Tim Wilson Franking credits retiree tax 2019 federal election

It will surprise no one that Australian Conservatives Senator Cory Bernardi and MP for Goldstein Tim “Freedom Boy” Wilson do not see eye to eye on a number of issues — the most obvious currently being marriage equality. While Wilson used his maiden speech in Parliament to pay moving tribute to his fiance, Ryan (“I know you have sacrificed so much for me to be here today, and we are only at the end of the beginning. For seven years a ring has sat on both of our left hands, and they are the answer to a question we still cannot ask”), Bernardi’s public statements on marriage equality are … a tad less romantic (“The next step, quite frankly, is having three people or four people that love each other being able to enter into a permanent union endorsed by society or any other type of relationship … In the future will we say, ‘These two creatures love each other and maybe they should be able to be joined in a union’.”).

So in response to news that Bernardi was robocalling nearly a million people to advocate a No vote, we hardly expected Wilson to be supportive. But he went a step further than critising the tactic, suggesting there was something more nefarious going on. In a tweet (swiftly deleted, but captured by The Courier-Mail‘s Paul Syvret) Wilson unloaded: “@CoryBernardi isn’t just using Robocalls to get people to vote ‘no’, he’s using it as a cloak to identify potential members & donors too”.

The deletion was noticed by other journalists, including Fairfax’s Adam Gartrell, who asked Wilson why he’d deleted the tweet. Had Wilson jumped the gun? Not a bit of it, Freedom Boy clarified, he was just “trying to get more in, [and] thought I could be tighter”:

 

Sure enough, Wilson’s original tweet was promptly replaced with a more fulsome take, adding that the ACL had done the same for the whole campaign:

 

Does Freedom Boy have some insider knowledge about the Bernardi campaign? Apparently not — he just knows. Crikey checked in with Wilson to see what had led him to the conclusion the robocalling had an ulterior motive. He gave us a word one answer: “Logic.”