Musk is 'ready to bankroll' UK populist Farage. Is Australia next?


Musk is ‘ready to bankroll’ UK populist Farage. Is Australia next?
By Hans van Leeuwen
(The Australian Financial Review)

December 20, 2024


The Reform UK leader is potentially in line for a massive injection of support from the X owner. Could the billionaire be looking at Down Under, too?

London | British populist leader Nigel Farage has been memorably photographed drinking a pint of goats’ testicles for a reality TV show in Australia, and copping a banana milkshake all over his pinstripe suit while campaigning in Essex.

But a potentially more significant addition to his political photo album emerged on social media this week, taken at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Standing in front of an eye-catchingly tacky portrait of the resort’s owner is an awkward-looking trio: Farage, his Reform UK party’s money-bags treasurer, Nick Candy, and Elon Musk.

It’s not the kind of photo that would be easy to explain to a Martian – although perhaps the astronautically inclined Musk may one day get the chance to try. But it has sent shockwaves across Britain’s Labour and Conservative parties.

The reason? Tesla founder and X owner Musk pumped high-octane financial and tech support into Trump’s election bid and gave it lift-off. Now, he is mulling whether he might similarly rev up Farage’s momentum in Britain.

Newspaper reports have suggested Musk could use X’s British subsidiary to furnish Reform UK – which has only five MPs in the 650-seat House of Commons, but got 4 million votes in the July election and came second in 98 seats – with up to $US100 million ($157 million).

Farage says that no cheques have been written, and that even if Musk does decide to pony up the dough it will be nothing like this much.

But even half that figure would be a game-changer: it would still be four times the size of Lord Sainsbury’s 2023 donation to the Tories, which was the largest in UK political history. Come Britain’s 2029 election, all bets would be off.

That seems a long way away. But there’s an election happening a lot sooner than 2029 in another anglophone democracy: Australia.

As a thought experiment, imagine if Pauline Hanson’s One Nation was given $100 million and the keys to X. Politics certainly wouldn’t stand still.

Could Musk visit his populist-reformist zeal on Australia, too? Possibly even quietly encouraged by Mar-a-Lago’s Aussie habitués, such as Gina Rinehart? Looking at what interests him about Britain might help answer that question.

His comments on Britain often relate to political stories that have brought people onto the streets. Race-related summer riots, for example, prompted him to post that “civil war is inevitable”. The tractor protests against inheritance tax had him claiming that the UK was “going full Stalin”.

He also backed the petition for a fresh election, saying “the people of Britain have had enough of a tyrannical police state”.

Farage went on right-wing TV channel GB News this week with a chapeau for all this: Musk’s fear, he said, is that the two big parties are identikit, and that “the mother country of the English-speaking world is frankly going down the tubes”.

So far, so UK-focused. But Britain’s Daily Telegraph also reported that one of Musk’s chief concerns is with the country’s Online Safety Act, which puts onerous responsibilities on social media companies to police their own content.

Musk has also been watching this debate in Australia. When an X user posted on Australia’s disinformation bill in September, Musk retweeted it with a single word: “Fascists”.

For Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and even for Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, the concern should be that this kernel of antipathy could metastasise into the kind of antagonism he is venting at Britain.

Not everyone is so sure. Sophia Gaston, a London-based senior fellow at the Australian think tank ASPI, reckons Musk’s embrace of Farage reflects a particular beef with the way immigration and culture-war issues are playing out in Britain.

“My instinct is that Australia’s leaders would need to be seen to be failing consistently on these issues, and over a long period of time to attract a similar level of scrutiny,” she said. “And even then, Australia will not be regarded as the same lodestar for the future of the West as Britain will continue to be.”

So Australia’s political establishment might need to hope that Farage will keep hogging the Trump-Musk limelight on the world stage – allowing the election Down Under to dwell safely in the shade. (The Australian Financial Review)