(Image: Mitchell Squire/Private Media)

If you’ve recently seen something Matt Canavan has said, there’s a good chance it was when someone else shared it in outrage, not support. 

The Queensland LNP senator’s trolling social media posts and outlandish policy proposals seem to portray a caricature of a blustering, pro-mining booster without a sense of irony or self-awareness.

These outbursts seem to have an underlying strategy: build support and sympathy for one of Australia’s most elitist industries by cloaking it in the language of populism and by earning the ire of the left. 

By angering and frustrating his political opponents, Canavan is baiting them into inflating his profile when they amplify his extraordinary statements and requests.

Canavan’s current term started when he was elected as the second member on the Queensland LNP ticket at the 2016 double dissolution election. He received 2255 first preference votes, more than 10 times fewer than George Brandis’ 27,299. It was only during his second term that he was brought into the ministry and began building his profile. 

Despite his white-collar background — before being elected to Parliament in his early 30s, he worked jobs at the Productivity Commission, KPMG and as Barnaby Joyce’s chief of staff — Canavan has marketed himself as a senator representing blue-collar workers, particularly miners and those in the fossil-fuel industry.

The profile pictures of his Facebook and Twitter account show him wearing hi-vis gear with coal dust smeared on his face. He posts photos of himself doing backyard maintenance (again in hi-vis, for some reason). He does live interviews with a backdrop of wall-mounted tools. 

A big shift in Canavan’s antics came in 2020 when he resigned from cabinet to support Joyce, another larger-than-life political character. Since then he’s been emboldened to mix a pro-fossil-fuels agenda with right-wing populist rhetoric. He compared renewables with “dole bludgers”. He’s rolled out anti-China sentiment in his defence of fossil fuels, pointing to the need to defend against China while also pointing to that country’s pollution rates. He’s taken aim at bankers for being a major force behind the net-zero carbon emissions push. (His trolling rhetoric has been matched with support for policies like a $250 billion mining fund.)

His attempt to use popular talking points to support coal comes as the sector becomes increasingly unpopular and out of touch with mainstream Australia. The industry employs about 80,000 workers, compared with tourism’s 600,000 and agriculture’s 315,000. It’s run by big business, often multinationals, which cash in big profits while receiving billions in government subsidies. Most Australians support banning new coalmines and oppose subsidies for new coal-fired power plants.  

Outside of his fossil-fuel promotion, Canavan has adopted other talking points in the culture war: opposing vaccine mandates, opposing lockdowns (his Twitter bio reads “END THE LOCKDOWNS!”) and opposing the “wokeness” affecting Australia’s school curriculums (and the Wiggles). 

Canavan said the quiet bit out loud about his outrage strategy after he was criticised for a tweet asking whether the Taliban would “sign up to net zero” the day after Kabul fell in August: “[It] was meant to provoke,” he later said.

Following the lead of his Republican counterparts in the US Congress, the goal of this kind of political communication is less about convincing your base and more about infuriating those who don’t like you (a tactic derisively known as “owning the libs”, referring to liberals and progressives).

In an age when negative partisanship is a driving factor in politics, being able to rile and frustrate others has become a mainstay of conservative politics. This combined with the sentiment-agnostic nature of algorithms where any engagement — good or bad — is rewarded makes it a viable political strategy where attention is power.

This has worked: Canavan more than doubled his Twitter following and quadrupled his Facebook following since the start of 2020. On Twitter, furious people often quote tweet his trolling takes — exposing their audiences to his views. The number of times he’s been mentioned in the media has steadily ticked up too. He’s perfecting being a loud voice in Australian politics. 

His latest digital effort takes a leaf out of the book of his departing colleague George Christensen, launching a newsletter called “Not Zero”. His first missive lays out, in a meandering way, an argument against the government’s push for net-zero by 2050. He even gets personal: “The prime minister may very well believe in miracles, but I don’t think we should be gambling people’s jobs based on the existence of them.”

Canavan’s success doesn’t make him a political genius. He is on the losing side of an argument: most people in every electorate want more climate action. He’s backing an industry that is quickly running out of time. If the National Party wants to build its constituency then betting on an increasingly automated mining industry — which clashes with its ostensible voter base in the agriculture sector — is ill-advised. 

But that’s a problem for the future for the Nationals more broadly. Right now, Canavan has his sights set on his reelection. As long as he maintains support within the party — a minority party in a Coalition with outsized influence — he has no need to seek broader electoral support.  

Canavan is betting on trolling the left and the media into making him into a bigger and more consequential figure than he actually is — and the votes that come along with that profile.