GetUp!’s guerrilla game plan

Politics in this country used to be about debating the merits of one policy over another, with voters making the final decision, writes Peta Credlin. Sadly, it’s now about shifting Australia’s political ‘centre’ to the left.

Forget the sham claims of independence, since its inception, GetUp! has been running guerrilla campaigns against Liberal MPs, especially conservative ones.

After the 2007 election, when GetUp! ran a how-to-vote website that no matter what questions were asked, advised voters to put the Liberal candidate last, the Electoral Commission branded their website “misleading and deceptive.”

In 2016, GetUp! boasted that it had ejected the former decorated army brigadier, and conservative, Andrew Nikolic from his Tasmanian seat of Bass.

This time it has even bigger targets: in Queensland, home affairs minister Peter Dutton; in Victoria, health minister Greg Hunt; in WA, attorney-general Christian Porter; and in NSW, their main focus, former PM Tony Abbott.

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In the 2016 campaign, GetUp! supported the former Australian Idol host James Mathison in Abbott’s seat of Warringah. Mathieson only got 12 per cent of the total vote but it was designed as a dry-run.

This time, GetUp! is supporting former skier Zali Steggall who’s being marketed as “liberal-lite” but has admitted never voting Liberal in her life (at least federally) and wants a 60 per cent (!!) emissions reduction target.

Independent candidate for Warringah Zali Steggall campaigning with her father Jack Steggall in Manly. Picture: AAP/Jeremy Piper

Naturally, Steggall denies that she’s getting support from GetUp! but her co-campaign director is a GetUp! operative (the other one is a former Labor staffer) and GetUp! are mobilising literally hundreds of left-wing activists to pour into Abbott’s electorate.

For an organisation that still cries, “we’re independent”, their role as the “faux community” arm of the Left is now laid bare. Politics in this country used to be about debating the merits of one policy over another, with voters making the final decision. Sadly, it’s now about silencing debate, shutting down the contest of policies and ideas, and by targeting Liberal and conservative MPs, shifting Australia’s political “centre” to the left.

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GetUp!’s claim of one million “members” might sound impressive but these are actually just people on its email list who might have signed an online petition at one time or even donated something as small as $5 dollars in the past and who have no voting rights whatsoever.

Far from being democratic, GetUp! Inc is controlled by just 12 directors (six of them Labor-affiliated and all of them left-wing activists). One of its founding board members was Bill Shorten.

GetUp! volunteers in the federal electorate of Warringah, along with a Tony Abbott figure, launched a national campaign to unseat conservative MPs. Picture: Jim O'Rourke

All up, over the past 15 years, GetUp! has spent at least $42 million on political campaigning. A good proportion of GetUp!’s money ($12.5 million reported last year) does indeed come from smaller donations but the biggest single donor ($1.1 million in 2010) has been the militant CFMEU.

Despite advocating against foreign donations for years, GetUp! has accepted plenty of foreign money from left wing groups like the European Climate Fund ($93,000) and AVAAZ (a New York based “people power” group — $268,000). It’s even been reported that GetUp! has taken donations from a communist-backed organisation with links to the former Soviet Union.

One of GetUp!’s big local donors, the Sunrise Project (which gave $495,000 last November) is an anti-coal, pro-climate change mob that receives money from the US Tides Foundation, a “progressive” charity dedicated to “daring change”.

GetUp! parading giant Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott heads while calling for politicians to show climate leadership. Picture: Tait Schmaal

In Canada, Alberta premier-elect Jason Kenney (who won this week on a platform of scrapping Alberta’s carbon tax) declared in his victory speech: “to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Tides Foundation…The David Suzuki Foundation and all of the others, your days of pushing Albertans around with impunity have just ended”

Last year, fellow conservative Doug Ford won the election in Ontario pledging to dump that province’s carbon tax too. Right around the world, everyday families and small business battling ever-higher energy costs are fighting back against the Left’s push to wind back our standard of living for absolutely no environment gain.

GetUp! and Bill Shorten like to categorise their opponents who want a sensible debate on climate change policy (and with transparent costings too) as “knuckle-dragging cavemen” but that’s where we’re headed if we insist reliable and affordable power is a modern-day luxury.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights from 6pm.