Former colleagues paint Alex Antic – the rabble-rousing Liberal senator who rolled female frontbencher Anne Ruston in a preselection battle – as a nice guy turned “Trumpian”.
Antic, a backbencher known for his “anti-woke”, anti-vaccine mandate and anti-transgender stance, nabbed the party’s number one Senate ticket spot in South Australia on the weekend.
Ruston, a former cabinet minister, was relegated to number two. The move rekindles criticisms of the Liberal party’s “women problem”, while Antic said the “gender card” was “nothing but a grievance narrative”.
Antic’s website focuses on issues including transgender, vaccination, abortion, and “woke indoctrination”. He is a regular on Sky News, attacked Australia’s pandemic response on far-right US shows, and was set to MC a Donald Trump Jr speaking tour (before it was cancelled).
Before he was elected to federal parliament, Antic was on the Adelaide city council.
The former councillor Anne Moran worked closely with him and said he seemed like a “moderate, rational bloke”
“He and (Greens councillor) Rob Simms and I were allied on council, and you couldn’t get a greater spread of politics than that,” she said.
Moran said rolling Ruston was a “pointless exercise” because he would still have nabbed the second spot, and that it seemed like a “display of flexing his conservative muscles”.
“I think what he did to Anne Ruston was foolish politics. She’s a female, she’s fairly conservative, and the second ticket is a sure bet,” she said.
“You should watch who you tread over on the way to the top. Make more friends.”
Simms entered the council at the same time as Antic in 2014, and went on to become a federal Greens senator. He is now a Greens MLC in the South Australian parliament. Simms said Antic’s politics had shifted from when he was a councillor.
“I think the politics that he’s representing in Canberra are Trumpian and out of step with mainstream values,” he said.
When they met a decade ago he was “really pleasant, with a good sense of humour”, Simms said.
“We got on very well. I found him to be a good colleague. We had different views in that first council term on some issues but I found him good on heritage issues, parklands protection, and he was good socially.”
In his maiden speech to federal parliament in 2019, Antic railed against “the tyranny of political correctness”, renewables, and so-called woke agendas.
There is a long South Australian history of battles between the wets (moderates) and the dries (conservatives). The moderates – with figures such as the former cabinet minister Christopher Pyne and former premier Steven Marshall at the helm – dominated for years but in recent times there has been a power shift to the right, with acrimonious preselection and council election battles.
Antic was reportedly part of a push to get religious conservatives signed up to the party.
Antic said at the time he was “proud to lead that charge” of the right. “Together we are going to make the Liberal party great again,” he told Indaily.
But there are Liberals (including conservatives) who see Antic as at the vanguard of a third force in the party – not a traditional conservative movement, but an “alt-right” one.
While on council Antic made headlines for raising concerns over the weight of “love locks” on a university footbridge, on the federal stage he notably defended Golden Gaytime ice-creams from a push to change their names, and railed against being forced into quarantine when he refused to reveal his vaccination status amid the Covid pandemic.
The state’s most senior Liberal, the opposition’s Senate leader Simon Birmingham, said he had supported Ruston for preselection.
“She is a dear friend, but more important than that a highly effective colleague,” he told ABC radio.
“She was an effective cabinet minister in the previous government, she’s an outstanding part of our leadership team, and she will continue to be so as a senator into the future.
“The thing about democracy is you don’t always have to like the outcomes,” Birmingham said.
Antic took the top spot with 108 votes to Ruston’s 98. The sitting senator David Fawcett took the third spot, which is also considered winnable.
The Liberal MP Jane Hume, who co-authored a review after the Coalition’s 2022 election loss which recommended targets for women, said she was “disappointed” and that it was a “mistake” not to have Ruston leading the ballot.
Antic is often thought of as the new Bernardi, in reference to Liberal turned independent Cory Bernardi, but Bernardi says Antic is his own man and that his policy positions are “traditional Liberal party positions”.
“It’s about less intrusive government, more freedom, some societal standards important to families … these are inherently mainstream positions that are being undermined and deliberately targeted by the left within the Liberal party and the broader community to demonise him,” Bernardi said.
In response to a series of questions, Antic – a vocal defender of freedom of speech – replied: “Who cares?”
“Suffice to say that whatever you write will be heavily scrutinised by my lawyers. Just so you are aware,” he said.
