In a large room of the Sydney Hilton hotel, Dick Smith addressed a small crowd holding a red plastic pitchfork.
“Hopefully I’m going to be attacked by people over this,” he said in front of his newest doom-laden public service ad, featuring the narrator of the infamous Grim Reaper Aids awareness ads of the 1980s.
The former electronics magnate, explorer and relentless self-promoter is launching a $1m advertising blitz that says immigration and population growth – rather than structural issues of inequality, low wages or poor housing policy – are primarily to blame for the country’s woes.
As befits a campaign for a small Australia, it was a small audience – no more than 20 if you exclude the press and the PR minders, all of them white and all over 50.
Smith spoke to very real issues of economic anxiety, house prices and congestion that weighed on the minds of his attendees.
A large banner behind him showed protests, firebombs and railed against the 1%. “Australia’s wealthiest 1% own more than the bottom 70%,” it said in a tone that would have made Bernie Sanders blush.
Yet the root causes of this economic inequality were largely ignored even as Smith admitted they could not be solved by cutting the immigration rate by half.
The millionaire stressed that his campaign was not about race but he failed to point out why immigration, rather than infrastructure or inequality, was a cause of the 1% hoarding the wealth that they do.
Structural solutions came second to the spectre of the “150 million-person” Australia, he said.
“You can’t have all this inequality without pitchforks coming out,” he said, holding his prop aloft.
“The inequality will still persist even if you reduce immigration to sustainable levels. But to try and spread [the 1%’s wealth] amongst 99% when you’ve gone from 24 million to 150 million … is impossible.”
Smith is also pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy, higher company taxes and the creation of an inheritance tax but admitted that none of these would feature in the million-dollar spending blitz.
He also took time out to lambast the ABC for not covering his views.
“Is there anybody from ABC television here?” he asked. “I can’t get any coverage at all … I’m desperately hoping somebody will ring the ABC and come up with some attack over it so at least we’ll be mentioned there.
“That’s the only way you’re going to get coverage,” he said, though he thanked reporters from News Corp and Fairfax Media, while his speech was broadcast live on Sky News.
The ad itself was more slip-slop-slap than Grim Reaper, playing mostly on the imagery of skin cancer awareness ads. Population growth was shown as a “a cancer cell” that would “grow forever until it kills the host”.
It then transitioned into footage of crying children, desert landscapes and the Korean war, predicting “famine, disaster, war and collapse” as the end result of population growth.
One audience member asked how we should best “stop people breeding”, while Smith also laid out some further potentially “eccentric ideas” to curb world populations.
“I’m suggesting that we concentrate our overseas aid on educating women,” he said. “Once you educate women, the birthrates come down and you give them control of their fertility. That’s something we should be doing.”
In the audience, the event’s few attendees murmured that the turnout was lower than they expected.
“I heard about this on Macca’s Australia All Over on Sunday,” said one, referring to the weekend ABC radio show. “I thought everyone was coming. Where are they?”
