Australian councillor says he was forced to fly back to Russia to speak freely

London: A regional West Australian councillor says he has travelled to Russia to speak openly about how free speech is suppressed in Australia and warned he has been persecuted for his views on Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Adrian McRae, a member of Port Hedland Council, doubled down on his praise for “Russian democracy” ahead of the three-day BRICS summit in Kazan, a city in south-west Russia, telling journalists he has been slurred as being “pro-Putin” for questioning the safety of COVID-19 vaccines and for praising the Russian electoral system.

Adrian McRae, a councillor from Port Hedland, WA, has made multiple appearances on Russian media. Credit: Sputnik News

McRae, who contested the last federal election as a candidate for The Great Australian Party, founded by former WA senator and conspiracy theorist Rod Culleton, in the seat of Durack, previously travelled to Moscow in March to act as an independent observer for the presidential election.

“The reason we are at 11.59pm on the nuclear military conflict clock, it’s primarily because ... if the world understood what you know, those of us who dare to look outside the mainstream narrative for information,” McRae told journalists on Tuesday.

“If the world understood both sides of the conflict in Ukraine ... and they were able to talk openly and discuss it, then the decency of, I think people all over the world, would not allow their governments to get away with the nonsense narratives that were constantly being spoon-fed through our television sets.”

WA Premier Roger Cook told a press conference on Wednesday: “It’s time for the councillor to go, he’s an embarrassment to the Town of Port Hedland, he’s an embarrassment to Western Australia. He’s using his councillor position and the privileges that come with that position to advance some international right wing ideological position, it is quite frankly an abuse of his position.

WA Premier Roger Cook.Credit: 9 News Perth

“He has an obligation to conduct himself in a manner which is consistent with the needs and requirements of his job which is to focus on the people of Port Hedland not engage in some sort of whacky, ideological debate about freedom of speech in Russia.”

When asked if the state government had the power to remove McRae, the premier said the rules needed to be investigated.

“But I think his councillor colleagues and the leadership of the town of Port Hedland should be sending him a very strong message, the same message I’m sending him today, resign, stop it, you’re an embarrassment.”

McRae, whose comments have previously been condemned by Australia’s Ukrainian community and Cook, said he had been turned into a villain by Australia’s mainstream media for airing his “informed” opinions, as well for his recent successful council motion, which urged authorities nationwide to immediately stop the use of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

The motion passed by the town’s council, based around 1800 kilometres north of Perth, was centred on an unverified study from Canada in 2023 which found “high levels of residual plasmid DNA present in the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 modified mRNA vaccine”.

“The fact that we no longer have any sort of semblance of free speech in our country – I have to come here to Russia to talk in a mainstream way because such a thing will never be permitted in Australia,” McRae said.

“Again, the usual smear is I’m pro-Putin, in the hope that this slur will be enough to make anything that I say across Australia be viewed as some sort of conspiracy or lie, which is quite frightening.”

He said he’d previously travelled to Russia with preconceived media-driven notions about the country and was embarrassed to say that everything he saw “left any democratic and election process that I’ve seen, certainly in my country or anywhere in the West, it in its wake”.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was re-elected in March with 87.8 per cent of the vote, the highest result in Russia’s post-Soviet history. Australia, the United States, Germany, Britain and other nations said the vote was neither free nor fair due to the imprisonment of political opponents and censorship.

McRae’s latest comments were widely shared on several pro-Russian channels on social media following a weekend interview on Sputnik News, where he applauded Russian state-owned media organisations for “giving an alternate voice”.

Along with John Shipton, the father of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, McRae has travelled as a guest to the summit, the biggest gathering of foreign leaders in Russia since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

BRICS is an alliance started by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The meeting comes 19 months after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Putin’s arrest on war crimes charges.

In the same weekend interview McRae quoted Carl Schmitt, a prominent Nazi political theorist, while attacking mainstream media reporting on the recent Russian election. The comments were first reported by the North West Telegraph.

“I think it was the German philosopher that said: ‘You have to have an enemy figure to create a cohesive society’. And of course, the enemy figure at the moment in the Australian media, in the Australian narrative is Russia,” he said.

In a social media post following his interview, McRae wrote that he was unsurprised the Australian media was acquainted with Schmitt’s work, since it had applied Schmitt’s “Friend & Foe” theories in “a desperate attempt to destroy my reputation”.

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