Australia's most dangerous home-grown conspiracy theory

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This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Awabakal, Darug, and Eora people.

So, we're talking about conspiracy theories a lot at the moment.

Obviously, primarily we are talking about it in connection with Jeffrey Epstein and the US government.

And most of the biggest conspiracy theories do involve the US government in some way.

But these online conspiracies take hold closer to home too.

And one of the most prominent conspiracies about the Australian government is related to one of the most traumatic events in our history.

It's actually the first news story I can remember hearing about as a kid.

The nightmare unfolded around half past two this afternoon.

A lone gunman, armed with a high-powered rifle, entered the the Port Arthur historic site and began firing randomly.

Late today the man was still holed up in a local tourist lodge which police have described as a siege-like situation.

I can vividly remember the horror of that day and seeing the grief of the families of the victims.

35 dead, a couple of dozen injured and many more obviously severely traumatised.

Then of course attention turned to the strange man who had done this.

And Andrew, do you know of any motive?

There's no motive at all yet.

We've got absolutely no idea why this person's done it.

We've heard that he's about 18 or 19, blonde, surfy-looking sort of fellow, driving a VW with a surfboard on the roof and no explanation at all.

We never really got an explanation.

The media eventually settled on the idea that the guy was mentally ill and left it at that.

They probably used less charitable words than that, but that was basically it.

Nothing more to it.

Cam Wilson's here.

He is the author of a new book called Conspiracy Nation.

And in it, he talks about a really pervasive conspiracy theory known as PA96.

G'day, Cam.

Hey, Martin.

So PA96, I assume PA is Port Arthur in this context.

Can you tell me about this conspiracy theory and where you came across it first?

PA96, as the real heads call it, the people who believe in it, is a foundational conspiracy theory of Australian conspiracy law, kind of culture, all about Port Arthur and the massacre that happened in 1996.

Not only is it the biggest act of gun violence in Australian history, but also it's remembered for being the catalyst for something that's actually remembered quite fondly, which is when John Howard led the way for serious gun reform that included things like gun buyback, et cetera, in a moment that is really still to this day a big thing around the world.

It's something that Australians are really proud of as well.

It's something that we like to boast about almost.

When something terrible happens in the United States, we'll often go, well,

why don't you just do what we did?

So yeah, no, it's a big event.

Yeah, absolutely.

That has had ramifications all around the world.

So that's like the positive legacy of it.

But there are people who undermine that legacy by believing in the idea that either Mund Bryant, the man who carried it out, wasn't actually responsible for it or perhaps was set up to do it in some way, with the kind of takeaway message being that for whatever reason, this was orchestrated by a shadowy group of people and the group changes sometimes from, you know, very vague to very specific to disarm the Australian public to ultimately kind of make them more docile and subservient to the government.

Okay.

Obviously, conspiracy theories flow all over the world very rapidly these days.

They can spark up and spread around in a matter of hours.

That wasn't the case in 1996, though.

The beginning of these conspiracy theories and the spread of this conspiracy theory seems to be tied to this man called Joe Viles.

Can you tell me about this guy?

Yeah, speaking to people who covered it at the time, including veteran broadcaster Ray Martin, who was there, you know, days afterwards, he said that he didn't hear anything like this at the time.

But a conspiracy theory and variations on that conspiracy theories started to sprout up a few years later.

And the person who we kind of see in our book as one of the main progenitors of this was this little-known guy called Joe Viles.

He lived in a suburban house in Perth, and he initially kind of threw magazines and independent publications, but then the early internet spread a great number of conspiracy theories by producing pretty enormous documents that would go through things like the events that happened at Port Arthur, 9-11 later on, various other world events to kind of piece together bits of evidence that he said proved there was actually kind of an ulterior motive that the event didn't really happen and it was all set up by usually a shadowy world government, often linking it to Mossad.

I mean, look, I've been reading a lot about Mossad recently, but I don't believe I've ever seen any evidence of them operating in Tasmania.

Seems a bit off the map for them.

What evidence did he claim to have of some sort of a connection between what we would, I suppose, these days called the deep state and the attack in Port Arthur.

Yeah, I mean, there are all these combination of little things, including there was an eyewitness who ended up becoming a really prominent Port Arthur truther, as they're known, because they said that they were at the event, they saw it happen, and they didn't think that it was actually Martin Bryant who carried it out.

Now, we know that eyewitness testimony isn't always reliable.

And there was a whole stack of people who definitely identified him.

And it was a small community who knew who he was.

And what they kind of rely on, in my opinion, is the fact that, you know, we're talking about, you know, conspiracy theories are simple.

