Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few weeks, you will have been bombarded with ads from Clive Palmer’s new Trumpet of Patriots party, featuring party leader, Suellen Wrightson.

No doubt, like me, you asked yourself:

“Who the hell is Suellen Wrightson?”

My first instinct was, “Don’t know, don’t care.” But, early last month, when Ms Wrightson did a jtrain-wreck interview with Chris Kenny on Sky News my interest was piqued.

“Seriously?” says a bemused Chris Kenny, “You’re putting yourself up as the next Prime Minister? You’ve never even been in parliament!”

“Absolutely!” says a confident Wrightson, “…. the bar isn’t very high.”

“It’s a little bit rich for you to be telling the Australian people through a lot of paid advertisements that you’re going to be the next Prime Minister. It’s not realistic,” says Kenny, barely containing his mirth.

“They’re looking for someone else, Chris, and I’m more than happy to be that person.”

Of course, Ms Wrightson has absolutely no chance of clearing even a low bar to become the next Prime Minister of Australia. But the hubris of this completely unknown person putting herself up as the leader of our country, responsible for 27 million people and a trillion dollar GDP, made me think we really did need an answer to the question, “Who the hell is Suellen Wrightson?”

Whether male or female, surely someone applying for such an onerous and important job should have an impressive resumé.

Love them or hate them, at least the current candidates have some qualifications. Anthony Albanese has an economics degree and nearly 30 years experience in politics, while Peter Dutton has (an apparently hard-won) business degree, is a graduate of the Queensland Police Academy, and runs a multi-million dollar childcare business. As public figures we know who their families are, and even where they live. Transparency is the price you pay if you enter politics, and it’s fair that voters have a well-rounded idea of who they’re voting for; especially if that person aspires to be our next PM.

So, I went in search of Suellen Wrightson’s credentials and personal history and … zilch, nada. Her Facebook page is locked, her LinkedIn page tells us only that she is a “Chief of Staff” at Parliament House, Australia. Beyond that, there is absolutely no information.

On Twitter (X) we learn that Suellen is the Trumpet of Patriots’ candidate for Hunter. On Instagram, where she has just 234 followers, she tells us only she “loves Australia” and has posted a single post – a photo of herself with Senator Ralph Babet – for whom, I subsequently learned, she is (or was) Chief of Staff. Hardly an achievement to be proud of!

Earlier this year, another researcher on X (@SpamBotX, aka Bender) addressed the vexing question, “Who the hell is Suellen Wrightson?”. They made the following observation:

“What little can be pieced together comes from scattered public records, her own vague statements.

… She’s either squeaky clean or just too irrelevant for anyone to dig up real dirt. There’s no smoking gun—no arrests, no scandals, no juicy tabloid fodder.

… Wrightson’s origins are as thrilling as stale bread. She grew up in Swansea on Lake Macquarie, went to Swansea High School (per the same 2014 profile), and that’s it for the parental trail. No names, no occupations, no influence mentioned. Were they working-class battlers, or did they spoil her into thinking she’s prime minister material? We don’t know, and she’s not telling.

Most politicians milk their upbringing for relatability—Wrightson doesn’t. … Her parents are a non-factor …”

Trumpet of Patriots, as the name suggests, is Clive Palmer’s vehicle for introducing Trumpist politics to Australia. There can be no doubt about this. At a media event in February this year, Palmer said, unequivocally:

“The party believes in the policies of Donald Trump which has shown to be effective in bringing management back on track. Australia needs Trump policies, Australians want them.”

To be fair, that was before Trump crashed the stockmarket, started a trade-war with China and “mistakenly” deported a US citizen, Abrego Garcia, who has been a hard-working, respectable member of American society for 14 years, employed, married and raising three children, two of them disabled. There are troubling shades of the Martin Niemöller quote here: “First they came for the socialists …”

Yet, Wrightson is completely on board the MAGA bandwagon. She says:

“The world is changing. In the United States of America, government waste and corruption are finally being exposed.”

Around the world, alarm bells are sounding about Trump’s increasingly authoritarian, anti-democratic government, his indiscriminate use of executive orders, his hate campaigns against, and efforts to silence, anyone who opposes him, his and Musk’s profiteering, and his blatant disregard for the law. But Mr Palmer and Ms Wrightson have committed to bring this dystopian circus to Australia.

