Shorten says Bannon’s texts about Palmer show he ‘must have been doing something right’

Former Labor leader Bill Shorten has declared that Australian democracy must be protected from secretive foreign interference after a former top strategist to US President Donald Trump was revealed to have bragged about convincing tycoon Clive Palmer to spend tens of millions of dollars on the 2019 federal election.

Palmer’s spokesman emphatically denied that Steve Bannon had influenced Palmer, contradicting text messages from Bannon released by the US Department of Justice as part of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

This masthead revealed on Sunday that in a message sent to an account appearing to belong to Epstein on May 20, 2019, two days after Labor’s shock election loss, Bannon told the convicted paedophile: “I had Clive Palmer do the $60m anti China and anti climate change ads.”

There is no further evidence to support Bannon’s claim.

The exchange placed the 2019 election within a wider conversation about a populist disruption of mainstream parties, climate policy and international institutions, suggesting that Bannon viewed the Australian campaign as part of a broader sequence of political interventions.

Palmer’s spokesman Andrew Crook later said: “Absolute beat-up. Someone talking themselves up. It’s not true at all.”

Convinced that Palmer’s blanket anti-Shorten advertising contributed to the party’s shock 2019 defeat, Labor subsequently changed electoral finance laws to prevent wealthy individuals such as Palmer from spending so much on election campaigns.

Shorten, who led Labor from 2013 to 2019, said: “An important principle is to know what forces were at play, and to protect our system in the future.

“Steve Bannon claimed that he influenced Clive Palmer’s 2019 campaign. Clive Palmer denies working with Steve Bannon. They both can’t be right.”

Shorten, now vice chancellor of Canberra University, said: “I think Churchill once said if you have enemies, you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life. Wear it as a badge of honour!

“I worked hard, but I didn’t realise that our ambitious reform agenda resonated across the Pacific.

“If Steve Bannon wanted to stop me from being PM, then I must have been doing something right.”

The official Labor review of Shorten’s 2019 defeat found that the “large size and targeted nature of Clive Palmer’s campaign had a significant negative effect on Bill Shorten’s popularity and on Labor’s primary vote”.

“Palmer’s advertising blitz strongly amplified the Coalition’s anti-Labor message to economically insecure, low-income voters,” the review found.

Greens communications spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young described Bannon’s claims as an attack on Australia’s elections.

“Seriously, when is either the Labor or Liberal parties going to stand up to the right-wing US rot and defend Australia’s democracy,” she said.

Brendan Walker-Munro, an associate professor at Southern Cross University who has written on foreign interference, said even if it was accurate, he did not believe the alleged communication between Bannon and Palmer would fall foul of Australia’s foreign interference laws.

He said the laws are designed to address influence by foreign governments and political parties, meaning an unbroken chain would need to exist between any attempted influence by Bannon and the Trump administration.

If Trump had instructed Bannon to meddle with Australia’s election system, then that would be a different matter, he said.

He said political operatives in different countries – for example, in British Labour and Australian Labor – often have “completely innocent interactions” that are not the target of Australia’s foreign interference laws.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General’s Department said it could not comment on individual matters.

“Broadly speaking, a person will be required to register under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 if they undertake registrable activities,” the spokesman said.

“Registrable activities include lobbying, communications, or disbursement activities on behalf of a foreign principal in Australia for the purpose of federal political or governmental influence unless an exemption applies.”

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme says people should register with the scheme if they conduct “registrable activities in Australia on behalf of a foreign principal for the purpose of political or government influence”.

The scheme’s website says activities requiring registration include “meeting with a registered political party or candidate, to influence their policies on a matter of public concern or their relationship with a foreign principal”.

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