Real life is complicated and sometimes awkward.

And telling a survivor that they might have been mistaken is hard to do.

Or there's other, you know, aspects of it where people said, well, there were these links between the people and the victims, which is actually just the reality of the fact that in a small community, everyone's within like two degrees of separation.

It's not a grand plot.

It's just the fact that there's not that many people around.

The messiness of real life is enough, if you're looking for it, to kind of create a conspiracy out of.

Absolutely.

I mean, you know, I live in Newcastle, and everyone in Newcastle either knows each other or knows a common person.

It would not be difficult to find linkages between any random two people in Newcastle.

Well, that is, of course, because of the Newcastle cabal, which everyone knows about.

That's right.

Well, that's true.

Which is real.

It is real.

That's right.

That's absolutely true.

So, but what about, you know, publicly reported things that seem to align with the idea that the government would do something to give themselves the permission to bring in gun control laws.

Yeah, but there's this one moment that Joe Viles really fixated on, which was about 10 years before there was this push for gun control in Australia, and there was a big meeting of the state premiers.

Casting your mind back, like at the time, it's kind of hard to almost like fathom now, but there was actually like a decent amount of gun violence in Australia.

There were a lot of guns.

It was pretty regular, you know, every few months to have what was, you know, technically defined as a mass shooting with at least a couple of people killed.

At one of these meetings where they were trying to kind of get this agreement to change these laws, the frustrated New South Wales Premier, who'd been pushing for the change, kind of left in disgust.

And then when he was outside, he had something to say to a bunch of reporters.

I came out of the meeting and I talked to reporters outside on the steps of Parliament House, and I just totally vented my frustration by saying that you wouldn't receive any support for gun law reform in Australia until a massacre such as those that had occurred on the mainland occurred in a quiet, sleepy little place like Tasmania.

I then promptly sort of forgot about that quote until I was reminded of it days after the Port Arthur massacre.

It was tragic that my prophecy had to be fulfilled to see change in Australia.

Okay, I can see why someone would take that as evidence that there was some sort of a plot for this.

But when you think about it, when you look at the context of the time, Tasmania was really the biggest holdout when it came to gun control legislation, wasn't it?

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, we can look at this as a very human moment where a frustrated politician was feeling that they wanted to see something happen and was just kind of expressing themselves in an exaggerated way, kind of almost like a plea or a cry for change, but also contained in that a pretty pessimistic prediction that would happen.

But of course, you know, that is kind of transformed or mutated instead into this idea is that it was an outlandish kind of almost like laughing in the face of the people saying, I'm going to predict something terrible that's going to happen because we are going to set it up to happen.

Of course, it doesn't make sense.

You know, again, once you ever like scratch below the surface or think about it, if there was a one world government, would they tell us about the plan that they're about to do?

Probably not.

That probably doesn't help.

So it doesn't really make sense unless, of course, you realize that actually this is a really frustrated guy.

What about things about Martin Bryant himself?

I mean, what parts of, you know, what we found out about him afterwards played into the idea that he was somehow a porn or a patsy?

Yeah.

Martin Bryant did have a limit in mental capacity and he was someone who, when he was doing interviews with police in the aftermath, he clearly presents as someone who's quite confused and you can almost understand why someone might think that maybe perhaps someone like this couldn't carry something like this out.

And that is actually a common conspiracy, this idea that how did Martin Bryant Bryant kill so many people with like so few bullets?

Because I think there was something like 35 deaths and he only fired a few more bullets and that are a very, very close amount.

And people suggest, well, how did this, you know, Tasmanian boy without any formal training carry out this almost like marksman-like act?

But the kind of like sad reality of it is that he had a very high-powered weapon that in a small space, unfortunately, just torped through people.

He wasn't in any way someone who had an incredible capacity.

He just had a great weapon of war that unfortunately and so sadly shred people apart and a big part of the massacre took place in a single cafe you know it was really horrifically close quarters that he was firing this gun at them he wasn't sniping them from a clock tower he was shooting them at point blank range virtually no and so when when they did these interviews and and these transcripts came out afterwards they're quite confusing at some points he kind of said i didn't do it and then he does seem to confess to it later on ultimately he did confess to it and plead guilty So there was no adversarial court case that happened.

And one account that I was reading from a journalist who wrote a book about it just said, that was a really great thing because it spared this community, this tight-knit group of locals from having to go through a pretty uncomfortable and very, obviously artificial process.

But the flip side of it was that there was no public digestion and understanding of the narrative that tested it in a way that ultimately might have gone some way to squash some of the conspiracy theories by airing out more of the evidence that had happened and answering some of the doubts that people raised.

