By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
More evidence, if it was needed, that the pandemic is far from over: billionaire blowhard Clive Palmer and his offsider Craig Kelly are still promoting their quack cures, importing controversial foreign doctors to back their dubious claims and crying victimhood when anybody declines to facilitate their schemes.
Craig Kelly is still pushing quack COVID ‘cures’. Credit: John Shakespeare
It’s all just so 2020.
Kelly, the former Liberal MP for the Sydney seat of Hughes, has been on the socials promoting a series of conferences on COVID-19 vaccines put on by Palmer’s United Australia Party this month in Victoria, NSW and Queensland featuring some controversial overseas talent.
The headline act is US physician Peter McCullough, who has pushed hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as treatments for the virus – sound familiar? – and made some pretty out-there claims about vaccines and who has been sacked from jobs and stripped of professorships over his views.
Can’t say anything these days, can you?
It’s likely that other speakers on the bill, Pierre Kory – another US doctor who says ivermectin is a “wonder drug” with “miraculous effectiveness” against COVID-19 – and John Leake, McCullough’s co-author of The Courage to Face Covid-19, which rails against the “Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex”, US Federal agencies, the Bill Gates foundation and others, will continue in the same vein.
United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer (left) with would-be prime minister Craig Kelly in 2022.Credit: James Brickwood
Worth sixty bucks – general admission – of anybody’s money, we say.
But it looks like Kelly suspects ticketing giant Eventbrite of standing in the way of the truth on COVID.
Kelly, who did not respond to a request for comment, told his followers on Monday that “Eventbrite removed their service and tried to disrupt our efforts, Clive Palmer and the UAP will not be deterred from bringing these important events to the Australian public”.
Eventbrite did not respond to our inquiries either but a UAP spokesman told us it wasn’t quite as dramatic as Kelly was hinting at.
“They simply withdrew from the ticketing arrangement,” the man from the Palmer party said.
“They have been replaced and all tickets are nearly sold out.”
MOROSE MONARCHISTS
Australia’s monarchists have a problem. Nobody, not even their own ranks of fogies young and old – is particularly excited about King Charles III. In a stinging email sent to members last month, the Australian Monarchist League’s chairman Philip Benwell likened getting people to come to the organisation’s events to “pulling teeth”.
Members of the Australian Monarchist League, including Philip Benwell (second from left), at a gathering in Sydney’s Paddington last year.Credit: Steven Siewert
“The lack of positive response by most members whenever events have been organised has been very off-putting for organisers and many are not willing to spend their time when faced with such lack of interest by members in their respective states,” Benwell wrote, in a missive.
Perhaps the appointment of desiccated former Liberal Senator Eric Abetz as campaign chairman hasn’t quite revved up the base. After all, clearly some in fogie-land aren’t too happy with the rightward politics of the movement. As this column reported last year, Benwell had to issue a grovelling apology amid internal disquiet at a conference that gave a platform to Pauline Hanson and Katherine Deves.
Benwell sure is right about one thing though, writing that “the forces arrayed against us are formidable”.
Unfortunately, some of those seem to be on the inside.
TOO MANY TEALS
When the Teal wave swept through the Liberal Party’s old heartland at the last election, it got the quiet ABC luvvies of Mosman and Vaucluse excited.
Perhaps a little too excited, for the state seat of North Shore now has two distinctly teal-tinged independent candidates vying to knock off Liberal Felicity Wilson. Helen Conway, a high-profile former Workplace Gender Equality Agency boss with stints at Caltex and the boards of Endeavour Energy and Westpac, rolled out her candidacy last year.
But also running, with a very teal-coloured website, and a familiar platform of climate, integrity and improved planning is Victoria Walker, who held a variety of senior public service roles in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the Commonwealth.
Conway was tapped to run by local community group North Sydney Independent – the mob behind Kylea Tink’s shock win in the federal seat last May – and has the much-needed backing of moneybags Climate 200.
Walker, who told this column she’s “not really a teal”, approached the community group as a prospective candidate, but registered of her own accord after being ghosted.
She also stressed a key area of comparative strength was her experience working on the policy side of things.
“I know how to do it, I’ve seen how parliament works,” Walker told CBD.
Looks like a crowded field for the more progressive-minded residents of the North Shore.
COMMITTED FOR SYDNEY
If you’d spent 2022 as a senior public servant at the NSW Department of Enterprise, Investment and Trade and watched your former boss Amy Brown take the fall for her role in handing John Barilaro a controversial trade posting in New York, you’d probably want out.
So Eamon Waterford, the department’s old Chief Strategy Officer clearly got quite the golden ticket, landing a gig as Chief Executive of the Committee for Sydney, the urban policy think tank devoted to making the Emerald City more London and less Los Angeles.
With a brief to “make Sydney the best city in the world for everyone”, Waterford sure has his work cut out for him.
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