Which minor parties are running in Australia in 2022?

Back by meagre demand!

Wondering which vaguely-named micro-parties are secretly Nazis, wizards, or God’s blessed elect? Well you’re in luck, baby. Here’s my time-honoured rogue’s gallery of Senate candidates for your electoral pleasure.

I’ve ordered these according the Victorian Senate ballot, and missed a few who are only running in other states. I wrote most of these descriptions at 3am last night, so some are gargantuan essays and others single lines.

The raunchy rhetoric and Maccas palette of the old Australian Sex Party are long gone. Reason’s ‘sensible solutions’ and tasteful turquoise hues suggests a closer to affinity to the teal wave of small-l liberal independents gunning for blue ribbon government seats.

This broad bloc seems to represent an emerging tendency in Australian politics that catalysed in reaction to COVID: inner-city, educated, white-collar workers who just wanted the experts to manage the pandemic and are politely fed up with the major parties.

They want people with professional credentials and personal integrity to write and implement policy based on evidence and values, the most urgent of which are climate action and a Federal Independent Commission in Corruption (ICAC).

While this framework is progressive, it can be technocratic, and tends to misdiagnose the source of our woes as incompetent management rather than underlying structures of power.

These candidates are also unlikely to fight for much-needed radical economic change – especially the Climate 200 Candidates, who are backed by pro-renewables billionaire Simon Holmes à Court, whose great-granduncle was a baron.

Reason are possibly better – they’ve always had biggish donors, but have a fairly comprehensive platform.

In March 2020, Gary Canning called off his wedding because his bride had lied to him about a cult called Restoration Order. To clear his mind, he went bushwalking on an island owned by a billionaire and stumbled across two weeping girls imprisoned in a mineshaft in the scrub.

As Gary lowered a rope to pass them water, 2003 Australian Idol runner-up Robert ‘Millsy’ Mills shot him in the back with an arrow. He died in the dirt beneath pitiless gums and the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic.

Some combination of these events had a big effect on Jack Irish actor Damien Richardson, who played Gary on Neighbours and is now running for the Senate on an antivax platform.

This is the other, opposite strand of post-COVID politics: anti-lockdown, anti-vax, anti-everything. Canning’s manifesto says ‘we say no to the tyranny of experts’. Half a dozen other Senate candidates are also fighting for this vote.

The most annoying thing about conspiracy theorists is that they’re almost on the money. You shouldn’t trust governments, and murderous elite cabals do exploit us, lie to us, spy on us, poison us and shrink our legal freedoms year on year. They’re called company boards and you can see the worst ones listed on the ASX.

‘Globalist institutions,’ Richardson’s manifesto says, ‘like the UN, The WEF, The WHO, and big Pharma and big tech dominate The Nation State.’

Right on. Unfortunately, things quickly deteriorate. He thinks COVID is fake, doctors are in on it, and that sinister transgender elements are trying to corrupt our children.

Without the tools to diagnose the systemic causes of the absurdity and suffering, we start skipping connections get unmoored. The world feels fake, a fever dream, an episode of Neighbours. And in that void you’re easy prey for whatever reassuring grifter comes along: quacks, conmen, online cults and even Neo-Nazis, who Richardson marched alongside in the anti-lockdown protests last year. Before you know it, your doctor is microchipping you with the brand of Beelzebub and (((Dan Andrews))) is trafficking child slaves through the Metro Tunnel.

It’s hard to tell how far down the mineshaft Damien Richardson has fallen. Then again, he is in the media elite himself, so it all could be a psy-op. He is looking authentically twitchy, but the Logies have been cancelled for two years so it could just be adrenochrome withdrawals.

Once the great centrist third force of Australian politics, Deregistered in 2015, then revived in 2019 by current leader, former Senator Lyn Allison.

Kind of proto-teals, I guess. Good policies on corruption, environment and social justice, but their past incarnation’s deals with the devil (John Howard) helped pave the highway to hell.

More than half of the women and children in prison and youth detention in Victoria haven’t been found guilty or sentenced. They’re on remand awaiting trial, because draconian laws have made bail almost impossible to access.

There’s no evidence that bail poses a statistically significant danger to the community, unlike mass incarceration, which increases crime in the long run by hardening rather than rehabilitating offenders.

Two-thirds of kids in remand will not even go on to receive prison sentences. But that won’t undo the trauma and stigma they’ll carry for the rest of their lives, however brief they may be.

In light of this crisis, radio shock-jock Derryn Hinch is campaigning under the slogan ‘less bail, more jail’. He’s previously voiced his support for the death penalty.

I guess they must want to introduce kangaroo courts!

…Sorry.

