Australia vs the Internet: Conservative kill screen

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G'day, I'm Thomas O'Reitty, and I'm thrilled to announce I'll now also be hosting Background Briefing.

Over the past few weeks, our reporters have been investigating stories of untold power and hidden influence.

Who's really shifting the dial in Australia?

They're secretive by nature.

From the unlikely influences.

I've rejected probably 15 to 20 politicians in the last month.

To the international businessman shutting the spotlight.

All of his buddies are sanctioned.

The game changers, wielding serious power under the radar.

We are cultivating influence.

Agents of influence, an all-new series by background briefing.

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

We have all just witnessed two of the worst political campaigns in modern history.

It started here.

Canada, get ready.

Our CBC News decision desk is ready to make a call.

Just a few months ago, Canada's Conservative Party looked certain to win this election, and yet...

Canada's next government will be a Liberal government.

It is not yet.

And then, six days later, another shock in Australia.

Astonishing figures, they're the stuff of landslides, except this time, unusually, it's towards rather than away from a sitting government.

Again, the Conservative Coalition Party was considered a sure thing a few months ago, but...

Let's just say that.

I can't see how the coalition wins from here.

Not only did both Conservative parties lose, both of their leaders were thrown out of parliament.

Piero Polyev, who may be on track actually to lose his own seat as leader.

This is perhaps the story of the night.

Dixon, this is Peter Dutton's seat, and it appears that he has lost that seat.

How did almost the same thing happen in two places at once?

Well, one word was on everyone's lips.

Obviously, Trump had a massive effect.

Donald Trump, I think the Trump factor.

The Trump factor.

The impact of Donald Trump.

But here's the thing.

As you may recall, Donald Trump has been the President of the United States before for four whole years.

In those four years, Conservative parties had no trouble winning elections in Australia, the UK, Germany, all over the place.

But in the last four months, everything has changed.

The same systems put in place to help Conservative political parties win may have contributed heavily to their loss.

So,

what is different this time?

I'm Matt Bevan, and from if you're listening, this is the final episode of Australia versus the Internet.

All right.

Hello, everyone.

So my apologies for the late start.

In August 2024, Elon Musk invited Donald Trump onto his social media platform X to interview him.

It was a bit of a mess.

Musk had taken 40 minutes to get everything working, claiming that a cyber attack had caused X's servers to overload.

We unfortunately had a massive distributed denial of service attack against our servers.

Outside experts said that there actually was no attack and the problems were instead caused by incompetence and massive staff layoffs.

Or, as Musk put it,

as this massive attack illustrates, there's a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.

Sure, why not?

Donald, great to

speak.

Congratulations, because I see you broke every record in the book with so many millions of people, and it's an honor.

Musk started the conversation by talking about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump that had taken place a month earlier in the town of Butler, Pennsylvania.

Take a look at what happened.

Musk particularly wanted to talk about what Trump did right after being hit in the ear with a bullet, climbing to his feet and pumping his fist in the air.

You were pumping your fist in the air and saying, fight, fight, fight.

And I think that's,

I mean,

you know,

the president of the United States represents America.

So that's, you know,

a big, you know, part of the reason why I was

excited to endorse you.

Elon Musk's endorsement came 34 minutes after Trump was shot that day.

And really, that moment seems to have changed the world.

A tweet that's just come in from Elon Musk adding that he fully endorses President Trump and hopes for a rapid recovery.

It's not just the endorsement though.

See on that day, around that time, something very significant seems to have happened inside the algorithm of his website.

This was the moment that Twitter truly died and turned into X, Elon Musk's personal megaphone.

Two Australian university researchers, Timothy Graham and Mark Andrejevic, found that on that day, the reach of Elon Musk's tweets increased exponentially.

He went from getting about 100 to 150,000 reposts a day to 500 or 600,000.

Maybe he's cleverer than he was.

Maybe he's more intelligent than funnier.

No, no, it's none of those things.

They juiced the numbers.

That's what they did.

