Paid agitator Avi Yemini's plan to harvest votes for One Nation

We need legislative reform that requires paid political agitators to disclose their earnings, particularly when they profit from exploiting democratic institutions, writes Tom Tanuki.

SPEAKING TO 774 ABC Melbourne's Raf Epstein about his media campaign involving tricking voters using vote harvesting techniques in Victoria’s upcoming state election, Avi Yemini was typically glib from the beginning when Epstein asked:

“Are you trying to trick voters?”

Yemini replied: 

“What do you mean, trick voters? We’re trying to ‘free Palestine’.”

This was in reference to the "Free Palestine Party", only the first of several shell parties set up by Yemini and fellow influencer Monica Smit — all designed to redirect uninformed voters’ above-the-line upper house preferences to One Nation.

I released a YouTube video on the matter:

Raf Epstein is right to bring the issue to his audience’s attention, of course. The loophole is almost universally reviled and long since abolished in every other state. It likely survives only until the upcoming Victorian State Election, as the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) has warned that it’s too late to ditch it without jeopardising the integrity of the electoral system.

But why bring Yemini on to discuss his media campaign?

It points, yet again, to an enduring misunderstanding of what exactly figures like Yemini produce as an end product. Mainstream media is astoundingly stubborn in its misapprehension of this matter. 

Epstein described Yemini as a "right-wing provocateur". And that is his background, and that’s what he looks like with all his stunts, sure. Bringing Yemini on to ABC Radio to defend his position rests on the assumption that his goal is to defend any political position.

But Yemini’s end product is not a cohesive Far-Right political agenda. In fact, Yemini was railing against the same vote-harvesting tactic in 2022 when it was deployed by "preference whisperer" Glenn Druery, who created a shell "Sack Dan Andrews" party.

What Yemini creates, as I described above, is media campaigns. Then he produces popular hyperpartisan videos that generate subscriptions by filling them with headline-generating stunts. The most popular ones involve meddling in democratic institutions.

He is, almost by definition, a paid agitator.

Why bring a paid agitator on to ask if he is trying to trick voters, when he already said in his own videos that he’s trying to trick voters?

Epstein, or at least one person on his team, ought to be aware that the ABC is a core content pillar for Yemini’s audience. One can discover this by looking at his channel, where Yemini has produced no less than seven videos within the past month that all concern themselves chiefly with the ABC.

Naturally, Yemini rushed to reproduce the Epstein conversation into a YouTube video, which he released less than a day afterwards, entitled Leftists Having a MELTDOWN After I Exposed Their SCAM. The video is more or less just the entire conversation in video format, reproduced with a standard beg for subscribers at the end.

The video attracted 146K views as of the time of writing. That view count is a lot higher than the size of Epstein’s audience on any single morning. It’s Yemini’s best-performing video of the past month.

So bringing him on benefits him, while delivering no discernible matching benefit to the ABC Radio listener base, educational or otherwise.

I have frequently discussed techniques deployed by Yemini and Rebel News to generate income using what some now call "lawsuit entertainment" or "performative litigation". We are as in the dark as we were when I first wrote about the tactic here in 2022, concerning exactly how much money Yemini makes from these endless media campaigns. 

We know, by Yemini’s own admission, that just one of these campaigns during the lockdowns raised him at least $100,000. So it’s possible that every successful campaign earns his team around that amount. Lots of mainstream media exposure for a stunt is no doubt the clincher.

In my 2022 IA column on the tactic, I concluded:

'The point I’m making now is that legal action is not the point... If the funds accumulated for frivolous legal action exceed the costs of undertaking that action, who cares what the outcome is? It doesn’t matter if every legal challenge is thrown out...The money appears to be the goal.'

The misuse of group ticket voting is the same trick. Beyond meddling with the courts, he’s now meddling with the democratic institution of the electoral process. All for financial gain.

But as I concluded in my video, I’m ambivalent on the matter of anyone publicly meddling in group ticket voting. It should have been abolished in 2024, when the Electoral Matters Committee first made a conclusive recommendation to scrap it. Druery’s grubby hustle was the shot across the bow fired years ago. Yemini’s parasitism is what we get as punishment for our complacency, then.

Meddling in and misusing democratic institutions as a form of influencer entertainment is now a ubiquitous, global money earner. 

YouTuber Ethan Klein, who once valiantly (and successfully) fought to defend YouTubers' right to fair use of clips for commentary, is now a millionaire who babysits his large audience with rolling legal actions that financially starve, subordinate, or silence his anti-Zionist critics. This is what influencers do everywhere. This is the internet now.

Epstein asked Yemini about the group-voting ticket loophole:

“Do you think it’s a good system?”

Yemini replied: 

“I think it’s a bad system.”

“So why exploit it?”

“Well ... while it exists … don’t hate the player, hate the game. I hate the game.”

On the contrary, Avi Yemini loves "the game". He uses "the game" – whatever ailing democratic institution du jour he can parasitise for stupid stunts – to make money.

We need legislative reform that requires paid political agitators like this to disclose the amounts of their earnings from "donations" and subscriptions, particularly when they profit by exploiting democratic institutions.

I’ve made this case for years and I will continue to do so until even the Raf Epsteins of this world are aware that they’re dealing with a paid agitator, not a political provocateur.

Epstein asked Avi:

“Do you make any money out of forming the party?”

Yemini replied:

“No, I lose money, about $800.”

If Epstein can’t recognise the level of absolute bullshit he’s being fed here, he’s unfit to engage in a Yemini stunt. Pin Yemini down on the precise matter of his subscription revenue as a result of all this meddling. Only then is he worth bringing on air.

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.