Chapter Twenty-Six: Nine Members

The party was founded in a rage and died in a spreadsheet, which is the most Australian sequence of events imaginable.

The 21st Century Australia Party. March 2013. Logo the same yellow as the seminars.

The policies — and this is the thing nobody expects — were not mad. Not all of them. There were positions on infrastructure bonds and decentralisation and regional rail and the tax treatment of small business that a competent independent could have run on in half a dozen seats.

He did not write them and could not have defended them under questioning for ninety seconds.

But he commissioned them, and paid for them, and when he read the draft he felt something he had not felt since the early seminars, which was the sensation of being taken seriously.

That is the engine of this chapter. Every other scheme in this book was about money.

The party was not about money.

The party is the one place in twenty-five years where you can see, without squinting, the boy in the kitchen looking at the man in the short-sleeved shirt and thinking: one day I will be on the other side of that table, and it will not be about cattle, it will be about the country.

Which makes what happened worse, not better.

The form

To register a federal party in Australia you need five hundred members. Not five hundred supporters. Not five hundred people on a mailing list. Five hundred members, contactable by the Australian Electoral Commission, who will say yes, I am a member when asked.

The first application went in with nine.

An office at Southport. Three people. A form on the desk. Invented.

Kate Ellery, twenty-nine, an actual political science degree, joined because she believed some of the policies:

"Jamie, we can't lodge this."

"Why not."

"Because it needs five hundred members and we have nine."

And Jamie McIntyre — who has by this point sold approximately fifteen thousand people on the proposition that a man with no capital can own real estate — looks at the form and says the sentence that is the skeleton key to his entire life:

"Lodge it and see what they say."

Kate stares at him. "They're going to say we have nine members."

"They might not check."

"It's the Electoral Commission. Checking is the entire job."

"Kate." He's smiling. He's not angry — he's never angry at this stage, he's delighted, because he can see something she can't. "Nobody checks. Do you know how many times in my life I've been told somebody's going to check? Everybody says they're going to check. Almost nobody does. And the ones that do, do it two years late, and by then you're somewhere else."

As a description of the Australian regulatory environment between 1995 and 2015, it is appallingly accurate.

It was not accurate about the AEC.

Thirty phone calls

The second attempt was the one with the phone calls.

They got the roll up. The machine could produce five hundred names. It could not produce five hundred human beings who would defend a name to a stranger on the telephone.

The AEC took a sample of thirty and rang them.

Six of the thirty said they were not members.

Thirty separate lounge rooms. Thirty separate evenings. Thirty telephones.

"Good afternoon, I'm calling from the Australian Electoral Commission, just confirming your membership of the 21st Century Australia Party—"

And a man in Wagga, a woman in Caboolture, holding the phone slightly away from their ear:

"Sorry. The what?"

Six of thirty is twenty per cent. Extrapolate across five hundred and the party does not exist.

How did six people end up on a roll they knew nothing about?

Nobody ever needed to forge anything.

There was a tick-box at the bottom of a seminar registration form. The tick-box was pre-ticked. The text beside it was in six-point type and said something like I wish to receive information and support the 21st Century movement, and six thousand people at events across four states left it exactly as they found it.

The hessian sack. The council weighbridge. 1988.

Nothing new is ever invented.

The number

And then the followers — something in the order of a million on the socials, of whom an audit put roughly three per cent human.

The bots were not there to persuade anybody. Nobody in the history of the internet has ever changed their vote because an account with no posts followed a politician.

The bots were there to produce a number.

And the number went on a slide, and the slide went into a room, and in the room a man said: we are a movement of over one million Australians.

Reg Tolley on the catwalk.

Now here's a line I like.

There was a weeping eye on one of them and everybody at the rail could see it and the price went up eleven cents anyway.

Deregistration

6 June 2018. Failure to maintain five hundred genuine members.

He announced he would sue the AEC for gross incompetence. He said it in a release and twice on video and once on a livestream where he held the notice up and tapped it with the back of his hand for emphasis.

No proceeding was ever filed.

Kate left in the September. Her exit interview was standing in his doorway with a box of her things while he was on a call, and him covering the phone and saying, with what she was quite sure was real affection:

"You off, darl? Good on you. You'll do well."

She said: "Jamie. Did you ever actually want to be in parliament?"

He thought about it.

That's the thing she couldn't get past afterwards — that he thought about it, that he gave her an honest answer, that at the moment of maximum indictment he was sincere.

"No," he said. "I wanted to be at parliament. Walking in. I never thought about the bit after."