The incoherence at the heart of the Australian anti-lockdown movement is due, in part, to the fact that it has no leaders, no structure and no real organisation. The importance of these conspiracy narratives is that they reiterate the alleged existence of a secretive, sinister ‘They’, and ‘They’ are lying to you. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much whether the conspiracy revolves around Premier of Victoria Dan Andrews working with the CCP to microchip the population via the vaccine and bring in the Great Reset, or Prime Minister Scott Morrison selling military bases to Pfizer and forcing people into death camps. The power of conspiracy theories rests on their emotional resonance rather than their narrative details. The fact that this ‘movement’ doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean it has no impact. It would not be accurate to call this a QAnon movement or far right movement or Sovereign Citizen movement, but there are elements of all of these and more. The content reflects the diverse paths through conspiracy radicalisation which each individual user is traveling down. Instead it is fragmented, with content reflecting narratives from QAnon or Sovereign Citizen, as well as New Age health tropes and fringe anti-CCP or religiously inspired conspiracy theories.
Taken as a whole, however, the content being shared does not spin a coherent narrative it is not building towards a wider, cohesive conspiracy theory which the community can latch on to. This content is recycled, derived from other geographical contexts – primarily the US – and often dates back to earlier in 2021 and even 2020. However, over a relatively short period of time, increasingly extreme conspiracy content is shared into the channel from a very broad range of sources – relatively little of which appears to have been created by Australian users themselves.
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Initial conversations largely focus on the local context and are closely grounded in practicalities, such as where to park before a protest or how to evade QR check-ins. Many of these channels have thousands of members, in some cases over ten thousand, and they have largely followed the same pattern of activity.
Nonetheless, it is a force which must be taken seriously.įollowing the outbreak of the COVID-19 Delta variant in Australia in late July, and in the wake of significant anti-lockdown protests in Sydney and Melbourne in August, a proliferation of new channels have joined the existing Australian conspiracy community on Telegram. Insofar as these groups could be considered a movement, that movement is incoherent, disjointed and disorganised. Conspiracy-focused anti-lockdown social media groups in Australia are experiencing a period of rapid growth, fuelled by widespread public health restrictions across multiple states, most notably in New South Wales and Victoria.
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