I fell for Clive Palmer’s grift. Twice. There are no heroes in this story
I went looking for wisdom from Tucker. I got taken for a (very long) ride by Clive.
As Australian politics prepares for what looks like a probable post-debate victory by Donald Trump in November, there may be a lesson for the Coalition from the Carlson-Trump approach: on society’s fringe, the market for alternate realities runs strong.
Aaron Patrick, AFR, 30/6/24
Carlson’s tour hits Australia at a time when a concerning network of community groups have been building a US-style “sovereign citizen” movement influencing elections with anti-government conspiracy theories. As Australian National University’s Strategic & Defence Studies Centre Fellow Matthew Sussex observed in a recent article on an abundance of Australian pro-Kremlin political and media personalities spreading false narratives like these, “the view that the West is to blame for the majority of global ills, that brutal dictators are misunderstood, and that mainstream media is culpable in pacifying the public is now increasingly common.”
Dr Emma L Briant and Alexandra S Chalupa, Australian Outlook, 21/7/24
As many a worker, businessperson and politician has learnt the hard way, property developer turned mining magnate turned political gadfly Clive Palmer is a wily foe.
While he – characteristically – bullshitted me, my first encounter with Clive was at least mutually beneficial. For reasons that aren’t important now, I incongruously found myself doing some freelancing for a super yacht magazine around a decade ago. I believe this was the first time Mr Palmer announced he would rebuild the Titanic.
I saw an opportunity to make a little coin and pitched an article about Titanic II to the mag’s editor/co-owner. Unsurprisingly, Palmer was happy to talk to a journalist and, long story short, I banged out a credulous summary of Palmer’s remarks, pocketed my no-doubt-modest payment and got on with my life.
I can’t find the article I prepared earlier, but here’s one from early 2024, rehashing the same announcement. Clive even reaches a fevered pitch I don’t recall him hitting during our chat, declaring:
“Titanic ll is something that needed to be built. We all know how to make war… But it is a lot harder to make peace. To make peace you have got to stick with it every day. You progress inch by inch. Titanic ll is something that can provide peace. It can be a ship of peace between all countries of the world. Millions have dreamt of sailing on her, seeing her in port and experiencing her unique majesty. Titanic ll will be the ship where those dreams come true.”
Things didn’t seem to work out well for the passengers of Titanic I. Still, I’m perfectly willing to accept Palmer’s construction of a replica vessel will lead to a widespread outbreak of global peace and dream fulfilment.
But as more than one cynical journo has noted, while Palmer is excellent at announcing he will rebuild the Titanic, he’s not so good at actually rebuilding it. Clive has been promising construction is imminent for well over 10 years now. Here’s how The Guardian’s Catie McLeod reported on the latest developments:
The billionaire mining magnate Clive Palmer has vowed to build a vessel “far, far superior than the original” as he unveiled designs for his Titanic II project – again… Yet after distributing a press release to journalists in which he promised his company Blue Star Line would construct “the ship of love and the ultimate in style and luxury”, Palmer acknowledged he hadn’t yet secured a shipyard. It was almost 10 years to the day since Palmer held a very similar press conference at London’s Ritz Hotel to “launch” his Titanic II dream… On Wednesday, Palmer blamed the Covid pandemic for the delays. He said people should believe him this time because “I’ve got more money now”.
The moral of the story I’m about to tell is that Clive Palmer is one of Australia’s most prominent and shameless bullshit artists.
I, more than most, had every reason to understand this.
Yet I fell for his ‘Australian Freedom Conference’ bait-and-switch grift hook, line and sinker.
Tuckered out
Many millions of people love, and hate, Tucker Carlson. Perhaps because I live on the other side of the world to him but work in broadly the same field, I’ve always had a more dispassionate perspective.
The chief criticism of Carlson is that he’s “far right-wing”. These far right-wing views include believing that the US should pull back from the disastrous military adventurism of recent decades and that wealth and power should be far more equitably distributed in the US. The title of his most recent book betrays his fascist leanings: Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. Here is a characteristically Nazi-adjacent quote:
"They [elites] view America the way a private equity firm sizes up an aging conglomerate as something outdated they can profit from. When it fails, they're gone… The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don't."
