Teal MP Kylea Tink turns opaque on finance transparency

Kylea Tink’s website contains an entire section devoted to her obsession with transparency in government. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Needling the teals on their flagrant BS could easily become a full-time job here …

On Wednesday we took a scalpel to Monique Ryan’s guff in The Guardian, where she tut-tutted airline lounge access for members of parliament, demanding these perks be fully declared.

Amazingly, in the very same piece, Ryan inadvertently let slip that she’d previously held a lounge membership with Virgin’s Beyond Club, our inquiries soon revealing that she’d never bothered to disclose this benefit herself. Chapeau, Monique. Your goose is truly cooked.

Incidentally, our spies spotted the Kooyong MP in the Qantas Domestic Business Lounge at Canberra Airport on Thursday afternoon, nursing a soothing G+T and then mistakenly trying to board the 5.45pm to Melbourne (she was supposed to be on the 6.15pm flight). Steady!

The interminable teal tendency to say one thing and do the exact opposite is a trend already well-canvassed by this column, but this list of duplicitous behaviours is by no means exhaustive. It strangely just keeps growing.

To wit, Kylea Tink’s website, which contains an entire section devoted to her phony obsession with transparency in government. Transparency is why her team publishes every donation made to its electoral campaign, often with full names included, but in many cases without. “Names are withheld where a donor wishes to remain anonymous,” it says.

How convenient.

According to this list, Tink has amassed more than $96,000 in unnamed donations since her 2022 election to parliament. They include an $18,200 pledge made in July, which eventually will be fully disclosed (because the amount is higher than the reportable threshold of $16,900) and $15,000 provided in March, which, like many others she received of a lower value, will not.

During one week in November 2023, a series of anonymous donations worth $8000, $5000 and $10,000 were provided to Tink’s campaign. Were these from one person splitting their payments to skirt the reporting requirements, or three genuine donors who’d parted ways with all sense and sanity? Unless Tink reveals their identities, we may never know – and this is a shame, given her passion for trying to extract and publish every last detail of campaign financing from the other political parties.

“Ultimately the aim should be to facilitate a clear accounting of all income to any political entity or individual,” Tink wrote to a parliamentary inquiry two years ago. A set of rules for oneself, and a set of rules for everybody else.

Special Minister of State Don Farrell is trying to slash the disclosure threshold. Picture: Will Glasgow

Tink professes to want a “clear accounting” of these records but can’t act in the spirit of her own demand. Instead, she discloses pointless financial sums – a token act of performed transparency – and withholds the actual funding source, the only kernel of important detail, without which there can be no tracking of true motivation or inducement.

From her bubble of self-delusion, Tink wouldn’t even realise this is the entire raison of the transparency exercise.

A spokesman said: “Ms Tink adheres to all electoral laws and is in fact going beyond her legal requirements by disclosing donations in real time. We look forward to Margin Call holding the major parties to the same exacting standard – in being expected to adhere to laws that don’t even exist yet.”

Sure, the Labor Party could be doing the same. Special Minister of State Don Farrell is already trying to ram legislation through parliament to slash the aforementioned disclosure threshold from $16,900 to $1000.

Like Tink, he also wants to introduce real-time publication of donor identities.

Labor could start right now, if it liked, but even we concede that’s asking a lot of a dysfunctional and multi-tentacled party with much machinery and ego underpinning it.

But an independent like Tink? No such barriers. She and the teals have been banging on about this for the past two years. The only obstacle is themselves. YB

Hivery no more

A bitter end for troubled AI start-up Hivery, which appointed Wexted Advisors’ Christopher Johnson and Andrew McCabe as administrators this week. This, of course, spells the end of the struggling software company, capping months of financial lifelines, exits at the leadership level and desperate, last-minute hopes of restructuring the business.

In May, we reported that Hivery had been on the verge of collapse but kept a heartbeat thanks to a $3.7m capital raise, half of the money coming from Blackbird Ventures, pocket change for the VC major; by that point it had already ploughed tens of millions of dollars into the business.

Jason Hosking, founder and CEO of Hivery.

A Blackbird spokeswoman said at the time that Hivery was “well-capitalised and positioned to execute against its product ambition” and that its people remained “optimistic about the market opportunity that Hivery is addressing”.

A shocking call, no less.

You have to wonder how, or why, Blackbird’s genii clung to this caper, even as the VC itself wrote down one of its positions from $17m to zero, as noted by our friends at the Fin Review in August. All up, Hivery raised more than $61m.

“We gave it everything but unfortunately it wasn’t our time,” said CEO Jason Hosking to Margin Call, while paying tribute to the partners, investors and customers. “We walk away with our heads held high.”

The sight of this wreck also bodes poorly for further investment in tech start-up land. Think about it: if Hivery didn’t last with all the backing and faith of one of the most successful VCs in Australia, others will think twice before bothering to invest.

“We are proud of our involvement with Hivery,” said the Blackbird spokeswoman. “This is not the result any of us wanted, but this is the nature of venture …” YB

A bad sign?

Six weeks after John Karantzis put out a call for former iSignThis shareholders to give him their personal details to help get up a European listing for the payments company, only 400 or so have signed up.

ISignThis chief executive officer John Karantzis.

That’s out of the some 10,000 mostly retail shareholders left stranded after iSignThis was suspended from trading in 2019.

And still, after weeks of heavy promotion from the remaining company loyalists, Karantzis remains some 700 shareholders short of the number needed to secure a listing on an unnamed European stock market.

To recap, in order to help out with the listing of ISX Financial, spun out of the ruins of iSignThis in 2021, shareholders have to create an account on ISX’s money transfer app, Flykk – by uploading their passport, banking and tax details, and a recent utilities bill or something similar. Worried it will create a honey pot for data theft? Fear not, Flykk is a “trademark of ISX, and personal data does not leave the company”, Karantzis told his followers on X on the weekend.

Meanwhile, Karantzis himself is waiting on the outcome of a penalty hearing in the Federal Court, which found in June the company had misled shareholders about its revenue and failed to disclose that a tie-up with Visa had been terminated. In the meantime, however, the iSignThis founder and his small band of loyalists remain quite a few bagholders short of a spread. NE