Last week, Liberal Senator Gerard Rennick described “institutional childcare” as a form of brainwashing that destroys the family unit and infects children with the “woke mind virus”.
Rennick is hardly an outlier in the Coalition or even in Parliament generally in terms of his age, background and experience leading into politics.
But he is concerned about getting heard and feeling stifled within the established confines of a major party, having been elected as an LNP representative for a six year term in Senate in 2019.
And one such issue (among many) he’s deeply concerned about is the issue of institutional childcare, and the 15 per cent pay rise the Albanese Government recently outlined for those who work in childcare. Rennick is upset that taxpayers will be slapped with the bill of this pay rise, which will overwhelmingly go to women who are earning little more than the minimum wage, with nine in ten such childcare workers being female.
Rennick earns around $211,000 a year annually as a Liberal National Party senator for Queensland, almost four times that of the average childcare worker.
This week, Rennick quit the Liberal National party and outlined plans to register a new political party called ‘People First’. He wrote on Monday morning that he resigned from the LNP on Sunday to run as an independent senator “so I can continue to fight for the Australian people.”
His resignation followed being booted from the LNP federal election senate ticket midway through last year, as well as a failed push to appeal against the change, alleging “gross irregularities” in the process.
So far, Rennick’s defection is receiving far less attention and criticism than that of somebody else who recently quit a mainstream party – Senator Fatima Payman, who until recently represented Labor for Western Australia, before moving to the crossbench.
Rennick has shared links to his website, a new party logo, and told the Sydney Morning Herald that with his time left in the Senate potentially limited, he would “rather use that time to talk about really important issues rather than just play tiddlywinks”
He said that those issues include addressing the structure of childcare support, which follows concerns he raised in 2020 on the need for a parent to stay home over sending kids to childcare.
Other concerns Rennick has raised during his first term in the Senate include claims the Bureau of Meteorology is engaged in a conspiracy to rewrite climate records to fit in with a “global warming agenda”. He once called superannuation a “cancer”, and had plenty to say about vaccine in 2021, resulting in the former prime minister Scott Morrison suggesting Rennick listen to medical experts on vaccine science.
Rennick isn’t without an audience.
His outrage has generated great results on social media, seeing his Facebook following increasing by 70,000 in less than a month at one point, after sharing a series of stories of people claiming to have experienced adverse vaccine side effects.
Now in 2024, with his new party registration pending, Rennick doesn’t want to be known for the “vaccine shit”.
“I want to stir the pot and get off the whole … vaccine shit,” he told AAP. “I didn’t intend to become a cheerleader for the vaccine stuff.”
He doesn’t believe change can be done sitting with a major party – stating that you go to Canberra and “you’re not doing anything.”
He doesn’t believe he can push his ideas and generate the kinds of conversations he wants.
But compared with Senator Payman, Senator Rennick looks set to be able to defect, take his cross-bench seat and even launch his party off being elected as an LNP senator, without the constant attacks on his character, credibility and ‘right to do so’ from the mainstream media.