Labor pulps how-to-vote cards preferencing hate club convener

Labor has pulped how-to-vote cards following revelations it preferenced a candidate who runs a fan club for an anti-Semitic lecturer.

John Tiger Casley, independant for Goldstein.

Labor has been forced to reprint how-to-vote cards in the Melbourne seat of Goldstein, following revelations it had preferenced a candidate who runs a fan club for an anti-Semitic lecturer.

Independent candidate John Tiger Casley, previously linked to One Nation, is the convener of the “David Icke Club Melbourne”, a fan club for British lecturer David Icke, who claims the world is run by a secret society of shape-shifting Jewish lizards.

Labor yesterday moved Mr Casley from fourth place on the how-to-vote card to last, after incumbent Liberal MP Tim Wilson and United Australia Party candidate Wayne Connolly. The party was also forced to dump Northern Territory Senate candidate Wayne Kurnorth over the weekend, after The Australian revealed he had shared Icke’s bizarre theories online.

Labor successfully campaigned to ban Mr Icke from coming to Australia earlier this year.

Earlier this month, former Labor MP Melissa Parke stood down as candidate for the Perth seat of Curtin following revelations she had likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to apartheid.

Mr Casley contested the 1998 election as a One Nation candidate in Liberal MP Kevin Andrews’s seat of Menzies.

He has also been engaged in a long-running legal feud with ABC radio host Jon Faine, who is Jewish, over the manner in which his talkback calls were treated between 1997 and 2010, and last year lost his Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal bid to have the public broadcaster sanctioned for allegedly “discriminating” against his political beliefs.

Mr Wilson slammed Labor for earlier preferencing Mr Casley above him. “We already knew Bill Shorten and his candidate doesn’t understand our forward-thinking, modern Liberal community with his high-tax agenda, but we didn’t expect him to endorse Pauline Hanson’s proxy over mainstream candidates on Labor how-to-vote cards,” he said.

Anti Defamation Commission chairman Dvir Abramovich welcomed Labor’s decision.

“In the wake of the San Diego tragedy, and especially a time when deadly violence against Jews is on the rise, we cannot afford to be silent or to take lightly the extremist views spewed by Mr Casley,” Dr Abramovich said.

“It is a matter of grave concern that a person who espouses abhorrent beliefs about Israel and ‘Zionists’, often a codeword for Jews, is running for public office.’’