Donald Trump Junior applied for a visa to visit Australia in May. Last night, the Australian government finally consented to give him one. The refusal to say, for more than a month, whether the visa would be granted forced the organisers of Trump Jr.’s speaking tour to postpone his commitments. 

There can be little doubt that the delay was political. Trump Jr is the son of the 45th president of the United States who also happens to be the runaway frontrunner Republican candidate in the 2024 presidential election. But stalling for so long made the Australian government look unprofessional, partisan, and dangerously illiberal.

So who is responsible for this diplomatic dog’s breakfast?

The handling of a visa for the son of a former president of the United States is a matter for Australia’s Ambassador to Washington, Kevin Rudd. Rudd had a reputation for running a dysfunctional office when he was prime minister. According to the Australian newspaper, his colleagues dubbed him Captain Chaos. 

When Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed his great friend as Ambassador to Washington he was taking a risk. As Sky News host Chris Kenny predicted when Rudd presented his ambassadorial credentials, ‘It won’t be smooth sailing.’

The final decision on Trump Jr’s visa rested with Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil who has the discretion to refuse it under the Migration Act 1958. But Rudd’s boss, Foreign Minister Penny Wong would have also been highly influential because she is responsible for foreign relations including with a possible future Trump government. She was one of those who stepped in to end Rudd’s first prime ministerial tenure when he was knifed by his colleagues in favour of Julia Gillard.

The first hint that the public got that there was a problem with Trump Jr’s tour was last Saturday evening, 1 July, when at 8 pm, Troy Bramston, a columnist with the Australian, published an opinion piece calling for Trump Jr’s visa to be denied.

Bramston has never made any secret of his links to the Labor Party. He touts on his author bio that he is a former ‘principal speechwriter’ for Rudd and an ‘adviser to the Rudd government’. Given the catastrophic implosion of Rudd’s tenures as prime minister, this is a claim of dubious value.

Bramston set out in his column, the trumped up (pun acknowledged) grounds for refusing the visa. ‘This is not about denying freedom of speech or de-platforming a person with controversial views,’ Bramston claimed, ‘but about upholding the integrity of our immigration laws as they relate to non-citizens. Everybody should have the right to express their views,’ he wrote, ‘provided they do not encourage illegality, engage in hate speech, sow division or propagate harmful conspiracy theories.’ Bramston then used the rest of his column to propagate a few harmful conspiracy theories of his own, engage in hate speech, sow division and encourage illegality.

According to Bramston, it was ‘completely unacceptable to allow Trump Jr to come to Australia to give voice to the undermining of democratic elections, disrespecting the rule of law, denigrating people based on their race, religion or sexuality, and provoking political unrest’. He claimed that Trump Jr was ‘an anti-democrat’ who encouraged ‘the overturning of an election’.

Bramston prides himself on being a history buff so he no doubt knows that there is a long history of US presidential candidates contesting the outcome of elections including Samuel Tilden, Grover Cleveland, Al Gore, and Hillary Clinton all of whom are or were Democrats. Clinton still refuses to accept that she lost the 2016 elections and the Democratic National Committee falsely claimed for four years that Trump only won the election due to collusion with Russians. That has undoubtedly undermined confidence in US democracy as much as the January 6 protests in 2021.

The second objection was that Trump Jr is ‘a conspiracy theorist’ who spread ‘misinformation’ about the Covid-19 pandemic. Spreading misinformation about the pandemic is something that everyone from President Joe Biden and his medical advisor Dr Anthony Fauci to Bramston himself has done. Who could forget Biden and Fauci pretending that the Covid vaccines would prevent people from getting infected, seriously ill, or dying when, according to the official figures released in NSW, the vast majority in that state who died of Covid were vaccinated and boosted? Bramston’s column endorses lockdowns when all the evidence shows that their harms far outweighed any imagined benefits.

Bramston spreads misinformation when he writes that the government denied entry to Australia to Novak Djokovic ‘after failing to meet vaccination requirements’. Then minister for immigration Alex Hawke said, ‘Mr Djokovic complied with the law in all respects, posed only a negligible risk to others, and was a person of good standing. He had a valid medical reason for not being vaccinated. He stated Mr Djokovic was being deported because his ‘presence could inflame anti-vaxxer sentiment’.

Bramston claims that Trump Jr has invoked ‘white supremacist, homophobic and anti-Semitic language and imagery’. Believe it or not, this is a reference to the use of a picture of Pepe the Frog, which is supposedly a symbol associated with white supremacy. An article in vox.com explained that ‘Donald Trump Jr. has a white supremacist problem’ because, ‘He tweeted and Instagrammed a “Deplorables” meme that included Pepe the Frog, a symbol now used by white supremacists and the alt-right.’ Trump Jr’s defence was that ‘he thought Pepe was just a funny frog in a wig’.

Would Bramston object to Hunter Biden visiting Australia? Biden Junior has pleaded guilty to federal tax and firearms charges, is alleged to have received millions of dollars in influence-peddling schemes, admitted to extremely dangerous driving. allegedly filmed himself smoking crack behind the wheel of a car and is being sued for defamation by the owner of the store where he left his laptop to be repaired while falsely insisting that the laptop was not his, but that it had been stolen or hacked.

Reading Bramston’s article it is hard to escape the feeling that we are listening to ‘His Master’s Voice’. But regardless of who inspired the column, it met with a mix of derision and horror from readers of the Australian.

‘Give us a break Troy’, wrote Graham. ‘We are adults remember and as such can make up our own minds!’ 

‘The Left is becoming increasingly totalitarian,’ observed another.

‘I remember reading 1984 as a cautionary tale, not a DIY guide. What happened,’ wrote Dwight.

Within a day or two, there were 459 comments, and less than a handful supported Bramston.

On Monday, sources close to Turning Point said that O’Neil had advised Turning Point that Trump Junior’s visa would not be issued. They had already sold 12,000 tickets to DTJ’s tour, equalling $2m in revenue. But Turning Point made no public announcement until Wednesday hoping that the government would change its mind. At 5 pm on Wednesday, Turning Point advised people that the tour had been delayed and the events would be rescheduled.

‘It seems America isn’t the only country that makes it difficult for the Trumps,’ they said, telling customers to hold on to their tickets as the dates for the shows would have to be changed.

Conservative Political Action Conference founder Andrew Cooper said Labor repeatedly delayed visas for conservatives and the visa for Nigel Farage’s tour last year was granted only a day before his departure. The tactic makes it difficult for event organisers to make bookings and sell tickets to events.

Within minutes of Turning Point announcing that the events had been postponed, a spokesman for Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said, ‘It’s up to Donald Trump Jr whether he comes to Australia, but there is no immigration impediment to him coming here.’ Was it political skullduggery or incompetence on the part of the government? Almost certainly the former said Andrew Cooper. It seems the government only wants to listen to government-funded voices and is doing its best to silence its opponents.