Libs new anti-vax SA president disappears into thin air
After winning the SA Liberal party presidency – the man who ‘opposes vaccinations and says bird flu is a conspiracy of big pharma’, refused to front media, Mike Smithson says.
Alex Antic has continued his enigmatic style of politics after being overwhelmingly elected as the state Liberal Party president and then disappearing into thin air.
Saturday’s vote inside a plush city hotel ballroom saw him elected with 119 votes to 73 against the far less fancied candidate Nicola Centofanti.
With all the buildup in his run for presidency and with all the turmoil in the Liberal Party, one could have assumed that he would front the media and outline his vision for a brighter future.
But Antic wasn’t seen by any of the attending journalists before or after the Annual General Meeting.
His last substantial public media appearance, to my recollection, was on election night when he agreed to come onto the 7News panel and left no doubt about his dim views of the party’s position back then after its devastating loss.
As explained previously in InDaily I’ve known Antic for many years outside the political sphere and that’s probably why he agreed to participate on election night.
But a text message congratulating him on his win soon after Saturday’s vote and a request for an interview was greeted with “thanks Smitho, but na, I’ll let others do the talking.”
Despite a concerted media stakeout of the hotel and car park, Antic managed to slip in and out unnoticed, which is his ultimate prerogative.
So, will this become a hallmark of his presidential style?
On election night I asked him where Ashton Hurn stood in the scheme of things after such a thumping loss.
She’s a staunch moderate in the party, as opposed to Antic who is a hard, far right conservative.
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“I don’t know,” was his short reply.
“Do you want her to stay there?” I asked.
“Of course, Ashton and I agree on a lot of things,” he said.
That’s well and good on election night but now we’re almost six months up the track, it could appear that Hurn was a backer of Centofanti who was standing to appease the moderates and left-of-centre conservatives.
She fronted the media as the party’s lead spokesperson on Saturday morning and reiterated the Liberals’ well-worn line that the party is broad church and welcomes different views, including Antic and his supporters.
The result hasn’t become awkward yet for the Liberals, but no one knows for sure which path Antic will take the party down.
Perhaps it will be business as usual, but I doubt it.
Returning to his election night comments, he said the Liberals should take notice of the One Nation’s result and of his own views.
“Are we talking about common sense politics?” he said.
“Obviously there are large numbers of South Australians tonight who would be characterised as hard right or far right and I don’t think that is the case.
“I think people want the Liberal Party to be the Liberal Party and stand for the values which we’ve always had.”
He also said, at the time, that he’d heard consistent rumours that the left faction would start their own breakaway movement and said that if so, perhaps that should happen.
You would think that if that rumour was correct, the left would be even more eager to split after Centofanti lost the race.
The result also gave Labor ample ammunition to open fire on Antic, Hurn and others.
Blair Boyer was trotted out as the attack dog, which was welcome relief for him fresh from seeing his electorate office adorned with graffiti from Stop the Chop protesters.
He’s now in that firing line as the new MotoGP Minister but was far more eager to dump on the Liberals.
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He accused Hurn of now being Antic’s marionette with puppet master strings being pulled to control the parliamentary leader.
She would find that laughable.
“This is the last rights being delivered on the South Australian Liberal Party,” Boyer said.
“The far, far, extreme right’s takeover of the Liberal Party is absolutely complete now.
“Alex Antic is a man who opposes vaccinations, who says bird flu is a conspiracy of big pharma and came out and defended someone who said homosexuality was demonic.
“Anyone in the South Australian Liberal Party with views which aren’t shared by Alex Antic has been booted out.”
Cool heads within the Liberal Party doubt Antic’s election will be the end of life as we know it, in fact, quite the opposite.
They say there needs to be a universe where both sides of the party work together.
Some say the moderates are licking their wounds after what they see as a “symbolic loss”, but it doesn’t need to be that way.
When Antic was asked at the AGM if he had any move to One Nation on his radar, he firmly put himself in the Liberal camp with a call for members to have more say on policy matters as a better path forward.
That doesn’t mean that grassroots members can form binding policies which need to be slavishly followed by elected members.
But those at the top hope this will be a wake-up call for grassroots party members and MPs to become more focused, energised and committed to the cause.
Hurn says the party was sent a very clear message at the state election, claiming that you only have to look at the polls.
“I’m just looking forward to getting back to those bread-and-butter issues,” she said.
It’s highly unlikely that the federal executive of the Liberal Party will have any appetite to intervene in SA’s internal issues.
After all, Antic was democratically elected via a prescribed party voting process which was open to anyone else to be nominated.
In other words, it is game, set and match whether Liberals like it or not.
Mike Smithson is weekend newsreader and political analyst for 7News.
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