Curiously, despite essentially being Hitler, Carlson has plenty of fans on the Left – or at least what would have once been considered the Left.
One of the results of Carlson’s recent reinvention as a YouTuber is that he has both the opportunity and incentive to visit his many admirers outside of America. At some point, Clive must have offered him a mountain of cash to spend a week touring Australia’s capital cities.
This is how I came to be trapped at ICC Sydney last Friday night.
I thought I was simply going to a Tucker Carlson talk, but it was a harrowingly interminable celebration of freedom.
You can take my life, just stop going on about liberty
I’m a busy man, dear reader, so when I learned Palmer was bankrolling a Carlson speaking tour, I didn’t do any due diligence.
I bought tickets for two of the cheap seats – it was still over $160 in total, despite much media sniggering about ticket prices being discounted – and recruited a companion.
(Said companion works in the media and shall remain unnamed. While s/he believes s/he might just survive the stigma of being associated with me, (non-ironic/non-professional) attendance of a Tucker Carlson event would trigger automatic expulsion from the tattered remnant that now constitutes this nation’s Fourth Estate. Henceforth, this individual – should they even actually exist – shall be known as ‘The Acquaintance’ or ‘TA’ for short.)
Anyhoo, TA and I are men – or perhaps women – of a certain age. When buying the tickets, I noted the event started at the civilised hour of 6pm. I made the calamitous miscalculation that after 80-90 minutes of truth bombs and high-pitched giggling from Mr Carlson, TA and I could catch up over dinner.
As TA and I navigated the heavy-handed security and took our seats, I remarked I hoped Palmer’s warm-up act wouldn’t stretch on too long.
We professional wordsmiths might label such a statement dramatic irony.
Freedom’s just another word for I need to snooze
As we headed towards the auditorium, a song about the United Australia Party rang out. I assumed it was a recorded track. But as we got to our seats, I saw it was a live band. (One that defined easy categorisation, but they looked like they could have a residency at that bar where the Blues Brothers sang Rawhide.)
Looking around, I was taken aback to discover the audience wasn’t entirely composed of men of a certain age. In fact, it looked like a – dare I say vibrant and diverse – cross-section of Middle Australia. The type of crowd you’d see at a moderately upmarket Westfield mall on a Saturday afternoon. And despite their putative wokeness, plenty of women and under-40s were in attendance.
I’d had terrible insomnia the night before and was already fading by the time the first speaker came on, but I was confident adrenaline would carry me through until dinner time.
First up was an anti-vax doctor. There aren’t many, but Clive has found an Australian one and seems determined to make her a star. I have no strong feelings about vaccines. (No, I don’t want to discuss it.) But I soon discovered the Palmeristas skewed heavily anti-vax.
The doctor initially met the crowd where they were, flashing up before and after shots of vaccine takers. The ‘before’ shots showed young, healthy Australians living their best lives. The ‘after’ ones showed them, well, enfeebled… or worse.
I suspect highly educated, painfully pretentious Leftists fail to comprehend just how festive the atmosphere can be at “far right-wing” get-togethers. I’ve never been to a Trump rally, but from the footage I’ve seen, Palmer’s ‘Australian Freedom Conference’ had a similar rock-concert-meets-open-mike-standup-night vibe.
During the more user-friendly part of the doctor’s presentation, a couple of middle-aged women behind me started yelling out bon mots such as, “Yeah, vaccines are fucken’ bullshit, blow ’em out your arse!” Encouraged by widespread laughter and applause, the crowd participation grew louder and more deranged as the night wore on.
And it did wear on. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
The AFR’s Aaron Patrick, who was also at the event, heard people yelling out, “Federal Reserve!”, “globalist puppet”, “Mossad”, and “Zionists”. I didn’t witness anyone shouting out anything even vaguely antisemitic or racist. Completely mental interjections, yes; bigoted ones, no.
It was during the doctor’s talk that I first started to hate freedom.
Even before anybody came on stage, there had been a lot of emphasis on freedom. The United Australia Party slogan/manifesto appears to simply be the word ‘freedom’ printed in big letters.
I like freedom as much as the next man. I even have some time for Libertarians, despite their adolescent ‘You’re not the boss of me!’ conception of how societies should function.