Those who lived through, or who have studied, the rise of Adolf Hitler and other dictators see frightening similarities in Trump’s exercise of power. And yet, this is the kind of regime Clive Palmer wants to impose on us – presumably with Suellen Wrightson playing the role of Trump, and Palmer, the jaunty billionaire sidekick – profiting from the anti-union, anti-regulation, low corporate tax, climate-change-denying, fossil-fuel-loving policies of his prime ministerial puppet.

I will not show, or quote from, Ms Wrightson’s disgraceful transphobic advertisements. But it’s worth noting at this point that one of Hitler’s very first moves, in a ‘practice run’ for the Holocaust, was to target transgender people.

As Brandy Shillace writes in “Scientific American”:

“The Nazi ideal had been based on white, cishet (that is, cisgender and heterosexual) masculinity masquerading as genetic superiority. Any who strayed were considered as depraved, immoral, and worthy of total eradication. What began as a project of “protecting” German youth and raising healthy families had become, under Hitler, a mechanism for genocide.”

Using a similar playbook, Trump is doing the same thing in the United States. Meanwhile, Wrightson – the stereotypical wolf in sheep’s clothing – is leading the charge here. It’s a despicable, confected, fear campaign based on misinformation. It targets a vulnerable group which deserves empathy and compassion, not contempt. But, folks, this is the way authoritarians roll and Ms Wrightson appears to be happy, not only to join with, but to lead this bandwagon of bumbling bigots.

Fortunately, Trumpet of Patriots (or as Palmer likes to pronounce it, Trump … pet of Patriots) will not gain enough votes to move Ms Wrightson and her family into The Lodge. Ms Wrightson and Mr Palmer aren’t stupid; they know that, despite what they’re saying publicly. Their campaign is predicated on the lie that they expect Ms Wrightson to become prime minister.

In fact, winning isn’t really the aim of Trumpet of Patriots. The aim is to gain a great deal of publicity for policies that are advantageous to Palmer’s already swollen coffers. By exposure and repetition, the strategy is to widen the Overton Window, so that policies and ideas which might once have caused political damage to a political candidate, become acceptable – perhaps even advantageous.

It benefits no-one except the rich to follow the Trumpist agenda, but Trump and Palmer (and before them, Hitler) cleverly run a parallel fear campaign against minorities – first demonising them, blaming them for all the country’s woes, and then promising they will punish them. People – ordinary, “good”, nice people – vote out of fear, not realising (or caring) they are voting against their own economic interests.

And here is the most important thing to remember: for leaders like Trump, Milei (Argentina), Orbán (Hungary), Bolsonaro (Brazil), and yes – Hitler – to gain power, requires the support of millions of ordinary people. Not monsters. Not moustache-twirling villains. Not creepy bald men stroking weird bald cats. Just ordinary punters who fall for the lie that there are people in the country who threaten their status, their safety, their security, their livelihoods, their culture, the purity of their race, and the moral upbringing of their children.

It’s a tale as old as time; and it’s just that – a fairytale. But not one with a “happily ever after.”

In this story, if the guy (or gal) with the loud voice, the big ideas and the common touch isn’t elected, those people (the ones who have been ‘othered’) will “ruin the country” – maybe eat your cats, eat your dogs, or sneak into public toilets disguised as women and rape your daughters. None of it is true, of course. It’s a vicious game of dehumanisation and demonisation for fun and profit.

The Holocaust didn’t happen only because of Hitler (though he was certainly the instigator) – it happened because millions of absolutely ordinary, nice, normal non-Jewish Germans either supported him, or did nothing to oppose him. You can read more about the complicity of ordinary people here, at the Holocaust Encyclopedia and in Robert Gellately’s (2020), Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis.

In fact, Gellately could be writing about Trump, or Palmer – or Wrightson – when he says:

“Subsisting just below the surface of the Führer’s grand vision was a jumble of incoherent and protean ideas – a mix that party leaders used to their own advantage, opportunistically alternating between positions, depending on their audience.“

Does Wrightson understand the playbook she’s working from? I doubt it. But it doesn’t exonerate her. To be clear, I am not accusing Ms Wrightson or Mr Palmer of being Nazis and I don’t think they are. I’m simply observing that their political tactics, their targeting of minorities, and their nationalist, populist approach, are spookily similar to that adopted by the National Socialist Party in Germany in the 1930s.

Reviewing How Ordinary People Became Nazis, Marcus Colla says Gellately provides:

“… a vision of a community that plainly demarcated its lines of inclusion and exclusion, and into which violence and racial engineering were baked. For those it embraced, it was emancipating, even exciting. For those it excluded, it was lethal.”

