Miranda Devine writes about the No Carbon Tax Rally:

WHOEVER put up a placard reading, “Juliar, Bob Browns bitch” behind Tony Abbott as he addressed the no-carbon tax rally in Canberra last week did the Opposition Leader no favours.

The opportunity was gleefully seized by his detractors and the government to divert attention from the Prime Minister’s broken promise not to implement a carbon tax. The fact that thousands of people showed up to anti-carbon tax rallies in Canberra and Melbourne was overlooked.

The protesters were, as Abbott said, a “snapshot of middle Australia”, most of them decent, ordinary Australians with a legitimate grievance, who had paid $35 each to catch a bus to Canberra from Sydney and $66 from Melbourne.

There were grandparents, mothers with prams, university students, and middle-aged men and women, who had taken the day off work, or closed small businesses.

Yet they have been derided in the media as “extremists”, “doddery irrelevant geezers”, “whites racist geriatrics”, “right wing nut jobs, “dim wits, “dumb morons”, “complaining rural bogans”, “hillbillies” and “dumb hicks”.

Greens leader Bob Brown and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet, who have made careers from encouraging questionable activism and violent protests, were “appalled” by Abbott’s involvement.

The Prime Minister was careful not to put down the protesters but her MPs went all out. Two likened them to the Ku Klux Klan. MP Nick Champion called them “misfits and oddballs” and “extremists with all the credibility of a Dungeons and Dragons convention”.

He wishes.

In fact, the protests were an authentic homegrown Facebook movement, started by an idealistic 21-year-old and his laptop.

Sydney real estate worker Gus Key says, “We’re just a bunch of people with ordinary jobs. I’m earning pretty much minimum wage. People paid for the buses [to Canberra] out of their own wallets.”

He is reluctant to give his real name because he has almost lost his job over his activism. But he reveals the genesis of the rally came on February 24, the day Julia Gillard stood alongside Bob Brown, and announced there would be a carbon tax.

Key saw red. “They lied about it. The politicians are elected to government to serve the people but they’re only serving themselves.”

He watched the news that night and, “as soon as I heard the words ‘People’s Revolt’ come from Tony Abbott’s mouth, I realised the best place to start a revolt was Facebook. Within a few hours it just went ballistic… With social networking once someone gets an idea, that’s it, people all over Australia get it.”

Within a couple of days the Revolt Against the Carbon Tax Australia Facebook page had 1000 members. Key enlisted the help of family friends, including Jan Millard, a 50-ish mother of four from Melbourne who describes herself as an “average suburban person”.

She booked buses and fielded emails from her kitchen table, with the help of husband Steve, who works in the building supplies industry, and 24-year-old son.

“We’re hugely offended at being called rednecks and right-wing extremists and people saying the Liberal party controls us.

“It was just everyday people who stood up … It was the most friendly, supportive crowd, “ she said of the Canberra rally.

“They picked up rubbish, they handed in lost property, our handbags were safe… there was no violence, no aggression.”

She said they had never heard of the League of Rights and Pauline Hanson was not invited, either.

As for “that placard” behind Abbott, “it was an aberration” in a sea of hundreds of unobjectionable signs. “None of us know that person [who held it up] but it was their choice to do it. We had nothing to do with it. But if that’s all people can complain about that’s pretty sad.”

Within days of the Facebook page launching, a new group called the Consumers and Taxpayers Association (CATA) became involved, the brainchild of Chris Johnson, 64, an ex builder and single father from the western Sydney suburb of Schofields, and three mates, also ex-builders.

His political activism began last year when he drove past his son’s old school and saw a hall being built. He and his mates were flabbergasted when they found out it cost $2million.

“We ballparked it at 740K. I thought, hang on.” He checked costs of other school halls built under Kevin Rudd’s Building the Education Revolution and found they, too, were wildly inflated.

So he organised last year’s Canberra protest against BER waste.

And on February 24, When Gillard announced the carbon tax, he was galvanised into action again.

“I was having lunch with friends at the Mean Fiddler. We talked about the carbon tax and said, ‘We can’t let it go, people are being hoodwinked. It’s going to affect everybody’s cost of living’.”

He set up a website, nocarbontaxrally.com, and relaunched CATA, which “stands against injustice to consumer and taxpayers.” He brought in radio station 2GB and joined forces with Key’s Facebook group.

“There’s nothing spectacular about me,” he says, “but I can talk.”

Conspiracy theorists claim the no-carbon-tax rallies couldn’t be a grass roots movement of ordinary Australians but must be fronts for the Liberal Party and big business. Spurious comparisons are made to America’s tea party and so-called “astroturfing”, the practice of fake grassroots movements working for big lobby groups.

But the protesters, and the friends and communities they went home to, have learned something from the savage misrepresentation of their position.

As we saw in the dying days of the Keating government, underestimating the depth of their anger is political suicide.