CPAC 2019: Labor’s Kristina Keneally ‘wins’ conservative award

Labor Senator’s attempt to disrupt a conservative conference in Sydney backfires.

Senator Kristina Keneally’s attempt to disrupt a conservative conference in Sydney appears to have backfired, with attendees presenting the Labor frontbencher with an award for drawing attention to the event.

Shortly after guest speaker Nigel Farage used his opening address to tip a bucket on “fake” conservative Malcolm Turnbull, former NSW premier Keneally was cheered by a crowd of about 500 at the Conservative Political Action Conference Australia (CPAC) yesterday.

The Labor frontbencher publicly railed against the CPAC event and pushed for the visa of British activist and guest speaker Raheem Kassam be cancelled due to his “extensive history of vilifying people” on racial and religious grounds.

Mr Kassam, a former editor-in-chief of Breitbart News London and former Muslim, has described the Koran as “fundamentally evil”.

Liberal MP Craig Kelly, who addressed the CPAC conference in Sydney on Saturday took to the stage with a trophy the size of a small child.

“This is the CPAC Freedom Award, which goes to the individual who has done the most to promote the CPAC conference,” he told about 200 attendees. Chuckles and broad applause met Mr Kelly’s announcement of the Labor senator as “winner”.

“Is Kristina here by any chance?” the Liberal MP joked.

Attendees on Friday reportedly chanted “send her back” after two speakers made a joke at the expense of Senator Keneally.

Mr Kelly, introduced to the conference as one of Australia’s strongest conservative MPs, also slammed the country’s move towards more renewable energy, and accused science agency CSIRO of a “bogus report” on energy costs. The 2018 report found solar and wind generation technologies were the cheapest power stations to build new.

“If an ASX-listed company said that in an annual report, they would likely end up in jail because of how misleading it is,” Mr Kelly said.

About the same time as Mr Kelly’s speech, Senator Keneally was comparing the conservative conference to the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.

“It’s uncanny how much CPAC is exactly what it claims to oppose,” she tweeted. “They are ... spending all day yelling about their ‘enemies’. This is exactly how people under totalitarian regimes behave.”

Earlier on Saturday, Mr Farage used his CPAC speech to celebrate Australia and Britain’s shift from “trendy, metro” leaders to real conservative leaders.

Mr Farage told the adoring crowd Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s election victory in May seemed impossible, after the recent hijacking of the Liberal party by “the other side”.

“Malcolm Turnbull ... pretended to be a conservative but actually turned out to be a snake,” he said, to applause.

“You’ve now got someone conservative, mainstream media (and) those in the middle of Melbourne and Sydney may not like him,” he said of Mr Morrison. “But out where real people live, they voted for him.” He said he had thought “the greenies had taken over this country”, especially after heading to Melbourne and having 600 people rally against him. The UK member of the European Parliament for the past two decades was a crucial figure in the 2016 Brexit referendum’s Leave campaign.

AAP