I used to work with Avi Yemini, the Australian Bureau Chief for Rebel News. He won’t mind me writing this (I hope!).
Today, fringe regions of the internet experienced a meltdown after Avi announced he would be seeking to establish a new political party in the lead-up to the Victorian state election.
Victoria is already a strange political landscape – even without its globally famous ‘Dictator Dan’.
Determined to ‘turn Victoria’s controversial voting system against the very establishment that preserved it’, Avi will be ‘taking a leaf out of the leftist playbook’ by adding to the ecosystem of strangely named micro parties that crowd the ballot box.
Avi goes into detail about this frustrating micro party behaviour, but the headline is that his new party will be called the Free Palestine Party.
‘Whether it is the far-left, the fringe-right, or certain immigrant cultures, there is one cause they cannot resist…’
And he’s right. Shouting, ‘Free Palestine!’ in the city near a university reminds me of a tourist who offered a chip to a seagull in Circular Quay and had to launch herself into a souvenir shop to survive.
If you build it, they will come! has transitioned into, If you shout it, they will vote!
Avi says he is imitating other groups in previous Victorian elections, but honestly, a ‘Free Palestine Party’ is effectively what’s happening in every local council election in the UK where burqa-clad candidates run under the Palestine chant while giving half-hearted ‘nods’ to the Green movement they are supposed to be representing. ‘Palestine’ is becoming synonymous with anti-Western, anti-British, pro-‘ism’ (pick from Marxism, communism, socialism, or Wokeism), and pro-migrant. Some candidates have given up pretending to run for Labour or the Greens and openly run as Palestine-oriented independents.
If Avi is trying to troll Victoria with this one, he’ll find he has the same problem as the Babylon Bee in that reality has already surpassed absurdity.
Avi writes: ‘They have been marching in the streets and campaigning online for years now. Imagine for a second that these groups walked into a polling booth and they saw “Free Palestine Party”. It’s genius.’
He adds:
‘By launching the Free Palestine Party, I intend to capture these votes and strategically redistribute them. We are going to flow our preferences to parties that want to free Palestine … from Hamas.’
I guess you have to read the fine print.
Like those eight pages of ant-font terms and conditions that come with your smartphone.
?✊?https://t.co/VctPGwJb6g pic.twitter.com/414L0Cduez
— Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) April 27, 2026
You can read the rest of Avi’s pitch here.
Beyond Avi’s aspirations for political power as head of the Free Palestine movement in Victoria, he is making a few serious points.
The first is the state of the Victorian political scene where there appears to be very little scrutiny over the way parties are named versus what they actually promise and deliver.
There is no easy way to control this, I understand, as parties must be free to shift around their preferences as they see fit. However, there have been cases in the past that seem to push the boundaries of common sense.
Civilised societies do not need to have the rules printed in detail, but there is a case to be made that politics in Victoria is no longer civil. We have communists who claim to champion the people’s voice. Antifascists who behave like fascists. Environmentalists who shill for Palestine. Anti-racists who believe in racial privilege in Parliament. A Labor Party that sold its workers out to foreign corporations. And Liberals doing laps of the Goldfish bowl – left, right, left right…
Avi’s other not-so-subtle point is the voting behaviour of intense political movements which have been radicalising our inner-city youth to a range of ideological causes.
Vote Climate! Vote Palestine! Vote Trans!
Each trend comes and goes with a fervour I haven’t seen since the school crazes of the 90s when we’d flip from elastics to Tamagotchis to Neopets to Beanie Babies to boy bands to Furbies (mine is still alive) to yo-yos and the Macarena.
At least our crazes were harmless to everything except our parents’ wallets.
The crazes today are political, intellectually shallow, miserable, destructive, and divisive. And you can’t take the batteries out when they degrade.
If nothing else, this campaign for the Free Palestine Party will highlight the problem of single-obsession politics which has robbed Australians of their grounded and balanced approach to political parties which used to favour a centrist point of view instead of the lean toward extreme activism which we are seeing emerge as a voting pattern among the young.
Avi says he has over 200 members already. One of his fans urged him to take his face off the flyer so they could build the movement faster. They have a point. Single-issue activist fringe parties are faceless and nameless. You’re supposed to go with the vibe, not the detail.
Considering most Free Palestine! protesters can’t name the river or the sea they want to be free between, I’d say Avi is in with an alarmingly good chance.
