CPAC Australia Organisers Forced to Keep Venue Location Secret Over Interference Fears

Nigel Farage speaks at the CPAC Australia conference in Sydney, Australia, on Aug. 10, 2019. The Epoch Times

Organisers of Australia’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) are keeping quiet about the location of the upcoming event to protect venue managers from pressure.

In an emailed newsletter on Aug. 27, CPAC Australia Director Andrew Cooper, said a venue partner had been secured, but warned that the “left-wing cancel culture crowd” wanted to stop the event from going ahead.

“They will do everything to shut us down including harassing and threatening any venue willing to host us,” he wrote in the newsletter.

“We therefore will protect the venue from the irrational mob by not releasing the specific location until closer to the date. Thank you for your understanding.”

Cooper added that the event would be the “biggest and best” CPAC Australia yet.

CPAC’s Australian edition was first held in 2019—headlined by former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage—and then a scaled-down version was held in 2020 due to pandemic restrictions.

The 2022 event will feature Matthew Whitaker, former acting U.S. attorney-general, Michael Schellenberger, author and eco-modernist, Mick Mulvaney, former acting White House chief of staff, and will be hosted by Indigenous leader Warren Mundine.

Pressure From the Left

The event has faced heavy scrutiny and pressure from local media outlets and politicians from the centre-left Labor Party.

Prior to the inaugural event in 2019, then-deputy leader of the opposition in the Australian Senate, Kristina Keneally, called for the visa of British activist—and CPAC speaker—Raheem Kassam to be cancelled, claiming he had an “extensive history of vilifying people.”

While fellow party member, Senator Penny Wong, who is now the Australian foreign minister, claimed CPAC was not a conference that discussed harmless ideas.

“It has been an extremist breeding ground in the U.S. We do not need to import its antisemitism, white supremacy and bigotry to Australia,” she wrote on Twitter.

Further, the Attorney-General’s Department, at the behest of then-shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, launched an investigation into whether CPAC speaker, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, should register on the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme.

The Scheme was originally introduced to deal with ongoing political interference from Beijing and came in response to the outing and resignation of Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, who had developed a close relationship with Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo.

Cooper himself was asked to register on the Scheme because his non-profit group, LibertyWorks, was a co-host of CPAC along with the American Conservative Union. This was later overturned.

CPAC Australia will be held in Sydney from Oct. 1 to 2: https://www.cpac.network/register2022