Opinion: Why ALP, Liberals should think twice before baiting billionaires

The two major political parties have made potentially fatal mistakes by baiting billionaires. It’s probably a good idea for MPs to think very hard before insulting the rich, writes James Campbell.

In all the thousands of words written about how and why Labor came to lose the last federal election, not enough credit has been given to the part played by the one-term Labor MP Cathy O’Toole.

O’Toole’s seat of Herbert, which she won by 37 votes in 2016, includes Townsville where Clive Palmer had got himself into a very public fight over unpaid entitlements to workers employed at his nickel refinery there that had gone into administration.

You might have thought that a politician with a margin of 37 votes would adopt the prudent policy of avoiding conflict with a thin-skinned billionaire.

But for whatever reason, O’Toole took another route and during her all-too-brief time in Canberra she went out of her way to annoy and embarrass Palmer.

On one occasion she took a wheelie-bin around Parliament House collecting copies of the memoirs which he had kindly gifted every MP.

Herbert MP Cathy O'Toole made a bad decision to bait Clive Palmer, writes James Campbell. Photo: Cameron Laird

On another she turned up and heckled him at a press conference he was holding to announce his Senate ticket.

A senior union official long familiar with Palmer later told me he had watched the press conference with a mixture of bemusement and horror, thinking this was something that would end up biting Labor on the arse.

We can never know of course how much O’Toole’s baiting of Palmer influenced his decision to spend tens of millions of dollars making sure Bill Shorten never became Prime Minister.

He might well have spent as much as he did without O’Toole’s intervention.

What you can say for certain is it’s probably a good idea to think very hard about the potential consequences before insulting someone as loaded as Clive.

Clive Palmer tipped tens of millions of dollars into his campaign. (Photo by Jono Searle/Getty Images)

It was hard not to think of O’Toole reading the glowing profile of Simon Holmes a Court in the Nine papers on Saturday.

Like Palmer, Holmes a Court, is cashed up and worked up about climate change.

Like Clive, he’s also got a vanity project to try and do something about it.

But while the UAP is devoted to encouraging Australia’s politicians to go slow on the issue – with the exception of its enthusiasm for nuclear energy - Holmes a Court’s independents movement is keen to rev them up on emissions.

How he came to be running around the country raising money to tip out moderate Liberal MPs is an interesting tale.

According to the profile, until as recently as 2018 Holmes a Court had been a supporter and indeed a donor to the Liberal Party, going so far as to join Josh Frydenberg’s Kooyong 200 Club.

This all changed apparently after he wrote a piece in The Guardian which included a line having a go at the Treasurer for trying to keep Liddell power station open.

“Less than 24 hours later I got an email from Kooyong 200 saying my membership had been rejected and two years of membership fees and a donation had been returned to my credit card,” he told the paper.

Simon Holmes a Court was a long time Liberal Party supporter.

If this is true and Holmes a Court’s money was returned because Frydenberg took exception to a few lines in a Guardian article, it may end up being the most expensive dummy spit in Liberal Party history.

Because as O’Toole and Labor found out with Palmer, it doesn’t do to insult the rich because, as goes without saying, they have means to get back at you.

No doubt Holmes a Court would say it’s all about the climate, which would explain why a year later he spent $145,000 backing a greenie independent in a failed attempt to throw the Treasurer out of Kooyong.

But you can’t help wondering if it’s a little bit personal too.

For example it’s hard, on the face of it, to see how the fight against global warming was helped by him turning up in person to the Federal Court to watch the challenge to Frydenberg’s eligibility to sit in parliament because he hadn’t renounced the Hungarian citizenship, he’d never had.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg. Photo: Martin Ollman

Now, like Palmer, Holmes a Court is back and ready again to start tossing his money about at a federal election.

Last time his Climate 200 fundraising group poured $500,000 into 12 independents campaigns, this time he wants to be “six to 10 times bigger and more effective”.

The difference between Clive and Simon in this space – leaving aside the fact that Clive made his own money – is that whereas Palmer tends to go after people he disagrees with, Holmes a Court’s concentrates his fire on the moderate Liberals like Dave Sharma, Trent Zimmerman and Katie Allen, whose position on climate change is closest to his own.

In that respect Holmes a Court and his fellow self-styled “philanthropists” resemble the Greens who always seem to end up targeting the most left-wing MPs in the Labor Party.

It may surprise him to know that in ridding the Liberal Party of its most progressive MPs he is actually playing into the hands of that party’s right wing.

As one rightwing minister mused to me recently, the Liberal Party’s electoral future lies in the growth areas of Australia’s suburbs and holding on the progressive seats of “small I” Liberals will in the long term be neither possible or desirable