Doubts have been raised about the United Australia party’s claim to have 80,000 members after more people complained about receiving emails welcoming them to Clive Palmer’s party despite not signing up.
The Liberal senator Eric Abetz first raised the issue in August after he received an email falsely claiming he had applied to join UAP, saying it appeared to be “a desperate attempt at spamming for membership”.
The UAP leader, MP Craig Kelly, said the email was the result of pranksters submitting other people’s details to the party, and claimed that a “couple of hundred” false applications had been weeded out by its checking process.
But Guardian Australia has spoken to two recipients who received identical emails confirming UAP applications had been submitted in their name, which they say did not make it clear that they would be counted as a UAP member unless they objected.
Both said their contact details were not publicly available. One is not even on the Australian electoral roll and is therefore not eligible to be a UAP member according to its constitution.
Taylor Rundell, a Labor member in Grayndler, received his first email at 2.35am on Thursday stating his membership application “has been successfully submitted and is currently being processed”.
“You will soon receive another email from us confirming your membership details,” it said.
“If you have any questions or queries regarding your membership please email us at membership@unitedaustraliaparty.org.au.”
When Rundell did not reply, he received a further email at 10.53am welcoming him to the party, thanking him for his “support for our party” and providing a membership number.
“I’ve never filled out any forms on the UAP website,” Rundell told Guardian Australia.
“My personal email address is not published anywhere … Although I do get a fair bit of general spam email.
“I was worried [by the claim I am a member]. I have very strong Labor values … I wouldn’t want to end up on the list as one of Craig Kelly or Clive Palmer’s people. I have no interest in their politics at all.”
Grant Turner, a resident of Casey in Victoria, also got the membership emails. Turner is a New Zealand citizen who has lived in Australia since he was two years old – but is not on the electoral roll as he is not an Australian citizen.
“How they came to get my email I don’t know – it was really gobsmacking to me … I thought it was extremely odd,” Turner said.
“There is not a chance in hell I’ve every corresponded with them or looked into being a member … it’s totally against my politics, and it’s definitely misleading to say I’m a member. It’s just rubbish.”
In November the UAP claimed that it had 80,000 members – which would make it Australia’s largest political party – a claim repeated in Daily Telegraph and Saturday Paper reports.
Kelly told Guardian Australia potential members were required to fill in an application requesting details including name, address, date of birth and social media accounts, after which the party used a two-step process to verify members, with a human checking applications for anomalies and the email.
“There have been some bad actors trying to put fraudulent names in there, of their friends and relatives, generally people being mischievous,” he said. “Our process is going to get 99.9% of those.
“Every application gets looked at by eye, someone checks that it looks genuine.”
Kelly confirmed that “members” are only “scratched out if they say this is not genuine, I didn’t make this [application]”, but did not say what proportion of people are counted as members only because they failed to reply.
Kelly defended the practice of opt-out membership, arguing it would be “unreasonable” to make people confirm their application again and “unwarranted, to catch a handful of bad actors”. “Not everyone responds to every email.”
Kelly said the party does not use commercial lists of contact details to spam potential members or other automated processes.
Asked who could have signed Rundell up at 2.30am, Kelly said he “wouldn’t be surprised” if rival political party operatives worked “that late in the morning”.
The Australian Electoral Commission has a role auditing membership to ensure they have 1,500 members for party registration, but parties with an MP in parliament, such as UAP, are exempt from the requirement.
The UAP also controversially claims former prime ministers Joseph Lyons, Robert Menzies and William Hughes as its own despite the trio having no link to the modern iteration of the UAP, which was registered in 2018.
