GetUp cash a threat to right MPs

GetUp! is targeting conservative MPs (clockwise from top left) Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton, Kevin Andrews, Greg Hunt, Craig Kelly, Christian Porter, Barnaby Joyce and George Christensen.

The latest accounts released by GetUp will send chills down the spines of Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s hard-right federal colleagues.

They indicate that donations to the left-wing activist organisation — which counts Labor leader Bill Shorten as a foundation director — are set to surge beyond $10 million this financial year.

That’s a frightening number for those Coalition members on GetUp’s hit list for the May federal election.

Leading that endangered flock is Peter Dutton, followed by Tony Abbott, George Christensen, Barnaby Joyce, Christian Porter, Morrison himself, Kevin Andrews, Craig Kelly, Greg Hunt and, rounding out the all-male top 10 that was voted by GetUp’s Coalition-loathing membership, Angus Taylor.

Audited financial accounts quietly lodged with the corporate regulator and seen by Margin Call reveal the group — which is chaired by Phil Ireland — enjoyed an almost 20 per cent spike in donations last financial year to $9.8m to assist its political campaigns.

And the group is on track for record donations this financial year.

It’s been a frenetic period, spanning last July’s Super Saturday series of constitution-triggered by-elections (of which Shorten’s Labor won four seats and the fifth went to crossbencher Rebekha Sharkie) and the high-profile showdown in Wentworth in October that saw the defeat of Liberal candidate Dave Sharma in toppled prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s vacated Sydney eastern suburbs seat in favour of independent Kerryn Phelps (whose campaign team had excellent Shorten connections).

And helping the donation drive right now is the upcoming federal election, which is replete with made-for-GetUp showdowns like that between Abbott and independent Zali Steggall in Warringah.

GetUp spends most of what comes in the door on its grassroots campaigns. In the year to June 30 it made a small surplus of $153,000, after funnelling almost $10m into its formidable electioneering machine. That left almost $3m in the bank and more than $2m in net assets.

The Orange Army should be able to slay a few Liberals with that loot.

Illustration: Rod Clement

Treasurer, save thyself

GetUp is also speculated to be supporting Oliver Yates, one of the independent candidates challenging Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in the blue ribbon Victorian seat of Kooyong.

GetUp’s mobility on the ground — including former GetUp media director Adrian Dodd, who is involved in Yates’s campaign — means Frydenberg will need a mighty war chest to retain his Menzies inheritance.

Frydenberg, who will deliver his first budget on April 2, is battling not one but two high-profile independents in Kooyong, which he has held since August 2010. Along with former Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief Yates, there is the corporate lawyer-turned-activist Julian Burnside, who, after earlier work defending the likes of corporate fraudster Alan Bond, is running as a Green in the leafy, affluent inner-eastern seat.

Frydenberg, via the Victorian Liberal Party’s Kooyong 200 Club, is a mighty fundraiser, who in the past has funnelled money to other electorates to assist colleagues’ campaigns.

But this time around should he splash the cash to save himself?

And just how much money are we talking about?

Margin Call can reveal that since Frydenberg’s predecessor, Petro Georgiou, vacated Kooyong in favour of Frydenberg at the 2010 federal election, the former investment banker has overseen an inflow of $2.7m into the Kooyong 200 Club. In Georgio’s last year in office, the club received a mere $24,410. That jumped to more than $100,000 in his energetic successor’s first year on the scene.

And it has only climbed since then. In the most recent financial year the club recorded receipts of almost $600,000.

All up it has funnelled $2.68m into the party’s coffers in the nine years that Frydenberg has been in Canberra.

Any wonder they don’t want the Treasurer to lose.

Posties at full stretch

The only real surprise in the news that a yoga and wellness studio has opened up in the Melbourne headquarters of Christine Holgate’s Australia Post is that it took so long.

So far, the unfurling of yoga mats in its Bourke Street tower is earning rave reviews.

“The fact that our business fully supports an initiative like this creates an amazing culture that I’m proud to be part of,” enthused one of Holgate’s disciples.

The yoga initiative comes more than a year after Holgate brought a Buddhist priest — no less a being than the reincarnation of the East Treasure King of Tertoen Dorji Lingpa — to Australia Post’s Gateway Facility to bless the Christmas 2017 mail.

Holgate, who masterfully timed her 2017 exit from Marcus Blackmore’s now stuttering listed pills business, has taken an idiosyncratic approach to staff retention.

Last December, she rallied the troops by putting on reindeer antlers and singing carols for them in the foyer downstairs.

But you can’t please everyone.

Despite the boss’s best efforts, Margin Call hears more posties will soon be couriering themselves in the direction of Holgate’s predecessor Ahmed Fahour, who is now running financial upstart Latitude (and overseeing a side-hustle as an investor in Hairhouse Warehouse).

Seems even Christmas cheer and the embracing of Lululemon in the workplace hasn’t been enough to keep everyone on board.