But it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. By the time the doctor’s speech reached the half-hour mark and she launched into a deep statistical dive (“You’ll notice the p-value is a little off, throwing into question the nature of the correlation, but I think this regression analysis better illustrates the relationship between the variables…”) the eyes behind my leaden eyelids were glazing over.
Perhaps I’m an intellectual snob, but I got the distinct impression that 4000 boisterous freedom-lovers hadn’t travelled into the Big Smoke on a Friday night for a Stats 101 class. I also got the impression that many in the crowd may have slaked their thirst – or, in the case of the Libertarian contingent, perhaps partaken of more illicit substances – before the event. Suffice to say, the crowd had grown restive by the time the good doctor belatedly read the room and wrapped up.
I perked up at this point, imagining the big moment was here.
It wasn’t.
Dinesh D’Souza – an Indian-American charlatan so obscure that even someone with my Rain Manish obsession with US culture war minutiae has barely heard of him – was wheeled out to argue that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. It was at this point I began to yearn for life on a North Korean collective farm and fantasise about being sent to a frostbitten gulag at the height of the Stalinist era.
Anything, to just make it all stop.
An eternity later, D’Souza walked off, seemingly preparing the way for Tucker to materialise.
He didn’t.
An intermission was announced. After we all trooped back to our seats 20 minutes later, a video link of Clive Palmer addressing a crowd elsewhere appeared.
I turned to TA, dismayed but also begrudgingly impressed.
“This will be the ultimate heist if Tucker doesn’t even show and just beams in from Clive’s Bombardier for a few minutes while flying back to the Land of the Free,” I stage whispered.
(Hey, I was getting into the spirit of things. Only God can judge me.)
For reasons I still can’t comprehend, the video link stopped halfway through and Clive walked out on stage to semi-rapturous applause. (It may have been unambiguously rapturous if he hadn’t taken the piss so shamelessly.)
Why do a half-recorded, half-live speech? I don’t know, but it must have something to do with furthering the cause of freedom.
Taking his cue from previous speakers, Clive held forth at length and, of course, touched on his plans to rebuild the Titanic. By the end of his diatribe, it was nearing 10pm.
Did I mention I’m a man of a certain age?
By this ungodly hour, my dodgy hip was playing up from the cramped seating, and I was spending more time dozing off than taking in the main event.
From what I recall, Tucker eventually appeared and performed much as expected, lavishing praise on Australians and joyously sticking the boot into Australian journalists. All those who had previously challenged Carlson were conflated into one ‘ABC journalist’, but Carlson got into scraps with hacks from at least three different media organisations before his talk in Sydney.
It was all, finally, going swimmingly at the Freedom Conference.
But by now, TA and I were just yearning for the freedom to fall asleep in a warm bed.
We headed off, along with plenty of others, while Tucker was still in full flight.
An alternate reality
The interesting thing about Carlson’s tour wasn’t any of the arguments he made; I’m assuming he didn’t say anything he hasn’t said hundreds of times before. What intrigued me was the way the Australian media – the “failing legacy media”, as you-know-who might call it – covered the Tucker Down Under jamboree.
Except for Sky News (I assume), the tone was one of sneering contempt for Carlson and those interested in the arguments he advances. Inevitably, there were countless references to conspiracy theories and, for all I know, even some bedwetting about the imminent threat of an Antipodean Handmaid’s Tale theocracy. As the quote above demonstrates, there’s still even a willingness – among people with PhDs, no less – to argue the rise of the populist Right is all the result of some sinister Russian plot.
As a former journo, I’m especially enraged those mendacious Russkis have convinced people the mainstream media might not always be trustworthy. Next thing you know, trouble-making malcontents will fail to believe the New York Times et al when they insist Biden has never been more on the ball.
Australia’s academics and journalists demonstrated close to zero interest in why the ordinary people – all those déclassé Palmer/Trump/Farage/Le Pen/Bardella/Meloni/Milei/Orban voters and Rogan/Carlson/Shapiro/Brand listeners – aren’t as taken with open borders, turbocharged multiculturalism, DEI maximalism and winner-take-all economies as their social betters are.
I wonder who will be sniggering come November 5. The likes of Carlson and Palmer, or those Australian and American academics and journalists who are so confident they perceive reality vastly more accurately than the benighted masses and their false prophets?