Crikey framing this as a 'conspiracy theory'
How Australia got its own ‘Epstein Files’ conspiracy theory — and the unexpected politician fighting its spread
Extract: A Liberal politician shocked parliament by claiming to have a list of 28 high-profile paedophiles. Now, a One Nation senator has become an unlikely crusader trying to debunk the conspiracy theory.
At a rally in Sydney’s Hyde Park, a man in a black t-shirt that proclaimed “punish the 28” stood just in front of another man whose t-shirt warned “Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required”.
The event, in September 2023, was ostensibly being held to oppose a Yes vote in the Voice to Parliament referendum. Yet another t-shirt read “yeah, nah”. The nation would soon vote on the Voice proposal, but the participants’ signs betrayed a broader range of interests.
Nearby, someone held a placard stating “expose the 28”. Later, as speakers took the stage to rally the crowd against a Yes vote, two other protesters appeared in front of the speakers, holding white cardboard signs with “punish the 28” in black marker.
The “punish the 28” signs referred to a list not dissimilar to the Epstein Files and the feverish speculation that surrounds it. Both are documents at the centre of sprawling conspiracy theories about child abuse rings at the highest levels of society. In the United States, the Epstein Files trace back to the very real crimes of Jeffrey Epstein from legal proceedings and investigations in the 2000s.
In Australia, our version, the “28”, emerged in 2015. Sitting in one of Parliament House’s anonymous wood-panelled rooms during Senate estimates, Liberal Party senator Bill Heffernan announced the existence of a document naming 28 people who were alleged to be paedophiles, including Australian politicians and legal figures.
It was not the first time he had made accusations against members of the judiciary. In 2002, Heffernan made claims under parliamentary privilege against a High Court justice, accusing him of using government cars to pick up young men for sex. The vehicle records Heffernan proffered as proof were later shown to be “bogus”.
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In this hearing on a Canberra spring day in 2015, he did not name names. There was a document, he said, that included “a whole lot of prominent people”. It was a “police document”, and among the 28 was a former prime minister. “They were delivered to me by a police agency some time ago because no-one seems to want to deal with them,” he said.
Heffernan claimed he’d gone to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse with the list. The commission had begun just a few years earlier, and spent years investigating the sexual abuse of children in Australian schools, churches and other organisations, providing a painful confrontation of the scale and horrors of Australian institutional complicity and failures to act.
Senator George Brandis, then attorney-general of the Coalition government, made an attempt to get the hearing back on track. “Of course, just because somebody’s name appears on a list does not make them guilty,” he said, which Heffernan accepted, and the committee moved on. Officially, little came of it.
Yet years later, this list has become a phantom among Australia’s fringes. Since 2015, references to “Expose the 28” are a mainstay in some corners of the internet, and were a guaranteed part of almost any protest of the pandemic era.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/08/04/conspiracy-nation-book-extract-28-malcolm-roberts-epstein-files/