Nigel Farage has labelled Malcolm Turnbull a snake and celebrated Australia and Britain’s shift from “trendy, metro” leaders to “real” conservative leaders.

Introduced as “quite possibly” the next British prime minister, the Eurosceptic and rightwing figure on Saturday addressed a crowd of about 500 at the Conservative Political Action Conference Australia in Sydney.

Farage told the adoring crowd that Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s election victory in May seemed impossible, after the recent hijacking of the Liberal party by “the other side”.

“Malcolm Turnbull … pretended to be a conservative but actually turned out to be a snake,” Farage said, to applause.

He said of Morrison: “You’ve now got someone conservative, mainstream media [and] those in the middle of Melbourne and Sydney may not like him … But out where real people live, they voted for him.”

Farage said he had thought “the greenies had taken over this country”, especially after heading to Melbourne and having 600 people rally against him.

The second day of the conservative conference was marked by clashes between protesters and some conference attendees on the footpath outside the Rydges Hotel in Sydney where the event is being held.

One conference attendee had a coffee thrown on them, and NSW police said a woman had been arrested and was in the process of being charged with common assault.

Coffees have been thrown, arrests have been made at #CPAC pic.twitter.com/mGEBWfkHoL — Joe Verity (@_jsph_v) August 10, 2019

The UK member of the European parliament for the past two decades was a crucial figure in the 2016 Brexit referendum’s Leave campaign. He now leads the newly established Brexit party, which unexpectedly won the most UK seats of any party in the European parliament election in May.

Farage claimed a rightwing revolt was moving across the west against parties that said they were conservative but were run by leaders who were nothing of the kind.

“[Former conservative UK prime minister] David Cameron was someone who was not conservative at all but a part of the trendy, metro, liberal elite masquerading as a conservative.”

Farage, who wants a no-deal Brexit, said he wanted the UK free of Europe so it could re-engage with its real friends in the world.

“Australia is right up there at the top of my personal list,” he said.

He said he wanted a complete rebalancing of where Britain was in the world, an increased engagement with commonwealth countries and fewer people forced into universities.

Later on Saturday, the Liberal Party MP Craig Kelly told the crowd the campaign against Tony Abbott in Warringah at the last election helped the Coalition win.

“Let’s not forget the hits that Tony took,” he said. “He attracted all the crazies and all the resources they bought in.

Abbott, Kelly said, had faced the “nastiest, most vicious, campaign” in the seat, but had “sucked it all up with grace” and given other MPs “a lot more room to move”.

“So we won seats like Chisholm, we won seats like Longman, we won seats like Bass, Lindsay. Without those we would not be in government. And that was because of all of the bullets that Tony took.”

Kelly used his speech to call for the adoption of nuclear power, the end to subsidies on solar power, and to attack taxes on air flight in Europe.

“Intelligent people understand the science,” Kelly said. “Around the world at the moment we’ve got 31 nations using nuclear power, leaving Australia as the only major developed economy that doesn’t use nuclear power. So I welcome the prime minister’s decision to refer it to the house environment and energy committee to look and study the possibilities of nuclear power.”