Paul Oosting’s journey from rooster to feather duster ended last week with an ignominious performance at a half-empty National Press Club, where he turned up to tell no one in particular his year had been something of a failure.
The GetUp boss practised his speech behind a kitchen bench in a soulless Canberra hotel room using the microwave as an improvised lectern, sharing a picture with his supporters to signal his frugality.
“Today has been absolutely wild,” he told them in an email that night. “I’m still very much out of my comfort zone when speaking to a room full of politicians and journalists!”
Exaggeration and self-aggrandisement is GetUp’s stock in trade. In response to some unsympathetic questioning from the depleted journalists’ table, Oosting admitted the organisation’s election tactic of targeting “hard right” MPs had been a total failure.
When the ABC’s Sabra Lane suggested GetUp’s presence had been superfluous in Warringah since Tony Abbott would have lost anyway, Oosting did not disagree. But, as he told supporters earlier in the year, it had been “the right thing to do”.
In the real world Oosting would have been lucky to hang on to his job after wasting $3.5m of donated funds on a hairbrained adventure in democracy. For the utopian left, on the other hand, the only thing more satisfying than victory is virtuous defeat, and a surprising number of people appeared happy to fund it.
It would be a mistake to say that GetUp achieved nothing at the May election. It succeeded in making this the meanest, nastiest and most-polarised campaign in recent memory.
Together with the union movement, it sought to influence the result through falsehood and intimidation. Yet its influence was, if anything, in the Coalition’s favour, building sympathy for most of the candidates it attacked and revealing itself to be anything but the spontaneous group of concerned citizens it pretends.
Oosting’s claim that GetUp has a million members is preposterous. It is feasible that it has a million email addresses since it uses all the tricks of social media marketing to harvest them. But as Oosting admitted, only 50,000 responded to its many appeals to chip in to save the world.
“Chip in $12 to save our ABC!” GetUp asked its friends in March. “Chip in $12 to free our parliament from Tony Abbott’s extreme, right wing politics,” it asked in January. “Can you make a regular contribution to support the fight against authoritarianism?” it asked somewhat cryptically last week.
If we assume Oosting’s figures are broadly correct, crowd-funding at an average of $24 would have paid for about a third of GetUp’s election funding. The rest of the money was not so much chipped in as shovelled in.
Jan Cameron, founder of the Kathmandu clothing and outdoor equipment company, donated $200,000. The pro-Palestinian Norman Rothfield Peace and Justice Fund contributed $160,000. The European Climate Fund, backed by Ikea among others, gave $93,000.
By far the largest contributor, however, was the Sunrise Project, an Australian charity to which donations are tax-deductible, unlike donations direct to GetUp, which quite properly are not.
The Sunrise Project was awarded tax deductible status in July 2013 in the dying days of the Labor government. Last year it raised $9.8m, $5.5m of which was given in grants to environmental activists including $1m that went overseas.
The Sunrise Project was founded in 2012 by a former Greenpeace executive. Its deputy director used to be Adam Bandt’s chief of staff and ran GetUp’s environmental justice campaign until three years ago. Its finance program director, who leads its campaign to pressure corporates to divest from fossil fuels, is a Swiss national who lives in Berkley, California.
It is a partner of Unfriend Coal, an international group that bullies insurance companies to get out of the coal business. Unfriend Coal is campaigning against the All Blacks because they are sponsored by AIG, a company that has agreed to insure the Adani mine.
Our members are our movement.
— GetUp! (@GetUp) October 16, 2019
People care what @PaulOosting has to say because our members are out there taking action and having impact. He’s simply a custodian of their voices and their values.
But gee we’re all proud of him today. 💪 pic.twitter.com/U2NZVSTKQ9
Many charities do worthy things with tax-deductible donations. They are effectively a government subsidy but one that few taxpayers would begrudge if it is helping to find a cure for dementia or lift kids out of welfare sinkholes.
Yet the Sunrise Project does nothing particularly charitable at all. A substantial part of its money comes from the US. Donors include the Sandler Foundation, the Growald Family Fund and the Flora Family Fund.
It operates a cashbox, accepting money from overseas donors whose identity are only known by chance and dishing out to environmental groups as it pleases.
This much we know thanks to an outbreak of premature triumphalism from Sunrise Project’s founder, John Hepburn, after the Federal Court overturned the Adani approval in 2015.
In a group email to supporters, which found its way via John Podesta’s inbox to WikiLeaks, Hepburn writes that the Adani project is in its death throes. The coal industry, he writes, was complaining of an orchestrated conspiracy to systematically destroy the Australian coal industry. “I seriously don’t know where they get these wacky ideas from!” Hepburn writes.
Like so much else on the social justice agenda, the elites have become skilled at achieving their aims through extra-democratic means.
The Morrison government received a mandate to achieve a moderate emissions reduction in line with our international commitments. A cashed-up international cabal of panic merchants is doing everything it can to overrule it. GetUp is merely the useful, or perhaps useless, idiot in this game. The real action is happening elsewhere.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.