Tickets to Tucker Carlson’s Australian speaking tour have been cut to less than a quarter of their original price, with hundreds of tickets still available for next week’s events.
In April, United Australia Party chairman Clive Palmer announced he was bringing over Carlson for a country-wide tour called the Australian Freedom Conference, presented by Palmer’s mining company Mineralogy.
In a media release spruiking the event, the former Fox News host spoke of his excitement at coming Down Under. “I know many Australians feel the same way, and I’m excited to meet them,” he said.
But it seems Australians might not be as excited as Carlson. With less than a week until the six-leg, multi-week tour kicks off, tickets prices appear to have been quietly but drastically reduced.
After Palmer’s announcement, media outlets reported that prices started at more than $200 to see Carlson and Palmer speak live.
As of Tuesday, tickets for the Sydney event on the Ticketek event page start at as low as $50 before transaction fees, less than a quarter of the asking price three months ago. Starting prices for the Brisbane and Cairns legs have been reduced to $80 and $98 respectively. Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth’s cheapest tickets have all been cut to $110.
There’s no public information on how many tickets have been sold, but the limited data available through the Ticketek website shows that there are still hundreds of seats available in Sydney and Perth.
At least one of the Carlson-headlined events has sold out. A three-course lunch in Canberra held at the Hyatt Hotel, not far from Parliament House, has exhausted all of its “limited” $190 to $1,900 tickets.
The tour is described as covering “a range of topics, including current and future threats to truth, democracies and personal freedoms”.
Carlson has been a bellwether for the views of the American right since he started as a conservative magazine writer in the 1990s. His career has seen him go from television commentator and host on centrist networks like CNN and MSNBC in the 2000s, to Fox News and launching his own website The Daily Caller. His show on Fox became America’s most-watched cable news program and was criticised for mainstreaming “racist and nativist talking points and promoting conspiracy theories”.
While Fox long put up with Carlton’s increasingly extreme views, it ultimately fired him shortly after settling a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems. Since then, Carlson has launched his own show on X, formerly Twitter, where he’s interviewed people ranging from Russian President Vladimir Putin to a man who claims he had sex with Barack Obama. His slip from atop one of the most powerful media companies in the world has been accompanied by a reduced cultural footprint that prompted a US publisher to cancel an upcoming Carlson biography.
Palmer, who has espoused anti-vaccine views in the past few years, ran a 2023 “COVID vaccines and effects tour” with Dr Peter McCullough, who has repeatedly made false claims about COVID-19 vaccines.
A spokesperson for Palmer did not respond by deadline.