So ultimately, while it might have saved a lot of pain, in that decision to avoid that, we may have actually created some of the fertile conditions to spread that conspiracy theory.

When it comes to the Port Arthur Massacre and I suppose many other similar events,

the fact that there is really no reason for it.

Martin Bryant just did this horrible thing one day.

Obviously, he did kill two people that his father seemed to have some sort of a disagreement with over money, but there was no logical reason why this happened.

And do you think in many cases people go looking for a better explanation than just some guy did a thing one day?

Yeah, absolutely.

Conspiracy theories, they provide a simple, easy to understand, you know, narrative about an event that is more kind of amenable to them, and also one that generally kind of simplifies the world in terms of motives, you know, that someone was good and someone was bad, not that, you know, Mun Bryan, who was known to be, have limited, you know, mental capacity and a whole variety of reasons, you know, all these structural factors and that led him to there, plus the randomness of just, you know, people turn out certain ways.

That's a very hard thing to understand.

But in the world of Mun Bryant was brainwashed to do this, or, you know, the Australian government or perhaps some other shadowy governments did this with the intention of being able to disarm Australia.

That it sounds crazy, but this is actually being kind of documented by researchers.

conspiracy theories end up almost having a soothing effect because you know the randomness is unsettling instead of believing that you know sometimes awful things happen and people do terrible things but you can never really predict it you say there are terrible people and if we just manage to you know know exactly who they are or if you know there are secret forces against us now to me that doesn't sound very soothing the idea of like an all-powerful all-seeing, a shadowy cabal, but in a sense, it allows you to be like, I'm worried about that, but at least I know what the risk is.

There's logic to it.

The world at least makes sense, and that's soothing.

I can understand that rather than just people do random stuff, random, terrible things.

So, in 1996, things like this weren't as common as they unfortunately are now.

We've now seen around the world, particularly obviously in the United States, we have seen many Martin Bryants do many similar things to exactly what we're talking about here.

Young men with limited mental capacity, some of whom are radicalized online and some of whom are just looking to become notorious, going out and

doing these things in order to try and make a name for themselves or for whatever reason.

Surely that would prove that the Port Arthur massacre was a likely thing and not a totally random thing.

And yet in your book, you write that the conspiracy theory is only getting stronger

in the last decade rather than weakening in the midst of all these other attacks that are so similar.

Yeah, and there's a variety of reasons for that.

I mean, one of the reasons is that we have had this change in how all of us communicate and find out about the world.

Joe Viles was early on the internet and used it to spread this, you know, alternative narrative.

And that was picked up by almost disciples of him who then started using new technology, like things like YouTube, things like Facebook.

And, you know, right now there still are, you know, active Facebook communities of people who don't believe that everyone was shot at Port Arthur or don't believe that Munbrian did it.

So that's one thing.

You know, the research, you know, kind of contrary to popular belief, doesn't actually support this idea that there's heaps more conspiracy theorists.

But technology has changed the way that they're able to communicate, to organize.

You know, now they can kind of group together in a way that they never could before.

You know, used to be if you wanted to find people with similar beliefs, you'd have to kind of meet up physically, geographically.

And that's obviously tougher when you have fringe beliefs.

Now you just, you know, log online and you can find anyone who not only agrees with you, but reinforces and perhaps deepens your beliefs.

And the other thing is just that the further we get away from it, the less people remember it's easy to be exposed to a conspiracy theory and not immediately have that almost like immune system that protects you from bullshit because you know the truth and maybe you don't fall for what can be quite compelling lies.

So we've seen that change and Port Arthur in that way has almost become, you know, one of the like foundational beliefs in the kind of tapestry of Australian conspiracy theories, because for many people, it represents an early example and a major example of government lying to people that then they can say, can you imagine all the other things that if you don't believe that happened, that the government would also do to pull the wool over your eyes.

What happened to Joe Viles in the end?

He's not popping up on conspiracy theory channels.

He hasn't got a Facebook group.

He hasn't got a Twitter account these days.

I assume he's no longer with us.

Yeah, he passed away in the early to mid-2000s and his legacy really has lasted.

You know, his imagery does pop up.

Unfortunately, I will inform you as someone who spent too much time in this that his legacy really does live on both through references, but also just people sharing his original stuff.

It really has outlived him.

And including, you know, Pauline Hanson, who is still in Parliament now, has said on TV before that she's actually read the book.

In secret recordings, she said that she doubts that Port Arthur happened as they said it happened.

Now, of course, I should say, since then, she's kind of disavowed that, but, you know, in a candid secret recording, she suggested otherwise.