Ms Wrightson may not be (is clearly not) a Nazi, but I suspect that’s a quote that will reverberate with the transgender people Ms Wrightson has besieged in a barrage of advertisements and misinformation on television and online.

Unlikely as Wrightson’s elevation to Australia’s top job might be, I felt it was incumbent on me, as a researcher, to find out more about Suellen than she was clearly willing to divulge. Sure, I had a glimmer of hope that I might find some ‘dirt’ (I didn’t). What I found, instead, was exactly the kind of person who tends to be complicit with authoritarian regimes – a dead-set ordinary, aspirational Australian from Sydney’s western suburbs; born into the working class and now living, not rich, but in moderate middle-class, aspirational comfort, in the Hunter Valley, in or around Cessnock. This is exactly the same kind of profile that fits a vast majority of Trump supporters.

It’s no coincidence. The Wrightsons are right in the pocket of the kinds of people extremist right-wing authoritarian leaders around the world are targeting in their efforts to dismantle democracy. But, of course, the lie they are telling is that they’re saving democracy. I think it’s quite likely Suellen Wrightson actually believes that.

Suellen Wrightson is no Donald Trump – but she is exactly the kind of person who is swayed by propaganda, motivated by fear and self-interest, and inhibited by a lack of education and critical thinking skills. And now she has taken upon herself to spread the MAGA virus to others.

I did try to engage with Ms Wrightson on Twitter (X) by politely correcting some of the misinformation she was posting. Her reply was to the effect of: “Clearly, I don’t care what you think.” And then …

So much for free speech.

Lest I be accused of “doxing” Ms Wrightson, please be assured that everything I have discovered about her and her family is publicly available on social media, in newspaper reports and media releases and on ancestry.com. I haven’t hacked into anything. I haven’t engaged a private detective. I’ve researched, but I haven’t snooped. I uncovered far more information than I think it’s fair to disclose (nothing scandalous, and I neither looked for, nor found her home address). I’m a researcher, not a stalker.

I’ve only published what I think is relevant to Ms Wrightson’s candidature, to get some semblance of a three-dimensional view of the woman who aspires to be our next PM and her husband, who will be our new “first bloke” None of this would have been necessary if Ms Wrightson had not been so secretive about her personal history.

Suellen Wrightson was born Suellen Marree Buckley in Sydney’s Western suburbs, the youngest of six daughters, two of them, twins.

During Suellen’s early childhood, her father was a bricklayer and a former under-21s footballer of some repute. Her mother was a nurse. They married very young and were raising their family in and around Campbelltown before moving north for a better, more prosperous life. Suellen’s Dad seems to have been the typical, Anglo-Celtic, working class, Aussie bloke; a man who liked to tinker in his shed, and with one of those great Aussie nicknames like Davo, Robbo, Gazza or Bazza. Suellen’s father was not much interested in politics himself, but supportive of his youngest daughter’s political aspirations.

Suellen’s grandfather served overseas during the World War II and was well aware of the dangers of fascists like Hitler. Her grandmother told her grandchildren stories about the atrocities that took place under Hitler and about Auschwitz and similar camps – the result of the dehumanisation and persecution of minorities.

As I suspected, the family was Irish Catholic – but non-practising since discovering a member of the wider family group was abused by a priest.

In the 1970s, the Buckleys moved from Narellan to Swansea, and, later Cessnock. One relative recalls that, at the time of the move to the Hunter Valley, there were 12 people living in the Buckleys’ three-bedroom Narellan home. It was certainly not a privileged upbringing.

Suellen attended Swansea State High School. There is no record I can find to show Ms Wrightson has anything more than a bog-standard high school education. If she has an economics, law or business degree, or anything else that might qualify her to run a country with a trillion dollar GDP, she certainly isn’t crowing about it on the internet.

The family survived the horror of the Newcastle earthquake in 1989, with at least one family member trapped at their place of work for a time.

After school, Suellen met and married coal-miner, Dean Wrightson, and went on to have two children – both of whom had the typical Aussie school-kid job as casual workers at the Kurri Kurri KFC.

My rationale for disclosing this publicly available, and completely harmless, non-incriminating information is simply to show how very, very ordinary the Wrightsons are. Indeed, if you met them at a barbecue and managed to stay off the topic of politics, you’d probably go home talking about what delightful, normal people they are.

