‘Cookers’: Albo’s fury on ‘far right’ Senator

Anti-vax LNP Senator Gerard Rennick has been labelled a “cooker” by Anthony Albanese over his conspiratorial posts about childcare “destroying the family unit”.

The Prime Minister took aim against Senator Rennick and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton on Sunday, questioning whether the outspoken senator’s spray over childcare worker payrises formed part of “sensible debate” under Mr Dutton’s leadership of the Coalition.

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Senator Rennick claimed “institutionalised Childcare is a sacred cow” for Labor which would “destroy the family unit” and “brainwash children early with the woke mind virus”.

Mr Dutton has previously backed the Senator, saying Mr Rennick “demonstrated he’s not afraid to take up the fight in order to defend the values of the LNP”.

Speaking in Adelaide at the weekend, the Prime Minister said this commentary needed to be called out.

“I think the shift to the right that we’ve seen from the LNP over a period of time and over Peter Dutton’s leadership, where you have, you know, cookers like Senator Rennick, being able to express views that are completely out of touch with modern Australian society need to be called out,” Mr Albanese said.

“This isn’t a fringe dweller. This is someone who will be sitting in the Senate this week and voting on legislation.”

Mr Albanese questioned how this kind of commentary contributed to “sensible debate” while referencing Barnaby Joyce’s comments likening voting to firearms and telling rally goers to “load that magazine”.

“How that contributes to sensible debate is beyond me,” Mr Albanese said.

“But apparently it’s all fair game under Peter Dutton leadership, or lack thereof.”

Mr Joyce has since apologised for his comments.

Labelling Senator Rennick a cooker is an echo of a barb thrown by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen just last month, when Mr Bowen and the Senator got into a mud-slinging match.

Last year Mr Rennick tweeted that gravity was an ignored cause of climate change and claimed “CO2 is a gas, it cannot trap convection”.

In the speech to Senate in 2022, Mr Rennick claimed Covid-19 vaccines were unsafe, ineffective, and compared the biochemistry process to “cooking sausages on the barbecue and you see blobs of fat merge together”.

He has compared vaccines to AIDS.

Mr Rennick’s comments about childcare referenced the federal government agreeing to a large pay increase for childcare workers this week.

Workers will get a 15 per cent pay rise – at a cost of $3.6bn – over the next two years in exchange for their employers agreeing to limit fee increases until after the election, and accept longer-term, union-negotiated pay deals for their workers.

Mr Rennick said a pay rise for childcare workers was “pouring fuel onto a bonfire as far as cost of living is concerned”.

“I’m not against helping families make ends meet, but government support for children should go to the parents not the unions or the rent seekers in the childcare industry,” the Senator tweeted.

“The further the government is away from our children the better.”

Senator Rennick was booted off the party’s senate ticket last July, losing his spot to LNP treasurer Stuart Fraser by just three votes.

In his appeal to the LNP’s Disputes Committee he claimed there were “grave irregularities” and he had been unfairly treated during the preselection bid.

After the committee rejected this in August, Senator Rennick took his own party to court.

He sought orders from the court declaring he was entitled to appeal the August decision, along with a declaration that his entitlement to appeal was not lost by “reason of effluxion of time.

But his Supreme Court action was dismissed in June.

Judge Glenn Martin said the only questions before the court concerned “the capacity to appeal the August decision”, and it was not about failing to comply with preselection processes.

“It is, in effect, a complaint that a breach of the Liberal National Party of Queensland’s (LNPQ) rules has been committed,” Judge Martin said.

“As such, the applicant cannot maintain any action directly founded upon that complaint except to enforce or establish some right of a proprietary nature.

“No such right is contended for.”

Judge Martin said it was open to the LNP State Executive to determine the question of appeal period “as it sees fit”.

“While I will not make a declaration about what might be a reasonable time limit for appealing a decision, I am content to decide that this appeal, lodged seven months after the decision, is outside any reasonable time limit,” he noted.