#federation party

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

Running where: All states except NSW for the Senate; in NSW, they are only standing candidates in the Divisions of Berowra, Newcastle, Page, and Robertson

(prior reviews and quote are given primarily for historical context as these have little relevance today—read on for why!)

Prior reviews (as the Country Alliance or Australian Country Party): federal 2013, VIC 2014, federal 2016, VIC 2018

What I said before: “I suppose if some rural electors are disillusioned with the Nationals, perhaps unhappy with their declining significance and fading role in the Coalition, a minor party like this might be attractive to them as a protest vote.”

What I think this year: The Australian Federation Party emerged from the remnants of a Victorian party known as the Country Alliance, but it is now a quite different entity. As the Country Alliance, it almost snagged a seat in Victoria’s state upper house in 2010, and since then has worked its way through a bunch of different guises, regularly changing its name and absorbing other micro-parties or fringe independents (e.g. Tasmania 4 Tasmanians and the Victorian branch of Katter’s Australia Party). The last time I reviewed this party, they had taken a more militant right-wing slant into the 2018 Victorian state election, including the addition of the slogan “Give It Back!” to their registered name for some poorly articulated reason. They then did not contest the 2019 federal election and took on their current name in February 2020, cropping up since then at a few state/territorial elections and in July 2020 at the federal by-election in Eden-Monaro, where they flopped into 14th place (out of 14) with just 170 votes.

The Australian Federation Party—who abbreviate their name as AusFeds on their website—have drifted so far from their foundations that its website never mentions the old parties. Its candidates this year include some, uh, luminaries of the micro-party scene, such as their lead candidate for the Senate in Western Australia, notorious anti-vaxxer Judy Wilyman, who has jumped ship from the Involuntary Medication Objectors Party. The lead candidate for the Senate in Victoria is Vern Hughes, a serial party-hopper who seems to be standing for a different party every time I come across his name. There are also candidates who were too extreme even for Craig Kelly and Clive Palmer at the United Australia Party: they disendorsed pro-Putin acolyte Jefferson Earl, who is now AusFed candidate for the Division of Flinders (VIC), while the AusFed lead Senate candidate in SA is Cathy Byrne, an antivax nurse (that should be a contradiction in terms) who previously palled around with Craig Kelly and was meant to be second on the UAP ticket.

The Federation Party bills itself as not a new party but “a new kind of political party”. They are obsessed with a rose-tinted, nostalgic view of the past: they have a table that claims to show that up to 1975, Australia was some sort of utopia of community harmony and accessible politicians and that ever since it has been the exact opposite. They describe all their electoral rivals as “centralised, top-down traditional parties” while depicting the AusFeds as a “distributed, networked organisation”. They explicitly draw on Bitcoin to claim their party is organised around similar networked nodes and that policy development will be public with tracked edits: they literally say you should “think a blockchain for text documents” as if turning on tracked-changes is some revolutionary idea.

Their frequent allusions to IT principles sound an awful lot like your drunk uncle at the family barbecue trying to explain his new interest in blockchain and why it revolutionises everything despite having only a superficial grasp of the principles. The silly part here is that literally almost a decade ago, the Pirate Party had actual member-designed policies with edits publicly visible and did so with sounder knowledge of IT principles and policy development rather than this arrogant notion that the AusFeds are the first and only community-based party in the country. Likewise, the whole “our members will hold town halls and be accountable to their community” lark is just plagiarising what indies in the mould of Cathy McGowan have done for years.

So what are they, if they aren't the innovative new party they claim to be? The AusFeds are covid conspiracists, as you would expect when Judy Wilyman and Cathy Byrne are standing for them. Throughout their webpage are crackpot claims that at every turn minimise the severity and prevalence of covid. Their “about” page starts not with a general introduction or a description of their history but a rant about lockdowns. They claim to be an evidence-based party but this is of the "I dO mY oWn ReSeArCh" brainworms variety. To illustrate their policy that party members have a conscience vote on every issue but must back their vote with evidence, they give an example that a party member could not vote for lockdowns in a pandemic even if their constituents wanted lockdowns because there is (according to them) no possible way this could be evidence-based. They have deeply dangerous policies that would prohibit covid vaccines even being offered to people under 18 and pandemic policies that would leave Australia completely exposed to the worst effects of any pandemic now and in the future.

I won’t bother with their other policies, many of which are bullet points that say next to nothing, because you get the picture. This party is now a hotbed of fringe politics and anti-vax advocacy, and must be rejected.

My recommendation: Give the Australian Federation Party a weak or no preference—indeed, they should be one of the very last parties you number if you distribute preferences fully (which I encourage you to do, as it maximises the power of your vote).