposed by Queensland Liberal HQ, wasted no time endorsing Trump while joking about getting cancelled, bringing up “Globalists and the Deep State, but we know what they mean”.

Antic discussed the dangers of the WEF and WHO coming to power and how the Welcome to Country at the AFL grand final was “over the top”. Jim Allen, a Jordan Peterson carbon copy, insisted that conservatives were making a dire mistake in “letting political enemies” enforce laws, instead advocating for conservatives to take lawfare into their own hands by installing himself and other allies to legislative positions. 

Covid lockdowns 

Lockdowns and Covid were still a pressing issue at CPAC. Barnaby Joyce, after a history lesson in the Dutch Tulip economy, insisted that governments were prone to doing “bat-poo crazy things”.

He described the number of people protesting outside of parliament during lockdowns as an indication of how badly the government was doing, seemingly ignorant of the fact he was deputy PM during this time. Dr Luke McLindon fretted about the Covid vaccine’s effect on fertility rates and inconsistencies with Covid deaths, suggesting the excess deaths following the initial surge were more likely a result of the vaccines.

Topher Field, Monica Smit, Carly J Soderstrom and Nick Patterson, prominent lockdown protest organisers, delivered a dramatic account of their lockdown experiences, complete with a blacked-out room and overhead white lighting. Topher described police arresting protestors as being “like goblins snatching them and scurrying back into their cave”, whilst Carly compared Dan Andrews to Stalin. 

Climate

Ian Plimer, flanked by Australia’s richest person, prominent mining magnate Gina Rinehart, made his introductions as a geologist and professor, neglecting to mention was made of his holdings in coal companies, in addition to having been on the board of Queensland Coal Investments and holding previous directorship of Silver City Mining, Ivanhoe Ltd, Ormil Energy, Kefi minerals, North Ltd, and Lakes Oil.

Plimer is a regular Sky News contributor and the most prominent critic of climate science in Australia who is actually a scientist, although not a scientist in climate science.

His address was a near identical performance to his CPAC speech in 2022, with the only major difference being the advertising of his latest book.

An alarming trend pervasive through CPAC was the belief that renewable energy was secretly environmentally destructive. Images of land clearing for wind turbine erection accompanied emotive rhetoric about endangered species living nearby.

Sky News host and former Queensland politician Gary Hardgrave, in a segment focused on Queensland, lamented that funding going to the capture of plastic waste in wastewater would be better spent on hospitals, while Sandra Bourke, Advance’s new spokeswoman, described a new offshore wind farm as “300 useless foreign turbines”.

In the same breath, she derided renewables for being too expensive and pleaded for nuclear.

Green villains

As the conference went on, the underlying aim became more obvious. At every intermission, catchy promotional videos castigating progressive immigration and net zero policies played. An edit of Gandalf telling the Greens to “Go back to the Shadows” was the prelude to an insistence that “it’s never been more important” to sign up for IPA membership.

The major sponsors of the event were the far-right IPA and Advance Group. The middle of each day was punctuated by charmless corporate types replacing the usual conservative entertainers to drone about how they were critical to the conservative movement.

The notion the referendum results were proof of conservative sentiment in Australia was latched onto, with Scott Morrisons idea of “Quiet Australians” resurfacing. Representatives from the IPA and Advance stressed that the flying of Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander flags, the teaching of statistics and the necessity for teachers to graduate from the university were allowing for the progressive takeover of education.

Between the more well-known speakers, academics like Dr Natalia Ilyushina, a crypto-oriented academic and Dr John Humphries, a free-market economist, took the stage not to discuss recent research but instead to espouse the benefits of a Westernised lifestyle.

Ilyushina advocated for Christian values whilst dispelling the idea of a wage gap, whilst Humphries theorised that providing welfare to those in need is what destroyed friendliness in societies. The emotive approach to academic opinions seemed more a feature of the conference than a bug.

The identity war was flamed when Sall Grover, whose conservative fame stemmed from her lawsuit over the exclusion of a transgender woman’s account from her female-only app, delivered a speech warning about being “coerced to give up our rights”.

The self-identified transgender-exclusionary radical feminist fretted about “finding ourselves in a situation where single-sex spaces can no longer exist”. This speech was followed by author Helen Dale’s account of J.K. Rowling’s battle against Scottish Authorities and their “Hate Monster” for her anti-transgender activism.

All up, there was little to trouble the Labor Government and the Left out of the CPAC conference. Plus ca change. The rub for the Liberals is whether the far-right movement further splinters the conservative vote away from moderate conservatives to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and far-right minor candidates. The feeling at CPAC, though, was that Peter Dutton was a real chance to win the next election.

Rosco Jones

Rosco is a student at the University of Queensland studying aerospace and plant science who plans a career in biological payload design for spacecraft. He has a passion for energy and transport infrastructure and its importance for handling the climate crisis.

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