With Climate 200, Political Action Committees Have Arrived to Australia

BY

DANIEL LOPEZ 

ZOWIE DOUGLAS-KINGHORN

A group of independent candidates purporting to break with Australia’s broken political system is contesting several conservative seats in next week’s federal election. Their claims to independence are mooted by backing from the PAC Climate 200.

 

As the 2022 Australian federal election rapidly approaches, a wave of blue-green independent candidates standing in upper-middle-class electorates has Coalition MPs hot under the collar. According to Liberal polling, this “teal tsunami” looks likely to claim the blue-ribbon seats of Kooyong and Goldstein from treasurer Josh Frydenberg and assistant minister Tim Wilson, respectively.

The most recent YouGov poll, published in the Australian, backs up this estimate. Teal independents are mounting serious challenges elsewhere, including in the Australian Capital Territory, Queenslandand New South Wales. Unlike other independents, the teal ones derive their hue from Climate 200, a group whose mission is to fund candidates who align with its values on the environment, government integrity, and gender equity.

Politicians and pundits across the spectrum are entranced. Former Liberal prime minister John Howard has derided the teal independents as “anti-Liberal groupies.” Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce has warned of “chaos” if teal independents win. Meanwhile, patrician small-L liberal outlets have celebrated the Climate 200 independents as a grassroots-led reinvigoration of democracy. The skeptical have accused the organization of being a party in all but name, or of entrenching the power of “dark money” over politics.

Climate 200 may be a relative novelty in Australian politics, but not so in America. In essence, it’s a political action committee (PAC), an organization that pools donations to fund campaigns and candidates. Progressive or not, by their nature, PACs are political organizations that maintain and reinforce elite control over politics. Far from repairing democracy, PACs are part of the problem.

The Teal Tsunami

Son of Australia’s first billionaire, Simon Holmes à Court established Climate 200 after being expelled from Kooyong 200, a Liberal Party fundraising group from the electorate of the same name. Before becoming a green-energy entrepreneur, Holmes à Court spent time in Silicon Valley helping to develop the gone-but-not-forgotten internet browser Netscape. Upon returning to Australia, he went to work digitally automating the water irrigation systems on his father’s eight Northern Territory cattle stations.

This election is not Climate 200’s first rodeo. In 2019, it attracted support from thirty-five investors, including Mike Cannon-Brookes. It backed twelve independents, including Helen Haines, who kept the North East Victorian seat of Indi in teal hands. This time around, Climate 200 lists twenty-two supported candidates.

 

Climate 200 rightly argues that corporate donations are a major factor behind the major parties’ dogged commitment to fossil fuels. The Liberals, Nationals, and the Australian Labor Party receive hundreds of thousands in donations from fossil fuel companies. Indeed, in 2021, the coal, oil, and gas industry paid over $1.7 million in donations, an increase of 30 percent compared to 2020. This sum is dwarfed by the $60 to $70 million that mining billionaire Clive Palmer will spend to promote the United Australia Party, which recently announced it will preference the Liberals in a number of key marginal seats.

Climate 200 raises funds to counter this influence. Holmes à Court acknowledges that this “spending to influence” ethos is like fighting fire with fire. The sentiment echoes the views ofHarvard professor Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, who Holmes à Court credits as one of his “favorite contemporary thinkers.” In 2013, Lessig founded the Democratic Party–aligned Mayday PAC which spent $10 million in an attempt to elect congressional candidates committed to passing campaign-finance reform. As Evan Osnos wrote in the New Yorker, “It was a super PAC designed to drive its own species into extinction.” As Lessig commented at the time, “Yes, we want to spend big money to end the influence of big money. . . . Ironic, I get it. But embrace the irony.”

The Mayday PAC was not successful; all the candidates it funded lost. Climate 200, however, seems set for better results. So far, they have built a war chest of just over $7 million, with a target of $15 to $20 million, allowing it to give its candidates much more than the major parties spend on most of theirs.

In the blue-ribbon seats of Wentworth, Mackellar, North Sydney, Kooyong, Goldstein, Warringah, and Curtin, Climate 200–backed independents have already outspent their Liberal counterparts by a fair measure. According to Facebook and Google transparency reports, the independent candidate and neurologist Dr Monique Ryan has spent more than $170,000 on digital advertising to try and unseat treasurer and deputy PM Josh Frydenberg. For his part, Frydenberg has spent $140,000 so far, including $25,000 worth of targeted digital content designed to associate Ryan’s campaign with uncertainty.

 

Elite Ecopolitics

Climate 200 is also a response to political realities. As the Liberal and National parties lurch to the right, they have alienated the well-off, socially and culturally progressive small-L-liberal voters who formed much of their historic base. In previous years, the Greens sometimes fought for these voters beyond Labor’s reach in electorates like Kooyong, in Melbourne’s genteel, leafy inner east.

Under Adam Bandt’s lead, the Greens have shifted in a more social democratic direction, taking the space once occupied by Labor’s left. Their most hopeful campaigns are built on patiently recruiting, organizing, and training hundreds of new members and volunteers. This shift has created an opening for Climate 200 candidates, who are now busily cornering the “tree Tory” market. Even former Liberal prime minister and investment banker Malcolm Turnbull has thrown his support behind the teal independents, as a way to “thwart” the hard-right factions that now dominate his party. In sum, Climate 200 is pitching to the kind of educated, wealthy, metropolitan voters who would previously have been represented by the Liberal Party’s moderate “wet” faction.

This is reflected in its list of candidates. Out of twenty-two candidates, six have been executives, directors, or CEOs of either large businesses or NGOs, usually with an environmental connection. Three are current or former small-business owners. Ten are from senior professional backgrounds, including lawyers, senior academics, a film and theater producer, an ABC journalist, a former Wallabies player, and a doctor. Three are sitting MPs. They are standing in some of the most privileged seats in the nation, including in well-above-average-income parts of Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, the Adelaide Hills, and Hobart. The few regional seats with teal challengers are also comparatively well-off — for example, the North Coast of New South Wales or Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

The majority of Climate 200’s candidates are women, reflecting widespread disgust at the Coalition’s ingrained culture of misogyny. While these candidates identify as feminists, there are no candidates representing or advocating for predominantly female industries such as eldercare, nursing, and education, whose low rates of pay underly the gender pay gap.

Climate 200’s candidates are also overwhelmingly white. This stands in stark contrast to the Greens’ Victorian Senate ticket, for example, which is the first in the state’s history to be made up entirely of First Nations candidates. Labor, too, is fielding a considerably more diverse array of candidates, reflecting the breadth of electorates that the major party needs to contest.

In short, Climate 200 is a home away from home for Liberals who like their lawns green, their representatives cultured, and their corporations woke. Holmes à Court summed it up well in his February speech to the National Press Club:

These candidates don’t need to go into politics to be successful; they are already successful. They are business owners, doctors, lawyers, journalists and athletes. They’re in it for the right reasons.

 

READ MORE:

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/05/with-climate-200-political-action-committees-have-arrived-to-australia

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

SCOMO HATES THESE INDEPENDENT WOMEN... 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW **********************!!!