And Musk wasn't the only one to benefit from the algo shift that day.

And you can see this sort of effect, not as strong, but on other right-wing accounts as well.

They all of a sudden started getting far more reach, far more views.

Anyone Musk interacted with frequently online got a massive boost to their reach.

The ex-account that Musk interacted with most in 2024 was an anonymous account called End Wokeness.

On the 6th of September 2024, End Wokeness posted a screenshot from a local community Facebook group.

A woman had posted that her neighbor's daughter's friend had lost her cat and then subsequently found it being carved up for meat by a family of Haitian immigrants.

She also said that she'd been told the Haitians had been doing this to dogs and local ducks and geese.

Two days later, on September 8th, Elon Musk repeated the claims about pet cats being eaten.

On September 9th, vice presidential candidate J.D.

Vance posted about it.

And then on September 10th.

In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats,

they're eating the pets of the people that live there.

In just five days, this

very untrue story about a neighbor's daughter's friend's cat was elevated from a community Facebook group through X to a presidential debate.

And Elon's meddling wasn't even confined to the United States.

Over the New Year's break at the start of this year, the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, took a little holiday with his family to the Portuguese island of Madeira but his holiday was interrupted by Elon Musk.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk launched an explosive attack on his social media platform X, one where he accused the Prime Minister of being complicit in the rape of Britain.

Nothing quite kills the Madeira vibe like being accused of being complicit in the rape of Britain.

The allegation concerned Sir Kia's time as the UK's top prosecutor between 2008 and 2013, where he was involved in investigating a decades-long child sexual exploitation scandal.

His office worked to prosecute members of criminal gangs, which predominantly consisted of men of South Asian descent that had groomed, assaulted and raped young girls across England.

But it was also criticised for not doing enough to help some victims.

Dozens of people were convicted.

Three parliamentary inquiries were held, and Sirkir has not been found to have done anything wrong.

But Elon Musk had never heard of any of this until he saw a video posted about it by a far-right British activist on New Year's Day.

And if Elon had never heard of it, that must be because of a cover-up.

Following Musk's recent posts, the decade-old scandal has re-emerged.

The British government spent weeks dealing with the chaos.

Musk demanded that King Charles sack Sir Kir, dissolve the parliament and call new elections.

Now, I know that the British have a very vibes-based constitution, but I'm fairly sure that foreign tech billionaires don't usually get a lot of say in this kind of thing.

Elon Musk, the world's richest man, had become a global wrecking ball, able to swing in and ruin any politician's day on a whim based on whatever little random tweet crossed his newsfeed.

Hello, hello.

Hello?

Can you hear me okay?

Yes, we can hear you!

In January, he decided to ruin the day of the major party leaders in Germany by backing a minor party.

The fate of the world, I think, rests upon this election in Germany.

He'd thrown his support behind the far-right anti-immigration alternative for Deutschland party.

We wish you,

President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D.

Vance, all the best to make America great again.

You're the best.

Make Germany great again.

Following Trump's election victory, Elon Musk was seen as a kingmaker.

His support or criticism were powerful potential weapons in political battles across the world.

The question now, what or who will be his next target?

All of this was watched with great interest in both Canada and Australia, which had upcoming elections.

Musk had already called the sitting Australian government fascists over their proposed social media misinformation laws, and he had endorsed Conservative Party leader Pierre Polyev for Prime Minister of Canada.

My three-year-old has just told me that he wants to go to Mars, so it's,

I guess Mr.

Musk would be the right guy to put him in touch with.

In January this year, Musk and Trump seemed to be on a winning streak.

Polls showed Trump's approval rating in America was around 50%,

and Musk's was around 45%.

It felt like there were no barriers to stop them pursuing their agenda.

The winds of change were behind them, and the Conservative parties in both Australia and Canada thought, why not hop on board?

The thing is, though, Musk in particular was taking a lot of his ideas from his pals on X.

And as the wise philosopher Donald Trump Jr.

once said, We gotta remember, guys, Twitter is not real life.

