Just wrapped in Brisbane, this year’s Australian Conservative Political Action Conference featured a galaxy of nutters vying for the votes of the disaffected, disorganised and dangerous.
Hosted by former broadcaster and now Nazi-botherer Karl Stefanovic, this once fringe event, transplanted from the Republican bowels of the USA, managed for the first time to draw a sitting opposition leader to its stage, the hapless Angus Taylor, alongside people such as Pauline Hanson, Matt Canavan, Barnaby Joyce, Liz Truss (PM of the UK for seven weeks), Jacinta Nampiginpa Price and Queensland deputy premier Jarrod Bleijie.
The result was not so much a unified conservative rally as an open contest for the support of angry men in oversized cars across Australia, staged before a group of people who paid handsomely to wear caps saying things like ‘Make Albo Go Away’, while a noisy protest outside did its best to disrupt proceedings.
NatCon
The 2026 event was branded ‘NatCon’, with the usual Trump-ish themes of saving western civilisation, ‘freedom’ and ‘hope’, particularly for those who already have more money than they know what to do with.
The word UNITE was plastered everywhere in a way that would have made Big Brother proud, but there wasn’t much unity on stage, apart from the general hatred of Anthony Albanese and his minimal and probably unachievable policy to address the climate emergency, known as net zero.
Angus Taylor was rewarded for reaching out to his ferocious red-haired opponent by being described by Hanson as a ‘smarmy management consultant’.
Promising to do worse in future, he promised a harder-edged Liberal Party that would scrap the net zero target, cut migration and drill for more fossil fuels, while also pursuing nuclear energy. Everything on Gina Rinehart’s to-do list, basically.
Harking back to the glory days of ‘stopping the boats’, Taylor framed his pitch around ending big government and resisting socialism, casting his alliance with Nationals leader Matt Canavan (who spent the whole event cosplaying in high vis as a coal miner), as proof that the Coalition was ‘conviction-led and unashamedly on the right.’ He said that together they would ‘save’ the country.
Former economist and lifelong office-dweller Canavan, for his part, shared his sorrow at having to look at renewable energy infrastructure on his drive to Brisbane, and urged all the squabbling members of the extreme right cesspool to come together and fight Labor, presumably saving their civil war until after the next election.
Perhaps fearing an egging, he wore his wraparound sunglasses as he took to the stage.
I don’t like it
Pauline Hanson spouted her usual nonsense, winning two standing ovations from the hyped-up crowd, then called for a Royal Commission into net zero, along with a spray at the eSafety Commissioner for daring to attempt to protect teenagers and other Australians from the barrage of lies and misinformation from her bot farms, aka ‘free speech’.
She was given mainstream authority in this quest by Liberal senator Sarah Henderson, who managed to conflate Labor’s attempts to do something about online safety and rampant misinformation with East Germany and the Berlin Wall.
Outside Brisbane’s Royal International Convention Centre, protesters with drums, placards and rainbow flags rallied against the conference, chanting that migrants were welcome but racists were not.
Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen responded to CPAC by saying the Liberals were competing with One Nation on ‘crazy’.
Speaking of crazy, Bowen and his prime minister were in Fiji and Tuvalu last week, for Pacific Pre-COP events, supposedly with a focus on giving voice to those on the front line of the climate crisis.
Unfortunately this was the same week that their NSW Labor counterparts approved yet another massive coal expansion in the Hunter Valley, and the High Court said that yes, Australian governments and those corporations mining fossil fuels here did have some responsibility for the global emissions of those fuels when they were burned elsewhere.
Who are you going to choose then, those who say there’s no problem at all, drill baby drill, or those who say there is a serious problem, but we will keep our eyes closed, thank you very much.
Luckily there are other political options, for now, and there are no televised public executions scheduled in Canberra. Despite CPAC’s best efforts, we’re not quite part of the United States, yet.
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning filmmaker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
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