What you’d expect: end factory farming, stop dog racing, close the Crown Casino bearbaiting ring. A tad too sentimental about feral horses, which are demolishing ecosystems endangered species depend on.

In 2019, a tax-dodging nickel tycoon spent some loose change to use almost every newspaper, TV channel, Youtube ad, radio station and billboard in the country to sway a Federal election in order to get his coal mines built. He won five per cent of the national vote.

This time, after tragically surviving COVID himself, Clive Palmer is garnering support among passionate freedom protesters who are sick of sinister forces manipulating democracy, and the brainwashing power of the mainstream media.

UAP’s main policy is to stop the Australian Government, World Economic Forum, and New World Order deliberately engineer an inflation crisis in order to steal everyone’s mum’s houses and sell them to the Chinese Communist Party.

To be fair, it is true that if the UAP get elected absolutely none of that will happen.

Despite its benign centrist packaging, the erstwhile Country Alliance’s policy platform is based on ‘Christian values’ and aims to roll back abortions, ban the ‘teaching of gender fluidity theory (or any other sexual theory) in schools’, and bring back corporal punishment.

As Jesus famously said, ‘…throw the first stone.’

The year is 2023. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has won the crucial Senate support he needs to sell Uluru to Chevron by announcing that a stocks, pillory and whipping post will be installed in every major rural centre. Opposition Leader Jim Chalmers supports the ConLasher scheme, as it will create regional jobs.

Cos’ I’m a shooter, I’m a fisher, I’m a farmer and I’m a sinner | You should give me back my guns

A boost to health spending. A public bank at the post office. A ban on house foreclosures. An end to the Queen of England’s satanic grip on the global drug trade and international finance system which she used to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks and disseminate rock and roll music to brainwash the youth and undermine the West.

The former Citizen’s Electoral Council, which boldly claims to be ‘inspired by the policies of old Labor’, is devoted to the ideas of the late Lyndon LaRouche, a Holocaust-denying cult leader who once ran for US President on a platform of sending everyone with AIDS to an island.

In LaRouche’s own words, he psychologically ‘broke down’ his closest followers in a process he called ‘ego stripping’ to make them more loyal. He was also weirdly central to Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ defensive initiative. The Dollop podcast did an episode about him.

The Citizens Party raised $2.3 million in donations in 2020-21, which bodes ill.

A supergroup of four progressive parties. Decent polices. They want to ‘classify ageing is a disease’, which I hoped was some batshit crazy Silicon Valley elixir of life thing but is just about increasing dementia research funding.

The Science party, formally the Future Party, are centre-leftish STEM-types who want high speed rail etc.

It’s interesting that the idea of a Pirate Party already feels outdated. The optimistic hacktivist sub-culture of the late oughties and early teens (Anonymous, Wikileaks, caring that we’re all being spied on by malevolent forces) is gone, leaving bored apes swapping Bored Apes in a rapidly collapsing Ponzi scheme called ‘industrial civilisation.’ In the good old days, we worked for our TV shows by closing dozens of pop-up ads on a Croatian-hosted website called watchstream or gigamovies. Now we just get our tithes to Disney and six other media conglomerates deducted directly from our pay.

Same goes for the Secular Party. The New Atheist movement arose in response to the Bush administration’s evangelical turn, and spread across the English-speaking world. But marriage equality has passed and religiosity is declining. Morrison may be happy-clappy, but he has the rat cunning to keep the best parts quiet, and after Tony Abbott with his Opus Dei stare it all just feels a bit underwhelming.

Unfortunately, the climate emergency isn’t going anywhere.

Former One Nation Senator Rod Culleton has a colourful history of refusing to give back hire cars and throwing his glasses at magistrates.

Now he’s a Sovereign Citizen and has established the Great Australia Party, which claims all Australian courts are unconstitutional. Sov Citz have a tough job down under. The US Constitution is a quasi-mystical text forged in revolution and venerated for centuries. Ours is gentleman’s agreement between colonial bureaucrats about the width of rail gauges.

They’re still have a crack though, and like the other cookers are very almost onto something before they veer off into the stratosphere. The law is a rigged construct which circularly legitimises and is and is legitimised by the state’s monopoly on violence. It is not, alas, a spell you can break with magic words you learnt from a dude in a Facebook group who types in all-caps and is posing from a fish in his profile pic.

Previously the ‘Involuntary Medication Objectors (Vaccination/Fluoride) Party’, they were against preventing babies dying from rubella before it was cool.

In 2020 candidate Tom Barnett said ‘you can’t catch a virus; it’s impossible’, a sensible compromise between the extreme positions ‘you can catch viruses, it’s possible’ and ‘viruses don’t exist’.

The antivax movement is a broad church, and IMOP seems more crystally and less fashy than some of its brethren.