Canva co-founder and Greens donor add to Climate 200 fundraising heft

Canva’s billionaire co-founder, the family charity linked to Australia’s 7-Eleven empire, and a tech entrepreneur who also supports the Greens were among Climate 200’s new top backers as it built up its fundraising heft ahead of this year’s federal election.

The fundraising vehicle for community independents, which was founded by Simon Holmes à Court in 2019, tripled its number of donors to 33,000 people and received $5 million split between seven key contributors as it expanded to back 35 candidates at the May poll.

Top Climate 200 donors: Marcus Catsaras, Deborah Barlow, Cliff Obrecht, Scott Farquhar and Robert Keldoulis.

Climate 200 did not disclose how much it received in donations altogether, but it said it had distributed $10.9 million to independent campaigns this year. It received at least three $1 million donations, from Keldoulis Investments, New Regime PL and Fairground Investments.

Share trader Robert Keldoulis, through his investment firm, has been a prominent donor to Climate 200. But new additions to the group’s top donors in the 2024-25 financial year were New Regime PL, led by West Australian tech entrepreneur and activist Norman Pater, and Fairground Investments, a rebrand of the Barlow Impact Group, which was the family charity of 7-Eleven co-founders Beverley and Douglas Barlow.

Pater, who founded the Carbon Farming Foundation and is also a prominent donor to the Greens in WA, told this masthead he was proud to be one of 33,000 donors helping to elect more community independents.

“The major parties continue to fail the integrity test and collude with fossil fuel giants, approving new projects at the expense of the environment and regular Australians,” he said.

Fairground Investments, now led by Deborah Barlow, told the ABC earlier this year that the charity had contacted Climate 200 because of “the inaction of the major parties on climate change”.

“We went via Climate 200 rather than direct funding to the independents because Climate 200 have collected the data and research as to which candidates are most likely to be successful.”

Keldoulis said he saw his donations as philanthropic, not political. “I expect nothing in return, just a better outcome for society,” he said.

Climate 200 supports independent candidates that match its stated values – on climate, integrity and equality – by providing them with funding, as well as campaign, data and communications support as they challenge major party incumbents.

It also received contributions of $500,000 each from Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht, trader and climate investor Marcus Catsaras, the LB Conservation Trust and Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar.

Atlassian founder Scott Farquhar.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Obrecht, the only one on that list to have donated to Climate 200 for the first time, also made a $250,000 personal donation to the Labor Party.

Catsaras and Farquhar had made donations of $1 million or more in previous years. LB Conservation Trust – which is registered to a $16 million South Yarra penthouse belonging to Lisa Barlow, another member of 7-Eleven’s Australian dynasty – has also donated to the Greens.

The donors are named in a list of major contributors supplied to this masthead by Climate 200, but the list is not exhaustive. The full list of donors over the disclosure threshold for the 2024-25 financial year will be published on Monday by the Australian Electoral Commission.

Before the 2022 election, when it helped drive six Liberal MPs out of the lower house, Climate 200 raised $13 million from 11,200 donors. This year, it said the number of donors had tripled to 33,000.

Half of its donors were from outside inner-metropolitan areas, where independent candidates are most successful, and 93 per cent of donors gave $500 or less.

They will not be included in the public donations register, as they fall under the $16,900 disclosure threshold, but they include people like Joy Nason, a resident of Sydney’s northern beaches, who gives $20 a month.

Nason said her experience being raised in conservative Christian group the Exclusive Brethren – whose campaigning assistance to the Coalition during the election campaign was exclusively detailed by this masthead – had motivated her political involvement through Climate 200.

“Seeing so many women stand up in parliament and speak for their communities feels vindicating when throughout my formative years. I was taught that women meant nothing and had to take second place,” she said.

Climate 200-backed independent MPs all held their seats at the election, except Zoe Daniel in Goldstein, who lost the inner Melbourne seat to her predecessor, Liberal MP and frontbencher Tim Wilson.

Climate 200 had also liked the chances of independent campaigns in Bradfield, Wannon, Cowper and Calare, but only the blue-ribbon seat of Bradfield in Sydney’s northern suburbs fell, when new MP Nicolette Boele won by 26 votes against Liberal challenger Gisele Kapterian after a weeks-long recount.

Climate 200-backed independents also came close in two Labor-held seats: Bean in the ACT, and Fremantle in WA.

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