Do we like Ralph Babet?
Our score: 1 out of 10. A bill targeting trans youth, X posts that included slurs, a fact-checked false vaccine claim and a refusal to apologise, with little real good found.
Ralph Babet is Mauritius-born and was the only person elected on Clive Palmer's ticket in 2022, taking the final Victorian Senate spot from Liberal Greg Mirabella. In his first speech he cast himself as an outsider who had “not been groomed in the political machine”. He's since said he'll leave politics after one term and go back to real estate.
The stoush he's best known for came in November 2024, when he reposted an Andrew Tate broadcast on X with a comment containing a racial slur, then followed up with a longer post using more slurs. Greens leader Adam Bandt called it “despicable”, and Babet replied that the chance of him apologising was zero. In September 2025 the parliamentary standards commission found the posts were “offensive, disrespectful and harmful to individuals”.
The commission ordered one-on-one training and a signed behaviour agreement. The Nightly reported in March 2026 that he hadn't attended, and he declined to comment on whether he was complying. He pointed instead to a Senate motion on hate-speech laws and said people should be allowed to speak freely, provided they aren't calling for violence.
On health, AAP FactCheck rated false his April 2023 tweet that under-18s were 51 times more likely to die from mRNA vaccines than from COVID-19. Experts told AAP the research behind it was seriously flawed. On the planet, he consistently voted against net zero by 2050, the Paris Agreement and a ban on new thermal coal mines. The odd one out is that he also voted for more renewable investment and for nuclear power.
The fair bit: he's consistent on free speech, voting for every senator's right to be heard and for freedom-of-information access. He also voted for greater political transparency, though against limits on party donations. When he defended a suspended Hobart councillor he said “Free speech is precious, and we must do all we can to defend it.” We couldn't find any charity work or acts of kindness in the reporting, so that's the whole list.
On the good-person test it's a close call. There's no court finding against him in what we found, and no reporting of mistreating staff. Against that, he refused to apologise for the posts, and the parliament's own standards body found them harmful. Where you land depends on whether you read it as a free-speech stand or as dodging accountability, but the harm test settles the verdict.