The Wrightsons are a large, well-known, family in the Newcastle area – comfortable, but not necessarily rich. At one stage Dean was working as an under manager (responsible for supervising safety and compliance underground) at the (now-closed) Donaldson coal-mine near Newcastle. I understand from a mutual acquaintance that he also worked at the Austar mine near Cessnock – where his former workmates are reportedly greatly amused by the idea of Suellen being Clive’s new poster-child. (OK, I snooped a bit.)

Both the Wrightsons and Buckleys are large, loving, law-abiding, close-knit ‘typical Aussie’ families.

Some members of Suellen’s family are die-hard football fans. Suellen and Dean don’t mind a day at the footie, but also enjoy things a little swankier. In 2017 they became Gold Members of the Mudgee Golf Club.

Like Suellen, Dean Wrightson’s online presence is virtually nil. His Facebook is locked and he doesn’t appear to have a LinkedIn profile. In fact, the Wrightsons seem to have instructed their families on both sides to lock down their Facebook profiles and remain schtum. Most, though not all, have complied. (I suspect when this is published, more pressure will be brought to bear on the non-conformers from the leader of the party that stands so proudly for “free speech.”)

Now, if Dean Wrightson were only a spouse of an aspiring MP, I’d say, good on him for protecting his privacy. But Dean Wrightson has also been involved with Clive Palmer as a United Australia Party candidate, and, we are told, will be the husband of our next prime minister. So, I reckon he’s fair game.

In 2019, when Suellen Wrightson was Assistant NSW State Director of the UAP, she, Dean, and their daughter, Meg, all ran as UAP candidates in the election. And yet, even as political candidates, there is no personal information about Dean, and little about Meg, publicly available.

Despite Clive Palmer splashing out for a double-page spread in The Australian featuring his UAP candidates for the 2019 election, neither Dean’s nor Meg’s photos appeared. My suspicion is they were simply “place holders” so that Clive could say he was running candidates in every electorate. No matter, as The Guardian reported that year, that 40 per cent of the UAP candidates (including the Wrightsons) didn’t live in the electorates in which they were standing.

“Don’t worry, Clive!” I can imagine Suellen saying, “We’ll just put Dean and Meg’s names down for those vacant candidacies – I’ll tell them they won’t have to do anything. It’s not like they’re going to win.”

Am I too cynical? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

Luckily for Dean he didn’t find any more popularity at the ballot box than he did with his former employees at the Donaldson coal-mine. To be fair, perhaps there were employees at Donaldson who thought Dean was a great bloke and drinking buddy, but those posting on the ex-Donaldson coal-mine Facebook group don’t appear to have held our future “first-bloke” in high regard.

“Small man syndrome, that fucker,” says one former Donaldson worker.

“Douchebag syndrome,” adds another.

“Lord Farquhar,” says a third, riffing on the mood and referencing Lord Farquaad the diminutive tyrant, from the movie Shrek.

A fourth makes a violent comment which I don’t countenance and won’t repeat.

A fifth laughs that when Wrightson visited her place of work, her role as a manager required that she feign a friendly smile.

Does it seem mean-spirited to post this? Not when you consider this is the man who, according to his wife, will soon be Australia’s next “first bloke” and representing us at all manner of official, diplomatic and charity events.

Suellen Wrightson has a long association with Clive Palmer and his various political parties She joined the Palmer United Party when it was first formed in 2013 and ran, unsuccessfully, as a PUP candidate in that year’s Senate election.

Prior to this she was associated, in some capacity, with the Liberal Party. But, as our frustrated anonymous researcher on X (@SpamBotX, aka Bender) posted earlier this year:

“Suellen Wrightson’s tenure with the Liberal National Party (LNP) is a murky, underwhelming footnote in her stumbling career—a brief and poorly documented stint that exposes her as a political drifter with no staying power or substance.

Unlike her more publicized roles with Clive Palmer’s outfits, her LNP phase is shrouded in ambiguity, with scant evidence of impact or commitment.

Wrightson’s association with the LNP predates her 2013 jump to the Palmer United Party (PUP), but details are frustratingly thin. She’s described in passing as an “ex-Liberal Party member” in a 2014 Newcastle Herald profile, suggesting she was active in the NSW branch of the Liberal Party. Beyond that, it’s a guessing game—dates, roles, and achievements are either unrecorded or too trivial to matter.

No precise start or end date exists for her LNP membership. It likely spanned the early 2000s to around 2012-2013, before she defected to PUP. This vagueness alone screams incompetence—serious players document their credentials. Wrightson can’t even pin down her own history.”

