Climate 200, the movement started by Simon Holmes a Court, ran candidates exclusively in Coalition-held seats during the May 2022 election, a trend likely to continue when the writs are finally issued for a ballot in 2025.
But don’t be confused. Climate 200 was never “targeting” those electorates. Instead, it merely threw money at nascent “community campaigns” that were already established and just needed some financial oomph.
“I really want to get away from the language of ‘targeting’,” Holmes a Court said in an interview with Peter FitzSimons, published in Nine newspapers over the weekend.
“We don’t target seats. Communities step up and, if they’re on a good wicket, we’ll do our best to support their campaign. We support community campaigns, not candidates.”
This is provable nonsense, and one of several jarring statements thrown out by Holmes a Court to gaslight voters and treat them as imbeciles. Does he not realise that the internet contains a vast repository of completely incompatible statements that he’s made to podcast hosts, radio interviews and to newspapers over the past two years?
Like these remarks from December 2022, given on the 100 Climate Conversations podcast, in which he boasted of how Climate 200 leveraged the dark arts of social media to sway votes at the federal election.
Seats were targeted, he used the very word itself.
“We worked with some experts on how to target that content, make sure it went not only to the target seats, but to persuadable people in the targeted seats using all the best and worst of what Facebook gives you in that tooling.”
It really doesn’t get more targeted than trying to channel “persuadable” people into the arms of Kylea Tink in North Sydney, or Sophie Scamps in Mackellar, using the slot-machine algorithms of Facebook and Instagram. This was a tactic indirectly funded by idle rich-listers who, apparently, had grown weary with the lack of transparency of the nation’s politics. Go figure, but some have learned their lesson.
Sussan Group owner Naomi Milgrom and her family have privately committed to withdrawing their support for Climate 200, as we revealed here in April.
A case of buyer’s remorse? That decision was made after Tink and Scamps sided with the Greens after October 7 and worked to condemn Israel over its retaliatory strikes against Hamas.
Holmes a Court gave a near-identical interview to FitzSimons two years ago in which he said Climate 200 had taken “all my time and more for the last 18 months”, except now, despite all that targeting of “persuadable” people, he somehow claims that Climate200 never had a role advising any teal or helping any candidate achieve victory.
Bizarrely, he seemed to have also lost a grip on the definition of the moniker “teal” itself. “They’re certainly not ‘mine’, and they are not necessarily teals; they’re community independents,” he said. “I still don’t know what the definition of a teal is …”
This wouldn’t seem so clownish if Holmes a Court hadn’t quite literally written and published a book, two years ago, titled The Big Teal, which chronicles “the triumph of the teals” and “those assisting their rise, such as Climate 200 founder Simon Holmes a Court” during the May 2022 election.
A sharper FitzSimons might have twigged to this fakery. He could have said wait, Holmes a Court, look here now, you yourself used the word “teal” in our interview two years ago to describe your victories in 2022. It’s right here, in the transcript:
“Our polling shows that in the state seats that sit under the federal electorates that are now teal, there is an extremely strong desire for community independents.”
On Holmes a Court’s telling, money drifts into and out of Climate 200 without any individual candidate being funded, or seats being targeted, or persuadables being manoeuvred.
And he is certainly not a svengali of the teal movement. Instead, he pointed to Peter Dutton and his affiliation with Gina Rinehart, claiming that Dutton has been cribbing from the Donald Trump playbook, even down to his “embrace of billionaires”.
“Dutton’s svengali, Gina Rinehart, is partying at Mar-a-Lago with Nigel Farage as we speak!” Holmes a Court said.
Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting donated $174,500 to the Liberal Party ahead of the May 2022 election, less than the $2.5m given to Climate 200 by Atlassian’s billionaire founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes. But what was that about embracing billionaires?
Milgrom gave $500,000 while the largest donation – $1.85m – came from businessman Rob Keldoulis.
Accusing Rinehart of exerting influence on the Liberal Party is easy enough, but it’s laughable coming from a guy who cuddles up to the rich, as the major parties openly do, and who is an office holder in his own political movement, and who sits on a committee that directs funding to individual candidates; sorry, to “community campaigns”.
“It meets every week, I’m just one of the members. The discussions can be very robust, but we always reach a consensus,” he said.
Yep, just another voice with no clout or pull, at a table where they all reach roughly the same conclusions on every decision. Nothing to see here.
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