Playing along to the tune
He who pays the piper calls the tune. In the United Australia Party, that’s Clive Palmer, and for the Teals – although he says it’s not the case – the reality is, it’s Simon Holmes a Court.
Both Palmer and Holmes a Court said you could not trust the major parties and campaigned against the Coalition on integrity. Both funnelled millions of dollars into political campaigns for candidates of their choosing. Both injected astronomical sums of their private money into these campaigns, treating politics as a billionaire plaything.
The difference is Palmer registered a political party, while six Teal MPS and one senator later, Holmes a Court is still at pains to claim he doesn’t have one and is quick to threaten legal action against those who say he does.
While Palmer has retreated for this election cycle, Holmes a Court was in parliament this week arguing that his not-a-party third-party fundraiser, Climate 200, deserved the same tax-deductible benefits as registered political parties.
He argued against donor and spending caps giving insight into the eye-watering cost of raising a Teal – between $500,000 and $2m per seat.
Holmes a Court argued that if electoral expenditure caps are pursued, we should “set the level higher for new entrants”. We should have caps on donations to prevent jurisdiction buying and some donors from having more influence than others.
How does one devise a system where emerging climate activists can take as much as they want from donors and spend as much as they need to win, while established parties, whose age is a measure of their electoral success, are hobbled financially, and still call that democracy?
Holmes a Court wants to redesign the electoral system to have the benefits of being a party, such as tax deductibility for donations and access to the electoral roll as well as exemption from the Privacy Act, while keeping the campaign agility that only comes without a party structure and without the heat of being held to government promises.
Climate 200 calls to “reduce the donation disclosure threshold to $1000”, yet for a group so focused on transparency they don’t include in their own “disclosures” on their website how much their donors gave.
While Holmes a Court claims 75 per cent of donors chose to disclose themselves, it is in name but not in value.
According to their donor list on the Climate 200 website, “Craig Kelly” and “Alan Jones” contributed. Others are listed by first name only, including “Rosanna L” and “Sue And Ken”.
For all his talk of transparency, we will only discover how much Climate 200 donors gave, including high-networth individuals such as Chris Barter, next year – and even then, only those who donated more than $15,200 will have their donation amount, name and address disclosed to the AEC. They can donate under the threshold to multiple “independents” which they cannot do to a political party that treats it as a job lot for disclosure.
One name might be 30 per cent of Climate 200’s income.
In the case of being careful what you wish for, if Climate 200 were genuinely transparent, it should declare which organisations or individuals provided strategic expertise services without charging a cent. Donations given “in-kind” to the Teals could be enormous. But we will never know.
They have a corporatised model of political campaigning – where research, digital and marketing are subcontracted out.
This was no more obvious than this week when in the Electoral Matters Committee, Climate 200 had to take on notice a question of how many employees it had – something few small not-for-profit organisations need time away to count.
Maybe Climate 200 refuses to register as a party to make its chosen candidates more electable. The moment you identify as something, you become a target.
The Teals are simply Greens that have shade-shifted, whose true
colours emerge when they attack donor caps, cynically comparing MP office budgets to campaign slush funds. They claim the average $263,000 office budget for sitting MPS and senators is used to “target swinging voters”.
That money is to keep communities informed across a raft of issues - such as animal desexing clinics in remote Indigenous communities or grant opportunities for local groups so they can get a few trees planted or disability access paths.
Most communities are oblivious to what they are entitled to from the government and offices try to keep them informed on all issues – not just integrity and carbon dioxide.
Since they consider it a waste, the Teals should give the office budget back. Nobody is forcing them to use it.
Climate 200 claimed staff in
members’ offices “work towards the re-election” of their boss, and we should “eliminate the practice”.
Does Climate 200 honestly think electorate staff should work against the re-election of their boss? How many UAP members are working for the Teals?
In any business, the employees want the organisation to survive. Unsurprisingly, electorate staff want their boss to be successful.
If this is what the Teals think electorate office staff are only there for, they need a massive reality check.
Electorate officers, most of whom are on about $70,000 a year, no matter their political stripe, are the emergency ground team trying to fix the mistakes of bureaucracy.
When a pensioner has his pension cut off for no apparent reason. When a veteran cannot get new teeth. When a single mother can’t get her childcare subsidy. When a doctor can’t get a visa to stay in a small town.
It’s often after people have tried bashing against the brick walls of bureaucracy that they call their MP for help. If the Teals think that is campaigning for their boss’s reelection, then not only can money not buy happiness, it can’t buy empathy either.
Politics is more than grand statements, dolled-up magazine spreads or dress-up doorstops. It’s answering the door to tough conversations with hurt, desperate, frustrated people who others have shut out.
Electorate officers are also the ones who answer the phone to streams of incoherent verbal abuse, who, when the outcome isn’t as desired, have defamatory videos about them posted online.
The Teals should try answering all the phones themselves if they think this is what the job is.
This is what rich, white eastern suburbs city guys trying to make their money more powerful don’t understand – they can not know what it is to be helpless because they have always had the mattress of wealth to fall back on.
It was no more evident than at the Electoral Matters Committee this week. That’s why they play with definitions:
“Climate 200 don’t run candidates.”
True – they organise them.
“Any reform must take into account the financial head-start incumbents have.”
Politics is not a participation sport where every entrant gets a prize. The people have chosen incumbents.
“Changes should be made to level the playing field”, but not if it means caps on donations or campaign spending.
And when Queensland Senator James Mcgrath pushed Holmes a Court to explain how Climate 200 was not a party, he told Mcgrath to read his book. As if Mcgrath has nothing else to do but finger through the tome of Australia’s first billionaire’s son.
Even though Mcgrath said he would not waste a moment reading it, Holmes a Court brought two copies to the table, which were left to the clerks to clean up.