Truly a 21st century Plato.

After all, what are tweets but shadows on the wall of Elon Musk's man cave?

Like I said, Twitter is not real life.

The rest of the country's a little different.

But just because people on X think that an idea sounds good, does that mean that the general public will?

For instance, the now infamous Doge, Department of Government Efficiency, was invented by an anonymous X user in August 2024 as a joke, merging Musk's favourite cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, with a story about Musk potentially getting a gig in the future Trump administration.

Musk caught on,

and the rest is history.

So if you do choose to be the head of the Department of Government Efficiency.

Yeah, Doge.

Yup.

Ideas like this spread quickly.

First to Trump.

My administration will establish the brand new Department of Government Efficiency.

And then beyond Trump, all the way to Australia.

The newly created job of Shadow Minister for Government Efficiency, an apparent nod to Donald Trump's appointment of Elon Musk as head of government efficiency in the US.

A large part of the Doge cost-cutting plan was to fire a significant portion of federal public servants.

This was a plan that the Conservative opposition parties in Australia and Canada tried to run on as a policy platform too.

We will cut the Liberal deficit by 70%.

by cutting back on bureaucracy, consultants, foreign aid.

We'll reverse Labor's increase of 41,000 Canberra public servants because it will save about $7 billion a year.

And then there's Elon Musk's idea of ending work-from-home arrangements.

We will also require that federal workers must return to the office in person.

Which quickly found its way to Australia.

I don't think it's unreasonable that people, like in many other workplaces, are asked to go back to work for that face-to-face contact.

Pierre Polyev, on the other hand, loved Musk's idea of cutting off funding to public broadcasters.

I'm going to defund CBC.

That's my commitment.

CBC is Canada's public broadcaster.

It will defund the CBC to save a billion dollars.

That was my commitment then.

It's my commitment though.

In Australia, Peter Dutton didn't pledge to cut funding to the ABC, which, to be clear, is the creator of this show.

But he did call us the hate media.

Forget about what you've been told by the ABC and the Guardian and the other hate media.

Forget about that.

Cutting public servants isn't a new idea.

Trump and Musk didn't invent it.

But obviously, people are going to make the connection.

Particularly when in Australia, Dutton's shadow minister for government efficiency, or Smoj, I guess, was photographed wearing a MAGA hat and saying this.

We can make Australia great again.

Even before Trump started tanking the global financial markets with tariffs, both Polyev and Dutton were keen to make it clear that they weren't directly aping Trump.

In fact, a clip of Polyev nonchalantly denying that he was Canada's Trump while eating an apple went viral on X.

A lot of people would say that you're simply taking a page out of the Donald Trump.

Like which people would say that?

Well, I'm served a great many Canadians, but...

Like who?

I don't know who, but...

Well, you're the one who asked the question, so you must know somebody.

Okay.

But passive-aggressively eating an apple isn't the same as vigorously denying any connection with Trump.

And it leaves you open for your opponents to make that connection for you.

But I have to tell you, speaking for myself, prior playground insults from the maple syrup manga don't bother me anymore.

Meanwhile in Australia...

This is a cut and paste from the United States.

This is cut and paste Pete.

Prime Minister, why would you invite Donald Donald Trump to Australia when you've got a Timu Trump sitting right opposite you?

So, between New Year's Day and Election Day in Australia, Peter Dutton's lead in the polls over the governing Labor Party shrunk from 10 points on first preferences.

He could soon be stepping into the nation's top job.

To nothing.

It is a time of reckoning for the Liberals following last weekend's unprecedented loss of seats.

In the same period, Pierre Poliev's lead shrank even more.

To blow a 30-point lead is a pretty catastrophic thing.

Both parties lost and both leaders were kicked out of parliament.

Both parties have conceded that the Trump factor played a part in their loss.

Mr.

Polyev continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau when the threat was clearly Mr.

Trump.

But both of them also kind of say it with a tone of who could possibly have predicted this.

