Last week in Melbourne, footage of protestors camping on the steps of Parliament opposing Victoria's pandemic laws showed a car pulling wooden gallows for full effect.

This was a threatening act as disgusting as it was disturbing.

There have been tens of thousands of Australians protesting lockdowns, vaccine mandates and other COVID-related measures and I am not going to tar all the people who are protesting with the same brush.

But we must find a way to reach out to Australians who feel they are disenfranchised by the disruption in recent years.

Whether it's far-right extremists, QAnon theorists, anti-vaxxers or mask refuseniks, the plethora of weird coalitions and even stranger bedfellows is a signal we should be very concerned about how disinformation on the internet is undermining the social contract.

And too often the internet is not the bringer of light and rationality and progress that we thought it might be. It is the opposite.

Like Alice in Wonderland, we have all fallen down the rabbit hole of the digital world that is the internet at some time or another.

For some though, they keep burrowing many without the ability to stop and people find themselves in the most dangerous of places, surrounded by the most evil and sickest of people.

I have seen the most heinous things written about myself, my family, friends and acquaintances and it has taught me there is a lot of sadness and madness in our world. I am also in no way suggesting that I am a victim of some vast conspiracy. There must be room for robust political debate online, and in broader society.

However, post-truth political theories and QAnon-style conspiracies do share in common a lack of reality.

In the wash-up of the 2019 election, one of the most staggering truths that emerged was the astronomical in Aussie terms anyway amount of money Clive Palmer spent to slander all and sundry.

It amounted to $83 million, including $8 million in the last week of the election campaign alone.

He bought full-page ads in newspapers on pages that have never been sold before. He used his time and money to plot and plan for power.

He's not Robinson Crusoe there, but on the scale and speed he's a unique beast in Australia. He may not have won a single seat but by Clive did win his own little war on democracy.

He has reared his big ugly yellow billboards again, already having spent $2.6 million for online ads in recent months.

His protege Craig Kelly has also been out and about, talking nonsense at anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine rallies around Australia, and online.

We used to say we don't have American-style politics in Australia, that Trump was a phenomenon you would only see in the US, that billionaires like the Koch brothers could never swarm elections here with tens and tens of millions of dollars.

We naively thought we were different. We also never thought American conspiracy theories would infect the Australian political bloodstream. We were wrong.

What worries me about the minor parties like United Australia Party and One Nation is not that they exist. It's a free country after all. It is that they target the people who feel what might be described as "status anxiety".

It is not the people who are doing it truly the hardest who are attracted to the right-wing third parties, rather a group, often men, who feel that their status has been eroded over time.

Often they are people who are looking for meaning in all the wrong places. We shouldn't and can't give up on people who have gone down the rabbit hole.

The great English journalist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote his poem Recessional, which included our beloved war remembrance 'Lest we forget', in 1897.

The phrase became common in Australia after the Great War and has remained an adage to this day.

Lest we forget was conceived as a promise to remember, and an instruction, a command to future generations not to forget the generation who gave their lives so we might live ours in peace.

And do not forget what they fought against.

Not to forget the dangers of fascism and tyranny.

Not to forget the poisonous politics of inciting the majority against a minority, of targeting people for persecution on the basis of where they were born, what god they worship or who they love.

Not to forget the ruin and death and devastation that lies at the end of that road.

The confronting question before us now is have these post-truth protesters forgotten?

Do they not know the death and hate and pain and misery symbols such as swastikas and salutes represent?

Or do they not care? Are they sufficiently disengaged from reality to think these words and symbols are just a neat little shorthand for their grab-bag of grievances?

Either way, this is a serious threat to our social cohesion and one that needs to be taken seriously. It needs to be examined, called out and confronted. All of us have a role to play in that.

(This is an edited extract of a speech given at the book launch of "QAnon And On'.)

This opinion piece was first published in The West Australian on Wednesday, 24 November 2021.