Astro-Turf Campaign Thrown at ON

Lest anyone doubt just how scared the political establishment is of One Nation, merely look at the astro-turfed resources they’re throwing against the upstart centre-right party in the upcoming Farrer by-election. Not to mention the secrecy they’re trying to hide behind and the blatant hypocrisy.

The astro-turfing (the deceptive practice of hiding the sponsors of an orchestrated message or organization to make it appear ‘grassroots’) is typical of the deceptive activity the well-financed left have been allowed to get away with. The big question is whether voters will see through it, this time.

Not if the legacy media can help it.

Pauline Hanson’s support for Donald Trump’s war in Iran has become a central battleground in the Farrer byelection, with a big-spending advertising campaign seeking to link the One Nation leader to rising fuel and fertiliser costs hitting regional voters.

Several published polls show Climate 200-backed community independent Michelle Milthorpe and One Nation candidate David Farley running neck and neck, setting up a tight race in the sprawling southern NSW electorate before the May 9 vote.

Left-wing advocacy group GetUp has raised more than $400,000 for an anti-Hanson campaign – spanning television, billboards, radio and digital platforms across regional cities including Albury, Griffith, Barooga and Deniliquin – arguing global conflict has driven up petrol prices and farm inputs, with Hanson’s political alignment with Trump placed at the centre of the attack.

Golly, where is an ‘independent’ scrounging up what will be more than half a million dollars by the time the campaign is done?

‘Climate 200’ is the puppet organisation of billionaire idle-rich-kid Simon Holmes à Court, the avatar of Ayn Rand’s ‘Mitchell Layton’, “the little boy who couldn’t digest [daddy]’s money”. Never having had to work for his inherited fortune, Little Simon is occupying his empty life by playing Svengali to a harem of ‘independent candidate’ lefty women.

As for GetUp, that’s never been anything more than a Greenshirt, far-left bully gang. Initially funded with nearly half a million dollars of union members’ money, courtesy of former Labor leader Bill ‘Shifty’ Shorten, GetUp has relentlessly targeted the Liberals at every election campaign – at times, to the point of violence and harassment, as when Liberal MP Nicolle Flint was stalked by a GetUp activist.

Now, these lefty bully boys have got another conservative woman to stalk and bully.

The new anti-Hanson campaign has activated a growing membership base nationwide for the group, which grew by more than 100,000 people last month alone. It is aiming to spend at least $600,000 by the time the polls close – eclipsing its entire 2025 election budget.

Really: 100,000 members in a month? Does anyone really believe that? Who, beside the legacy media, is really deceived that this is anything other than old-fashioned Labor-style branch-stacking, where thousands of phantom ‘members’ are ‘signed up’, with their membership dues paid in full by shadowy establishment backers?

Surprise, surprise: GetUp recently hired Brittany Higgins’ bankrupted husband, David Sharaz, who infamously defamed former Liberal minister, Linda Reynolds.

These lot just love bullying conservative women.

Milthorpe, a 47-year-old teacher who whittled retiring MP Sussan Ley’s lead down to just 6.2 per cent at last May’s federal election, has warned her potential donors that she risks being outspent by One Nation’s advertising campaign, linking Hanson with mining magnate supporter Gina Rinehart and pushing back on suggestions she is affiliated with the inner-city “teal” independent movement.

If you don’t want to be affiliated with the teals, then you probably shouldn’t be taking money off their billionaire Svengali. And if you don’t want to be called out for the steaming hypocrite that you are, don’t prattle about your opponent being backed by a mining billionaire when you’re backed by a useless rich kid who inherited his fortune from his mining billionaire daddy – Australia’s first billionaire, in fact.

GetUp’s push includes 20 billboards across the electorate, television advertisements focused on cost-of-living pressures and the Albury hospital, and video-on-demand placements aimed at younger voters.

Targeted radio advertising has also begun, while the campaign has spread into metropolitan areas with additional billboards and bus stop placements. More than 40,000 anti-One Nation stickers were distributed nationwide within 24 hours, according to the group.

That’s a whole lot of money and power behind a supposedly ‘independent’ candidate.