The truth is, they should have.

Elon Musk is an unelected billionaire who deliberately surrounds himself both in person and online only with people who agree with him.

You know what people who aren't billionaires care about though?

The price of eggs.

I can't go to the grocery store without spending less than $250

usually.

This is the issue that won Donald Trump last year's election.

Again and again, polls say the economy is the issue for Americans.

Trump's promises of a better economy hit home.

While Musk might seem very important and popular with the blue tick people on the website that he owns, polls showed even before the election campaign began that Canadians and Australians did not like him.

His policy ideas are just as unpopular.

More than a third of Australians work from home, at least part of the the time.

Many say that it saves them money in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis.

These people are especially concentrated in the parts of the country Peter Dutton needed to win votes in to become the Prime Minister.

Similarly, the vast majority of Canadians support the CBC.

Even among Conservative voters, only 18% support totally defunding it.

Also, wanting to sack enormous numbers of public servants might be very popular on X, and yet, Don Jr.

Like I said, Twitter is not real life.

The rest of the country is a little different.

So, the Doge-style policies weren't popular.

But do you know what else isn't popular in Canada and Australia?

I'm proud of our country, and I am a nationalist.

It's a word that hasn't been used too much.

People use it, but I'm very proud.

I think it should be brought back.

Donald Trump, a self-described nationalist.

You know, they have a word.

It sort of became old-fashioned.

It's called a nationalist.

And I say, really, we're not supposed to use that word.

You know what I am?

I'm a nationalist, okay?

I'm a nationalist.

He wants to put America first.

We're putting America first.

It hasn't happened in a lot of decades.

He thinks that for America to win, everybody else has to lose.

I said, of course I'm unpopular with foreign nations because we're not letting them rip us off anymore, folks.

He thinks that America's military allies should pay for their own defense and wants to stop people investing anywhere other than the United States.

We subsidize a lot of countries and keep them going and keep them in business.

And I say, why are we doing this?

And this isn't new.

He's had this opinion for like 40 years.

All he's doing now is acting on it with tariffs and expansionist threats.

I think Canada is going to be a very serious contender to be our 51st state.

The US dollar is falling too because the world is losing faith in America.

President Trump has betrayed Canada.

He's betrayed Canada.

The administration's tariffs have no basis in logic and they go against the basis of our two nations partnership.

This is not the act of a friend.

Also, Trump always, always

throws his allies under the bus, or in the case of Peter Dutton, into the blades of a waiting helicopter.

So, what now?

In this three-part series, we've seen that social media companies are clearly causing serious problems for democracy, both inside and outside of the United States.

The free press in advanced democracies is in crisis, with big tech taking both their advertising revenue and their audiences.

Attempts by Australia to fix this through taxation and negotiation have failed.

So have attempts to build regulatory levies to control a rising tide of harmful misinformation.

That misinformation has infected not only voters, but our political parties, who seem to be struggling to grasp the difference between popular policies and fever dreams cooked up in Elon Musk's echo chamber.

Australia, with some support from Canada, has tried many ways to remedy this, but both countries are too small to take on the tech giants without help.

The European Union has also had big fights with tech giants over the years, but there's very little coordination between Australia, Canada and the EU on these issues.

Trump may may not want countries working together, but there's no way anyone is going to be able to fix this problem alone.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Cinnamon Nipart.

We're returning to normal programming in our next episode with a look at the man leading Trump's trade war, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

His backstory is extraordinary.

He's been a hero, he's been a villain, he's been a sympathetic figure and also one of the most hated men in America.

And all of that is even before he attached himself to Donald Trump.

Also, if you're in or around Newcastle, we've got some good news.

On the afternoon of Sunday the 18th of May, we're going to do another performance of our live show for people who missed out on coming to the Newcastle Writers Festival event in early April.

It'll be at the Young People's Theatre in Hamilton, and tickets are available now via a link in the show notes.

Catch you there.

Please don't do an insurrection.