Very early every morning, Glen Morris picks up some chalk and updates the blackboard that has given his Spring Hill cafe an air of social media notoriety.
Last Thursday, it was a light-hearted message to Glen’s Espresso’s new Wharf Street neighbours.
“I’m not sure if One Nation have done their due diligence putting their head office 3 doors down from my blackboard,” Morris wrote in response to news One Nation was relocating to a nearby building owned by the party’s billionaire backer, Gina Rinehart.
As Morris went on with his day, one of his new One Nation neighbours took a photograph of the blackboard. Within a couple of hours, it was up on the right-wing party’s official Facebook page.
“Oh, we did [due diligence],” the party said in the caption. “We’re very lucky to be surrounded by a number of cafes serving delicious coffee (yours included). We will always support small businesses, regardless of the owners’ politics.”
What happened next was a sustained campaign of review-bombing, phone calls and abuse from One Nation supporters.
“We started noticing within that hour-and-a-half period that we were getting one-star reviews on our Facebook and Google profiles from people who’d never been to the coffee shop and were intent on maligning the shop in ways that would ruin the business if the reviews were upheld,” Morris said.
“We were fortunate enough that our ratings on both Facebook and Google were running at a flat five stars, which is nice, but all it takes is a dozen or so one-star reviews to go up and suddenly your rating sucks and you look terrible.
“So it was a definite and deliberate attempt by their followers to ruin someone’s livelihood, based on what I perceived to be a fairly innocuous joke that wasn’t in any way harmful.”
Luckily for Morris, whose business has a reputation for irreverence, the review-bombing was noticed by Google and the reviews from the 24-hour period were wiped.
But in the moment, Morris said, he was furious to have his business dragged through the mud so he contacted One Nation with screenshots of the reviews, with no response.
“They captioned [their post] in a way that wasn’t antagonistic, but it also didn’t make it clear that it’s actually all tongue-in-cheek, that I’d been making coffee for them all week and we were actually getting on fine,” Morris said.
“One Nation demands tolerance for their own opinions, but refuses to extend that right to their critics.”
One Nation, which has previously cited a boycott of this masthead over its reporting of the party, did not respond to requests for comment.
Griffith University political scientist Paul Williams said online mobs were becoming more prevalent, particularly in the “hard-right” of Australian politics.
“It’s like there’s now an army of barrackers that we’ve not really seen before, whose mission seems to be destroying any hint of progressive thought,” he said.
“And if that means taking down a business, well, it’s a case of whatever it takes.”
Williams said there was an irony in One Nation supporters engaging in a form of cancel culture, something leader Pauline Hanson described in 2021 as “killing debate, freedom of speech, and shutting down conservative political representation”.
He said it appeared her party had no issues when it came to shutting down progressive speech.
“In the hard-right, rationality doesn’t have to make sense,” he said. “The whole ideology is full of paradoxes, contradictions and non-sequiturs.”
For the record, Morris said he welcomed One Nation workers and volunteers to Glen’s Espresso.
“The people I’ve been serving for a week or so will read the blackboard and then look up and [say to me] ‘Oh well, actually, I’m a volunteer down there’, and they’re all lovely – these are people who I’m getting on with absolutely fine,” he said.
“The people I’ve told about the dramas have been very apologetic and said that’s not their intention and not what they want to do – but it’s all well and good for individuals to be pleasant to deal with, but sicking the mob on a small business doesn’t compute with that.”
It was not the first time Morris’s blackboard has stirred up political trouble.
During the 2014 G20 leaders’ summit in Brisbane, Morris got wind that then-South African president Jacob Zuma was staying in a hotel near the original Glen’s Espresso coffee cart in Ann Street.
Morris decided to reference historical rape allegations levelled against Zuma – of which he was acquitted in 2006 – on his blackboard.
“His security detail came down and had a bit of a conversation about what my intentions were,” he said.
“You have fun with it, but I’m not out to hurt or offend people unless they desperately deserve it.”
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