But all that to say is that his legacy lives on, whereas he passed away after about 10 years of kind of blogging away.

And throughout his kind of online career, he was always dogged by these accusations that, how is it that this guy who no one seems to know just popped out out of nowhere and seems to have all these incredible insights into the awful things that governments are doing?

That seems pretty unusual.

Perhaps he himself is also someone who is not as it seems.

So he had to deal with, you know, accusations that he himself was some kind of false flag or plan himself.

And when he died, people even doubted that he died at all.

There was quite a widespread conspiracy theory that actually his foes were catching up with him, people were figuring out his secret identity, and that he was whisked away back to Israel to Mossad because they didn't want to expose him to any danger.

So it's this crazy thing that even this leader of the movement who had such an influence ended up being eaten by his own.

It's interesting, yeah, how they can sort of turn on each other as well.

Is that something that you found in your investigation of the other conspiracies that are in your book that often they eat each other when they start to disagree?

Yeah, absolutely.

One of the kind of personality traits that might make you more open to this stuff is being kind of contrarian, being individualistic.

They are kind of united by grievance, but that doesn't really stick them together.

And they always storming and forming, you know, different groups.

You know, for example, Craig Kelly, who is now a former Australian parliamentarian and still kicking around, you know, he definitely has dabbled and been close to these groups.

And he used to complain that the people who he thought were also his followers started accusing him of being Illuminati because he wore red shoes.

So it is a pretty common thing that happens all the time.

And there's not a lot of respect for the people who seem to be putting in a lot of hours, you know, uncovering the truth.

At the moment, we're seeing a situation where the MAGA movement in the United States is sort of ripping into each other over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

We have this really strange situation where you have two of the people who had pushed the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, two of the strongest pushers of that idea in Dan Bongino and Cash Patel taking over the FBI and then giving a statement saying, actually, there wasn't a conspiracy here.

Funnily enough, I read all the files and it's all fine.

I've spent the last day watching videos of what the rest of the Epstein was murdered crew think of those two guys now.

They're not big fans.

Oh, lucky you.

They're, you know, traitors to the cause and someone's got to them and that kind of thing.

Is it just an indication that there really is no possible way to disprove these conspiracy theories for these people?

Even two people who were totally bought in can't convince their compatriots that actually we were wrong about it and actually it's yeah, I mean, that's the sad reality and what we kind of have to deal with.

They call a conspiratorial mindset a kind of self-sealing mindset, which is this idea that any proof that you could get that might challenge it is immediately chalked up as somehow not only being often not correct, but may in fact reinforce your point of view.

So, for example, you know, you are a MAGA supporter and you're so excited to see some of the guys who've been pushing this be the head of the FBI, and they get in there and they do something and they check it out and they say, well, it's not as exactly as we kind of thought it was.

And then when they do that, that's not proof that, you know, your buddies have really checked it out.

And actually, maybe there's not much to this.

That's proof that this goes even higher than you possibly could have thought.

And even these guys are having their arms twisted behind their back and being forced to kind of continue this conspiracy.

So that is definitely something that happens.

It's kind of a sad thing.

And, you know, there was actually this kind of famous study.

They asked a group of people who had conspiratorial beliefs, do you think that Osama bin Laden is still alive?

And this was a time before the US had announced that they'd killed him.

And all these people said, no, no, no, I don't think that he is.

They followed up with them later on after the US announced that he'd been killed.

And they asked them, do you think that he was killed?

The same people said, no, no, we actually think that he's alive.

And the reason is because the facts are less important than this idea, this guiding principle, that whatever you're told by these institutions are wrong.

And ultimately, nothing is going to really convince you otherwise.

It's the old joke about the conspiracy theorist dying and going to heaven and God saying, I'll answer any question that you have.

And they say, who really killed JFK?

And God says, Lee Harvey Oswald, and he acted alone.

And the conspiracy theorist goes, hmm, this goes higher than I thought.

Cam, congratulations on the book.

It is already out.

People can already go and buy it and read it and make up their own mind.

Do your own research.

Do your own research with Cabrin's book.

Cam Wilson, thanks so much for speaking to us.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

It's easy to get swept up in these conspiracy theories.

I should know.

I've spent two weeks in a row now zooming in on grainy prison footage to try and determine once and for all what happened in Jeffrey Epstein's prison cell the night he died.

And look, well, I'll tell you what I found on Thursday.

But if you're into this kind of thing, or if there's ever something in an episode that you'd like us to dig deeper into, send us an email.

We would love to hear from you.

You can find us at if you're listening at abc.net.au.

I'll catch you on Thursday.