How Teal ‘independent’ Kylea Tink’s campaign tapped into $1.83m to get her elected

Kylea Tink appearing via video-link at an independent energy event in Sydney’s CBD earlier this year.

Who else but teal independent Kylea Tink would campaign so vigorously against corporate largesse and the “undue influence of money” in politics, only to then grease her own bid for a seat in parliament with funds provided by millionaire donors?

And that’s to say nothing of her warped calculation earlier this year that she would receive roughly $750,000 in donation support.

The final sums, released this week, revised that number significantly to $1.83m, a figure that puts paid to her suggestion that independents would be disadvantaged without “a big bank, like a big party machine” supporting them.

Certainly not the case for Dai Le, an independent MP with no affiliation to the Teals, who amassed just $81,000 in donations and went on to thrash Labor’s Kristina Keneally in the seat of Fowler. Perhaps we should chalk that one up to an act of God.

To claim there was no big bank or party machine supporting Tink is preposterous.

Kylea Tink concentrating hard during parliament’s Question Time. Picture: Gary Ramage

The machinery is simply known by another name, Climate 200, and we now know that its deep-pocketed backers deployed more than $800,000 to fortify her campaign armoury; that’s a mere slice of the $6m collected from its donors to buy greater levels of integrity in federal politics. Go ­figure.

They might have delivered Tink into parliament but for their money her services only seem to be provided on a part-time basis.

For months her electorate office has been open Mondays through Thursdays, between 9am and 3pm. Friday walk-ins are verboten, unless one has a booking, although a spokeswoman said that arrangement had changed “a few weeks ago”. The office is now open on Fridays, too – but only for six hours.

“Kylea is keen to hear from you,” shouts the banner on her website, in capital letters. “Our office values meaningful connection with the North Sydney electorate which means we are out and about in the vibrant North Sydney community.”

Maintaining such hours is unusual for any working MP of any stripe in any parliament. It looks like a decided lack of commitment to us. But why expect more from an MP who just months ago purchased a trophy to present to a local high school student, named it after herself, and then didn’t bother to turn up for the presentation night, having sent her apologies because of a scheduling clash.

MP Dai Le, on a modest election budget, trounced her opponent, Kristina Keneally. Picture: Gary Ramage

A reminder, too, that this is the same MP who campaigned so assiduously for action on climate change while holding shares in Beach Energy, an oil and gas explorer, Viva Energy, a retailer of Shell-branded fuels, and shares in toll road operator Transurban.

Tink jettisoned the shares once a fuss was made about them in the press, including this column. But not before mounting an intellectually forlorn argument that she only bought them to exert pressure as a shareholder activist.

This is an argument truly destitute of any good sense; she would have held more sway whispering her demands into the bin under her office desk – when the office is open, of course.

But nowhere are Tink’s asymmetries most puzzling than on her passion project of political donations. Just last month she again called for corporate donors to be capped at $25,000 and demanded even further caps on campaign spending altogether.

That’s while having no compunction accepting a whopping sum of money from the Climate 200 mothership, which collected $2.5m in contributions from Atlassian co-founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, in addition to a slew of other significant corporate identities.

Not that there’s any reason to suspect that Cannon-Brookes would use his personal wealth or his private investment vehicle to advance a corporate ambition … like the wholesale takeover of an energy company.

But it’s the other little white lies, the harmless miscalculations, that continue to attract our attention and concern.

At the outset of her campaign, Tink told reporters that 30 per cent of her funding would be sourced from Climate200. We now know the figure was much higher, just shy of 45 per cent, but only when in-kind donations were included – and they should be included, according to Electoral Commission rules.

For some reason Tink’s website estimates the figure at the lower benchmark of 40 per cent, without calculating those in-kind contributions. A bit sneaky, we think, but what’s a few lousy percentage points when you’re campaigning on integrity?

Paying the price

The cyber security crisis gripping the Mike Wilkins-chaired Medibank Private and its policyholders is also proving incredibly costly to company boss David Koczkar’s professional reputation and personal bottom line.

While the boss’s financial pain can’t be compared with having extremely personal details divulged all over the dark web, it’s all still biting for Koczkar, who became CEO in May last year when Craig Drummond retired.

Koczkar is required to hold at least $1.5m worth of Medibank shares to make sure his interests are aligned with shareholders. At the end of the last financial year he was well above that, with 858,734 shares worth $2.8m.

Alas, the value of the shares has fallen almost $400,000 since the advent of the hacking crisis. He’s still above the threshold but the matter looks to have some way to play out.

The performance component of Koczkar’s pay for the current year could also be in jeopardy as the crisis drags on, and there’s much on the line.

His maximum possible package is $6.2m after receiving a 3.3 per cent pay rise at balance date. He’s currently on $1.55m as a fixed base, a maximum of $2.33m as a short-term incentive and $2.33m as a long-term incentive. The base pay he’ll receive regardless, but the latter two are subject to performance thresholds.

To max out the STI, Koczkar has to meet criteria including, ironically, mandatory cyber security training and adequately managing risk. He’s also got to beat a group operating profit hurdle and top a customer net promoter score – that is, how likely it might be that a customer would recommend Medibank or ahm to family and friends.

To get the LTI, Koczkar also has to leap an earnings per share benchmark and thresholds concerning Medibank’s market share.

Doesn’t sound great.