Gerard Rennick People First Party

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Let’s get the drama out of the way first. Gerard Rennick People First Party (hereafter referred to as GRPF) is still, at the time of writing, part of the Australia First Alliance with a group of far-right micro-parties.

However.

Almost since the announcement of this Alliance, there have been accusations of betrayal and dodgy dealing coming from inside the house – primarily, from now-former Great Australian Party candidate William Bay. As of today, it’s impossible to tell if it even still exists, let alone in what form.

As for GRPF itself, it’s hard to escape the suspicion that this is largely a vanity project for Senator Gerard Rennick. Rennick was elected in 2019 as a member of Queensland’s Liberal National Party (which is in permanent coalition with the national Liberal Party), but in 2023 pre-selection ballots, lost his place as third on the LNP’s Senate ticket. Determined to stay in politics, he resigned from the LNP last year, and announced the formation of GRPF.

He’s the name, the face, and, apparently, the final word on everything the party does. With that in mind, I’ll be leaning heavily on Rennick’s stated positions in relation to policy areas.

GRPF asserts that it is anti-ideology. It’s so eager to convince you that it says this over and over in separate policy statements. In fact, it’s nothing of the kind – GRPF’s is only opposed to principles and beliefs that it doesn’t agree with, and is just fine with pushing its own.

This is a tiresome tactic from right-wing parties, the notion that any principle or policy that might be even slightly concerned with issues or social justice or climate change can be dismissed as merely “ideological”, while their own policies are “common sense” or “rational”. It’s an attempt to convince you that anyone even slightly on the Left of politics is thoughtless and impulsive, and a danger to “Our Way of Life”.

Ironically, the more I delve into the policies of parties who use this tactic, the more I find that the reverse is true. Time and time again, these “anti-woke”, “anti-ideology” parties rely on lies, prejudice, and wild claims about the effectiveness of their own proposed strategies, while the people they condemn are the ones with solid statistics and science on their side (not to mention a healthy dose of human decency). GRPF is a prime example.

Take its Aboriginal Affairs policies. First, GRPF wants an end to Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country. This isn’t limited to funding – nothing less than the removal of all references will do. GRPF isn’t even trying to dress this up as a cost-saving measure, as Trumpet of Patriots did. It’s just erasure. And why? Well, GRPF doesn’t give a reason in its policy statement, but a quick perusal of Senator Gerard Rennick’s YouTube channel shows that it’s grounded in the false notion of “unity”.

Pro-tip, Senator? If you have to erase people in order to claim you have a club of like minds, it’s not unity. It’s elitism.

As if that wasn’t egregious enough, GRPF has a very nasty Native Title policy. Without directly accusing Indigenous people of fraud, it manages to convey the notion that most – if not all – Native Title claims are specious at best, deliberately fraudulent at worst. It justifies this outrageous claim by dismissing the fact that many people have difficulty showing their continuous connection to country precisely because of dispossession and (at the time) legal persecution, which is why claims take so long to be settled. GRPF insists that if a Native Title claim can’t clearly show continuous association with the land, then that claim should be dismissed. And why?

This is necessary so that Australians can move on as one people and give certainty to organisations and individuals that their land will not be subject to native title claims.

“One people”. Unless those people’s ancestors were abused, displaced, and murdered by white settlers. It’s pretty clear that there’s nothing but racist ideology at the heart of this policy.

Speaking of racism, let’s look at GRPF’s stance on Immigration.

It starts off with the obligatory genuflection towards the reality that Australia as a nation is built on immigration. This is how you know that there’s a giant “BUT” looming on the horizon.

First, GRPF repeats the lie that the current housing and cost of living crisis is due to “unsustainable” levels of immigration – which Rennick, in 2019, called the equivalent of farmers overstocking the paddock. This is designed to do nothing but appeal to our sense of grievance. We work hard, so why can’t we buy a house? Why isn’t there adequate funding for services? Why do eggs cost so much? Blame the migrants!

Ideally, GRPF would like zero immigration – but in a rare acknowledgement of the reality that Australia cannot function without migration, it “softens” its policy to a demand for a hard cap of 100,000 work visas. It would also like to see a reduction in international student numbers, though it gives no target for this.

Now, given GRPF’s racism as regards Indigenous folk, you might be wondering if it’s similarly picky about which potential immigrants it thinks are acceptable. And you’d be right. The party wants to prevent entry from countries known for radical views or extremism incompatible with Australian values.

What, exactly, are these values? GRPF doesn’t say, but it’s not hard to find numerous examples of what it has in mind. Christian. White. Heterosexual. Cis. Rennick’s YouTube channel is awash with anti-Muslim and anti-trans sentiment, and he’s a vocal opponent of anything that even hints at LGBTQIA+ celebration.

