#cookers

Running where: for the Senate and a majority of House seats in all six states (no candidates in the ACT or NT)

Prior review as the Australian Federation Party: federal 2022 (which links to older reviews of the Country Alliance, with no relevance today but of historical interest regarding the party’s origins)

See also my reviews of the Palmer United Party/United Australia Party: federal 2013, VIC 2014, federal 2016, VIC 2018, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023

What I said before: “The AusFeds are covid conspiracists … a hotbed of fringe politics and anti-vax advocacy, and must be rejected.” (federal 2022)

What I think this year: Here's the review I've been anticipating writing ever since I began this year's series.

You know the feeling when you are familiar with a band—you don’t necessarily like them, you’re just aware they exist—as a tiny wee outfit, gigging around the place and releasing a couple of albums with very niche appeal, and overnight they have a number one hit and everybody’s talking about them as some brand-new thing? That whole “I knew them before they were famous” vibe? Yeah, that’s how us micro-party nerds feel about the Australian Federation Party/Trumpet of Patriots (TOP). They were our gag, the weirdos we would trot out to amuse people who went through their lives blissfully unaware of updates to the AEC’s register of parties.

But now TOP are headline news, to the point that some people even think Clive Palmer founded them this year. Oh you sweet summer electoral children (are you even 18 years old and eligible to vote?). TOP are so much more than that: they are crackpots to whom Clive has hitched his wagon. He is, after all, simply not capable of concocting a party name as outlandish as Trumpet of Patriots by himself.

The original Trumpet of Patriots formed in August 2021 and applied for registration in December that year. It was one of the many groupings to emerge from the “Freedom” movement of covid denialists, antivaxxers, and assorted selfish people horrified they were required to do anything for the common good or care about other people. It used the slogans “make Australia free again” and “unifying the voice of reason” and held all the views you would expect: appropriation of “bodily autonomy” in the antivaxxer sense, hostility to the United Nations and any other international agreements to which Australia is a signatory, conspiracy theories about “The Great Reset”, the end of judicial and ministerial immunities (recall the violent demands on social media and at rallies that cookers have made about arresting and even executing prominent politicians), and so on.

These charmers did not achieve registration before the 2022 federal election (or at all), with prospective Trumpet of Patriots candidates instead standing under the banner of the Australian Federation Party, one of the most cracked parties at that election. This dalliance proved to be no electoral one-night stand: the two saw in each other something that they liked. For the AusFeds, it was a catchier name; for TOP, it was federal registration. And so the two merged in late 2024, with the AusFeds’ registered name updated to be Trumpet of Patriots.

Clive Palmer did not enter the picture until early this year, and he only did so because his United Australia Party (UAP) had been de-registered and the High Court affirmed that it could not contest this election. As I said in my review of One Nation, everybody involved with UAP is unintelligent and incurious even by the low standards of the far-right. They de-registered the party, evidently to avoid financial disclosure requirements, and did not realise this meant they could not re-register ahead of the next election—despite the fact this restriction has existed for over forty years to avoid cynical de-/re-registration, misleading registrations posing as a recently de-registered party, or squatting on a name but not contesting elections (and Australia, the land of the squattocracy, knows all about squatting).

Clive decided that in lieu of the UAP contesting this federal election, he would bankroll Trumpet of Patriots. Former leader Nick Duffield handed the leadership to Suellen Wrightson, who ran for Palmer United at various elections in 2013–16, stood for the UAP in 2019–22 (and was for a time the NSW assistant state director), and in 2019 her husband Dean stood for the UAP in Watson and her daughter Meg in McMahon. The party website was promptly updated with the UAP’s garish bright yellow colour scheme, redirected from a dot com domain to a dot org domain, and the old TOP logo (a boring navy-blue-and-white one with a lion and the Southern Cross) replaced with some of the most shithouse AI art you have seen in your life of a lion blowing a trumpet.

Anyway, what does TOP stand for besides Clive trying to pollute federal parliament with even more numpties like current senator Ralph Babet? I think you can guess: this is full-throated Trump worship seeking to bring his destructive and hate-filled policies to Australia. If you’ve paid even the slightest attention to Babet, you can tell the man wishes he was in the US Congress and keeps trying to fight US political and culture wars; he has his head plunged in the social media septic tank and seems to barely even grasp that Australia is a separate country with its own issues.

TOP would like to Americanise—or Trumpise—our politics even further. The homepage boasts that “In the USA, government waste and corruption is finally being exposed” and that in Australia “We will drain the swamp!” They have a policy to replicate the Department of Government Efficiency here, so that we too can claim fictitious savings by destroying public institutions, wrecking lives, and ending high-value programmes Trumpists simply don't like or refuse to understand. Like parties such as Sustainable Australia, TOP thinks we can solve housing issues by cutting immigration rather than improving supply. They depict coal power as cheap and renewables as expensive and unreliable when the truth is the opposite and that the likes of AGL have been seeking to offload old outdated coal-fired assets in favour of cheaper renewable sources of electricity. TOP's policies go on like this: fearmongering about banking and cash, racist opposition to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags and to Welcomes to Country, nonsense about schools having a “woke agenda”, antisemitic dogwhistles about “globalism is the scourge of the free world”, on and on and on.

It's all very wearying and the sooner the Trumpet of Patriots falls silent, the better our politics will be.

Recommendation: Give Trumpet of Patriots a very low preference in the House (a fitting pick for your very last preference!) and a weak or no preference in the Senate

Mike Carlton on X:

The Handmade incredible miniatures of cookers

I bet all these collected more dust  by weight than food they cooked over the last 64 years.

