Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

There are always grandiose claims being made by these people. At the heart of conspiracy theories, including the COVID conspiracy theories that mobilise this lot, there is an attempt to undermine confidence in science, rationalism and public institutions. It is a key tool of the far right. They're marshalled historically, as I've said, by people like the League of Rights, who used to hand out theories about antisemitism to dodgers at the country shows, but now these pseudoscientific claims are made about the COVID pandemic.

There's always the pseudoscientific language. They always resort to things that sound important but aren't. There are always discussions about gene therapies and if something is really going on here, when something is different and new. They're always used. If you can encourage people to believe this set of conspiracy theories, they're part of the radicalisation pathway that is designed by people who sit at the heart of these, and sometimes people don't know that they've been engaged in a radicalisation pathway. If you can encourage people to believe this nonsense, to accept the set of premises that underline the fetid swamp of conspiracy theories that these come from, you can get them to believe anything.

The radicalisation pathway that is engaged here by these propositions is a pathway to violence and social disharmony. It is a deliberate pathway engaged on sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, because the unwitting dupes of this kind of conspiracy theory often don't realise that they are on a conspiracy pathway. These are the kinds of ideas that mobilised the recent terrorist incident in Wieambilla. They were attracted to COVID conspiracy theories. It was a core part of what they believed. We need to be very careful indeed.