Moving on from immigration, we get to the issue of climate change. Rennick (and, presumably, those who’ve signed on under his name) is an utterly recalcitrant climate change denier. No science in the world could make him admit that human activities have irrevocably changed our climate, or that global temperatures are rising. It simply isn’t happening!

That’s probably why GRPF has, among its stated Environment policies, the promise to not only abolish the Ministry for Climate Change, but also to remove all funding and references to Climate Change. Operating on the principle that if there isn’t a name for it, then it can’t be real, apparently.

It’s not often I use the description “Orwellian” in relation to real-world politics, but GRPF’s notion that it can make a problem go away simply by removing all reference to it is classic Newspeak thinking. Of course, GRPF doesn’t have anywhere near the power to do this – it can’t dictate what the news reports, or what the dictionary says, or what people talk about online and face-to-face. But by god, it’s gonna have a red-hot go.

To back that up, GRPF proposes to both remove subsidies for renewable energy generation, and to apply a 10% royalty if energy retailers wish to purchase wholesale renewable energy. This is both stupid and sneaky, because a royalty like that would inevitably be passed on to energy consumers, thus making a self-fulfilling prophecy out of Rennick’s oft-repeated lie that using renewables would drive up power bills.

The Education Policy focuses on one thing, and one thing only – the lie that students are not being taught fundamental skills, but are instead being indoctrinated with “woke ideology”. You know, the terribly subversive ideas that all people are worth celebrating, that we should know the truth of our history, and that being kind to everyone actually helps build a more united society.

No problem, though. GRPF thinks that if we abandon the National Curriculum and just let the States and individual schools sort it out, all this woke nonsense will disappear and kids will learn to spell. That’s some US Republican thinking right there.

Health is where GRPF really betrays its origins in anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine thinking. You know the tune, sing it with me. No vaccine mandates! Quit the World Health Organisation! Prosecute “Big Pharma” for making Covid-19 vaccines! Justice for “jab injury” victims! Have an enquiry into the pandemic response!

GRPF inexplicably fails to mention that we have already had numerous enquiries into Covid-19 vaccines and pandemic responses at both state and federal levels, including several in which Rennick himself participated. Perhaps this is because these enquiries didn’t come to the conclusions GRPF wanted. Not to worry, because if their members get elected, they’ll push for their own special inquiry, explicitly formed with a view to holding Health authorities who failed to uphold their ethical responsibilities to account.

In other words, GRPF wants the enquiry to start from a position of clear bias without any evidence to warrant such an operating principle. Not an enquiry, then, but a witch hunt aimed at appeasing the brainless cookers who still believe that Covid-19 was either not real or a bioweapon aimed at population control, and who think there was (and is) a worldwide conspiracy to deny them their “right” to flout public health and safety regulations like the selfish bastards they are.

Pardon me. I get a little hot under the collar when confronted by this nonsense. Losing loved ones to Covid-19 and watching your own kid taken to hospital in an ambulance because of the strain on their heart will do that.

Finally, here’s a sample of the contradictory thinking that runs right through all GRPF’s economic policies.

On the one hand, it wants to raise the tax-free threshold to $40,000, as well as set a tax-free threshold for contributions to superannuation. This would directly benefit lower and middle income earners.

On the other, it wants to abolish the current mandatory superannuation scheme with its employer contribution, effectively destroying lower and middle income earners’ ability to plan for their futures.

There’s a lot more in their economic policies, of course, but even here, GRPF can’t stop itself from being racist. Snuck in amongst all the promises to cut the rate of company tax and abolish fringe benefits tax altogether is this:

Remove the tax exemption on mining and native title payments to Indigenous holding entities.

We’re talking about a tiny amount of money, here, so – like its determination to cut all funding for Welcome to Country ceremonies – this is not about bringing in more revenue for the government. This is about punishing people for being Indigenous.

What we have in GPRF, then, is one man’s vanity project, fuelled by grievance, anti-science idiocy, and conspiracy thinking. Senator Rennick is the darling of the cooker movement, frequently appearing on their livestreams to eagerly declare himself sympathetic to their delusional claptrap. His candidate for the Victorian Senate, Christopher Neil, is likewise wedded to conspiracy theories. He’s the founder of the Australian Medical Professionals Society, a haven for disgruntled anti-vax doctors who got upset when they were rightly punished for spreading lies and peddling dangerous “remedies” like Ivermectin for Covid-19.

They’re not worth anyone’s vote. If you’re voting below the line for the Senate (which I always recommend), you no longer have to number every box. Don’t dignify GRPF with a number.