Running where: for the Senate in the ACT (lead candidate of Group F with running mate from the Libertarian Party), NSW (second and fifth candidates in Group I on joint ticket with People First and Libertarians), QLD (second candidate in Group K with the Great Australian Party), VIC (second candidate in Group O with People First), and in the House for the divisions of Bennelong, Eden-Monaro, and Lindsay (NSW), and Canberra (ACT)

Prior reviews: federal 2019, federal 2022. NSW 2023

Plus Health Australia, for reasons which will become clear: federal 2016, VIC 2018, federal 2019, VIC 2022

What I said before: “the pandemic only heated up their rhetoric, which seeks to undermine vaccines and other public health measures that are proven to be safe and effective … If you want your teeth to fall out and to die of preventable diseases, this is the party for you.” (NSW 2023)

What I think this year: This party began life in the mid-2010s as the Involuntary Medication Objectors (Vaccination/Fluoride) Party, which tells you everything you need to know in six stupid words. We are so close in time to when the world lacked vaccines for many once-widespread debilitating ailments that there is literally at least one childhood polio survivor still living in an iron lung, Martha Lillard in the US. Here’s a good long read from 2017 about Martha and two other American polio survivors (Mona Randolph, who died in 2019, and Paul Alexander, who attained popularity on Tik Tok before dying in March last year). They underscore their disappointment, even heartbreak, with the rise of the antivax movement and people who sow distrust about vaccines.

Many diseases that once stalked our society no longer threaten us thanks to the achievement of mass vaccination and herd immunity. This is not a miracle, as some would describe it, but the outcome of decades of hard work, investment, good policy, and genius alike. We witnessed one of the great achievements in medical history at the start of this decade: within two years of covid being identified, ordinary people could receive a safe and effective vaccine. Anybody who wishes to undermine the outstanding medical achievements of the past century or so and risk the spread of diseases—especially by misleading parents into gambling with their children’s lives by not receiving a full course of childhood vaccinations—is a horrific ghoul.

In December 2019, IMOP tried to soften their image as dangerous science denialists by renaming themselves the Informed Medical Options Party, a name about as inaccurate as it is possible to be. This change received approval in March 2020, days before the emerging threat of covid was declared a pandemic. At the time, IMOP got steaming mad about being called anti-vaxxers by senior medical professionals and politicians, with the party’s secretary suggesting that their members “only want their voice and concerns heard”. Now, it’s one thing to ask your GP questions to better understand a vaccination or any other medication. It's another thing to keep rejecting medical and scientific expertise, ignore the consensus of researchers, promote woo, and undermine public confidence in the transformative, lifesaving effect of vaccines. Do not say you are “just asking questions”. Do not pretend you are promoting “informed choices”. And definitely don’t say you have “done my own research” unless you happen to possess your own fucking world-class research laboratory staffed by a team of qualified researchers.

The most paranoid people amplified their fearmongering during the covid pandemic, but they were such malcontents that they struggled to work together. Cooker parties (some registered, some not) fielded rival candidates at state and federal elections. But in 2023 it emerged that IMOP were negotiating a merger with Health Australia, another “don’t call us antivaxxers” antivax party whose existence also predated the pandemic. In August, the two groups announced amalgamation under the name Health Environment Accountability Rights Transparency (HEART). Using IMOP’s registration with the AEC, they submitted an application to change the name, which received approval on 3 October. Astonishingly, later that month, IMOP-cum-HEART had to retract their own merger announcement. Health Australia chose to withdraw from the merger process, and collapsed a few months later.

So, HEART is just IMOP, rebadged, although I don’t doubt some ex-Health Australia people support this entity. Some of HEART’s rhetoric about affordable living, political transparency, and individual rights tries to appeal to politically disengaged voters in a cost-of-living crisis. But they cannot disguise how extreme their views are for more than sentence or two. Their website has predictable “big pharma” diatribes alongside promotion of completely unfounded alternative medicines and other woo popular in the backblocks of Byron Bay. And their fearmongering goes beyond healthcare: they are, for instance, concerned about the apparently imminent introduction of China’s “social credit system” to Australian cities. Their “transparency” policy is really a stubborn insistence that virtually all leading authorities on vaccines and healthcare are hiding conflicts of interest and that none of their studies or policies can be trusted. It’s striking how ready these people are to buy into unsubstantiated claims about “holistic” and “natural” medicines while insisting the most rigorous medical studies and expert bodies are compromised and sinister.

It also tells you a lot about HEART that they have entered into the “Australian First Alliance” with three far-right parties, Rennick First, Great Australian Party, and the Libertarians. This explains the convoluted Senate tickets listed at the start of the entry: multiple parties can register a joint ticket of candidates to share a single column on the ballot, which is something the Liberals and Nationals have done in some states for years. People who vote 1 above the line for this ticket will have their first preference go to the candidate listed first in the column below the line; for example, an above-the-line vote in the ACT goes first to HEART but in Victoria goes first to Rennick First. In addition, HEART’s how-to-vote cards recommend that their supporters distribute preferences to religious fundamentalists (Family First, Australian Christians), racists (One Nation), and LaRouchean fantasists (Citizens Party). Anyone who actually follows HEART's how-to-vote recs—which won't be many, as minor parties struggle to get their HTVs in the hands of potential voters—will have their ballot exhaust before reaching any party likely to be in contention for a Senate seat, with the exception of One Nation, who are going to be competitive in some states (especially Queensland).

Despite some HEART members being leftover hippies who were once in the Greens, exiting that party once their penchant for woo became too unwelcome, HEART does not associate with the left at all. The company the party keeps is firmly right-wing and exclusionary.

Recommendation: give Health Environment Accountability Rights Transparency (HEART) a weak or no preference in the Senate, and a very low preference in the House.

Queensland hit by surge in whooping cough cases as experts blame low vaccination levels

A surge in cases of a deadly disease is tearing through Australia, with one state particularly plagued by the worrying rise.