Chapter Thirty-Four: Oneegs

You cannot sell to a movement without a figure inside the movement, and the figure was Dave Oneegs — David Oneeglio — who by then had ninety-six thousand followers and a public history of his own: Independent Australia would describe him as a far-right grifter found guilty of running a fake charity, after the Sydney Morning Herald reported in April 2022 that almost five hundred thousand dollars in flood relief had been frozen in bank accounts in a conspiracy-theorist scandal.

A man found to have run a fake charity, vouching for a man banned by the Federal Court of Australia, to an audience selected precisely for its refusal to look up either of them.

Read that sentence twice. It is the single most efficient description of the modern Australian grift economy available in the English language.

And it was not a one-off. He is on the record as a promoter and associate across the whole Indonesian portfolio — named alongside Warren Stokes, Sean Strecker, Tejal Dave and Henry Kaye in connection with Nesara Bay City, Gesara Bay City and Harbourside City in Lombok.

He posted his congratulations to Jamie McIntyre and all his clients in Seminyak, publicly, to ninety-six thousand people. He appeared on the network's shows. Jamie appeared on his. They interviewed each other. They shared channels.

A villa, Canggu, 2021. Invented.

Two men on a daybed with a ring light and two phones.

Oneegs is talking. Oneegs is always talking. Oneegs believes — that's the thing about him, and the thing Jamie found simultaneously useful and unbearable. There is no distance in him at all between the thing said and the thing held.

And Jamie McIntyre — who has not sincerely believed a proposition since 1988 — sits there nodding, and does what he has done in every room since Glen Innes, which is to identify the largest available grievance and stand behind it.

Afterwards, when the light is off, Oneegs says: "Mate, this is bigger than property. You know that, right? This is civilisational."

And Jamie says, "Absolutely, brother."

And then, when Oneegs has gone, he says to Warren, without lowering his voice much:

"Get him on the Lombok launch."

Warren, deadpan, not looking up from his phone: "He'll want to know about the permits."

"He will not want to know about the permits."

And Warren Stokes laughs — one short exhale through the nose, the laugh of a man twenty years into a joke.

Because Jamie was right.

He never asked.