Later, from 2012-2015, Wrightson served as a “United Australia Party backed, independent” city councillor in Cessnock before resigning in 2016 to take another tilt at Federal politics with Uncle Clive’s Palmer United Party (PUP). And then, once again, in 2019 – this time with her camera-shy family in tow. 

It pains me to question another woman’s ability for independent thought and agency, but Uncle Clive is emerging very much as something of a Svengali to Wrightson’s Trilby in this narrative.

“… in the medical field as a chronic disease management co-ordinator working closely with diabetic and asthmatic patients in addition to performing medical practice accreditation.”

If Ms Wrightson does, indeed, have impressive credentials in the medical field, why aren’t they on LinkedIn? For someone, like Wrightson, whose CV appears to suggest nothing more than a basic and unremarkable high school education, you’d think the prestige of a position in the medical profession would at least warrant mentioning the name of the company she worked for. Unless, of course, all that vague language is just a bit of “smoke and mirrors.”

Wrightson also appears to have dabbled in real estate at Andrew McGrath’s First National Real Estate, Swansea. In fact, she is still listed as an agent. But like her other “careers” there are no achievements to be found online. As “Bender” says, “No listings, no sales – no presence.” Wrightson’s “Rate My Agent” profile, which was live a few weeks ago is now mysteriously blank – although it didn’t feature any negative (or positive) reviews.

So far, Ms Wrightson’s political career has not been a rip-roaring success, but you have to give her 10/10 for tenacity. Despite winning only 625 of of 97,020 votes in 2019, and a measly 400 votes in her 2022 tilt for a Senate seat, Ms Wrightson is back in 2025, confident she’ll be the next PM. I’m imagining her packing her bags ready for a move to The Lodge and looking forward to long, lazy weekends at Kirribilli, entertaining Mr Trump and Mr Musk in style – maybe she or Dean can whip up a fish curry.

Suellen reminds me of one of those super-confident contestants convinced they have the chops to win American Idol, absolutely sure they sing better than Adam Lambert, but, in fact, warbling in an off-key impersonation of Tiny Tim; not a rock star, just a normal, everyday, pitchy punter.

Referencing the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt spoke of “the banality of evil.” Evil rarely comes packaged like the villain in a Victorian melodrama. More often, it comes in the guise of perfectly nice, astoundingly ordinary people, who’ve bought into a populist cause and ideology which purports to serve the ‘ordinary bloke’s’ interests. In fact, such causes are inevitably a Trojan horse for the vested interests of those who care for nothing or no-one but themselves, but need everyday punters to get them into power.

That’s not to paint everyone from Ms Wrightson’s demographic background with the same brush. While some family members are on board, at least one member of Ms Wrightson’s close family is virulently anti-Trump. In 2020, long before Wrightson went full-MAGA, her relative wrote :

“This clown #PresidentDonaldTrump refused to denounce white supremacy at his first presidential debate with Joe Biden! It’s bad enough that he’s disrespected every diverse culture & their historic value …”

I thank them for reminding us that being kind, or choosing self-interest at the expense of others is a choice – it’s not pre-ordained by your family, education, upbringing, or social status.

People – some people – buy into hateful campaigns because of their pre-existing prejudices. Because they have been “battlers” and now have a modicum of wealth they are inclined to guard it jealously. Things that are untrue, or damaging to others, can seem reasonable, because many people live in echo-chambers, and because their education has not equipped them to think critically or to fact-check and evaluate information with an open mind. (I always suggest that you should research to try to prove yourself wrong.)

Some people. Nice people. “Salt of the earth” likeable people: that “lovely couple that lives next door” or that “nice tradesman who did such a great job on the driveway” or “that pretty blonde real estate agent who showed us the house.” Without them, the billionaires, the Trumps, the transphobes, the xenophobes, the would-be dictators, would have no traction; would pose no threat.

Having done a deep dive, I think Ms Wrightson is one such perfectly nice, delightfully ordinary, likeable person. And that’s a real worry – not because she will become our next Prime Minister, but because Clive Palmer is exploiting that relatability to convince a lot of people that what he has her selling is perfectly reasonable: good for them, and good for our country. It’s a fairytale, but not one with a happy ending.

Chrys Stevenson

See also: “How election candidates are boosting The Noticer, a news site promoting neo-Nazi ideologies” ABC NEWS, 14 April 2025

See my follow up post: Trumpet of Patriots – Honour Among Thieves?