Green-left that dare not speak their name
The teals and the ABC aren’t as centrist as they would have us believe.
When pre-teal independent Zali Steggall arrived at an Australia Day long weekend rally to declare her candidature for Tony Abbott’s seat of Warringah in January 2019, an ABC television reporter and crew were in the car with her. Two days later we got to hear what 7.30’s Andy Park had asked Steggall: “We are on the way to your press conference to announce your candidacy as the independent for Warringah, are you ready for that?”
Evidently she was – and the ABC seemed well prepared, too. This was an early clue about the symbiotic relationship between what became known as the teal independent movement and the ABC.
Just as the unions have the ALP and small business has the Liberals, the teals have the ABC. And vice versa.
At heart they share the same political beliefs and an identical tactic – they are green-left activists who pretend to be centrist. The ABC hides its true bent to avoid being overt in breach of its charter; the teals hide it because they do not want to frighten away right-of-centre supporters in the leafy suburbs.
The teals and the ABC are the green-left that dare not speak their name. This disingenuous approach taints them both.
The Australian Greens, for all their lunacy, are transparent about their ideological positioning, as are leftist media organisations such as Guardian Australia and Green Left. But the teals and the ABC pretend to be climate-friendly but middle of the road.
This is nonsense. They have more in common with Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion than they ever would with John Howard or Bob Hawke.
Flip back to that Steggall launch in 2019, and who was there to welcome her and the ABC crew? Only former climate commissioner and renowned climate catastrophist Tim Flannery.
He of the notorious “even the rain that does fall is not gonna fill our rivers and dams” revealed to the ABC that he and Steggall were pretty much interchangeable. “Look, I was considering running, but when Zali put up her hand I could see that the time was right for her,” said Flannery, perhaps realising that in the green-left hierarchy once you are matched on alarmism other factors, such as gender, come into play. This was Flannery, not some centrist.
The teal member for Kooyong, Monique Ryan, employs as her chief of staff Sally Rugg, formerly of GetUp and Change.org and who most recently ran the campaign for a royal commission into News Corp (aka non green-left) media.
The teal candidate (and now member) for Goldstein, Zoe Daniel, personifies the teal-ABC nexus. She is a former ABC reporter who engaged campaign support from former ABC journalists Angela Pippos and Jim Middleton.
Middleton also was employed by Climate 200, the campaigning and teal-funding organisation funded and run by Simon Holmes a Court, the renewable energy investor and enthusiast who inherited hundreds of millions of dollars from his father, Robert, Australia’s first billionaire, who made much of his money through resources, including fossil fuels.
Perhaps the teals are a way for the son to purge the sins of the father – or perhaps he is just having fun with his fortune.
Steggall failed to properly declare a $100,000 donation from the Kinghorn family, who derived their wealth from coalmines. So there seems to be some big dollars getting a bit of teal-washing.
Ryan, in Kooyong, personifies the big government, leftist bent of the teals. Although she once denied any previous political affiliation (“No, nothing, I’m a complete cleanskin,” she told The Age), Ryan later admitted she was a former member of the Labor Party.
Before the election she was asked about any plans to increase taxes and her office responded that she would “not be making tax policies”. During the campaign Ryan, like the other teals, was big on improving politics and declared: “I stand for integrity, decency and honesty, I will always hold our government to account for its actions.”
Yet after she was elected – displacing treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who had legislated a three-stage tax cut plan supported by Labor and which both major parties had promised to keep – Ryan came out with a tax plan. In August she tweeted that stage three of the tax cuts, due to be delivered in 2024, benefiting most of her constituents, now made “no economic sense”.
This week she said – and yes, it was on the ABC – that we were “mature enough” to understand that governments “can sometimes need to change their mind”. Let us be clear: before the election she stood for “integrity, decency and honesty” and holding “government to account”, and said she would “not be making tax policy” – but after the election she was urging Labor to increase taxes and break a core election promise.
A clearer case of political hypocrisy and double dealing would be hard to find. Perhaps the ABC will run a critical piece about all this – or, more likely, they will continue to give her an uncritical platform.
Ryan is the same MP who pointed across the chamber and admonished Coalition MPs, Nurse Ratched-style, to “put your masks on”, then was pictured a week or so later dancing barefaced at a crowded party. She also accidentally voted in favour of coalmines in parliament and had to make a public confession.
You need to remind yourself occasionally that the teals promised to improve our politics. Ryan had to admit she drove an internal combustion engine car, as Steggall had confessed previously, both claiming they could not afford an electric vehicle.
Wentworth teal Allegra Spender also did not drive an electric car or have solar panels on her roof. She boasted of driving a hybrid in the city but keeping a fuel-burning beast for the weekends.
Yep, minimising your carbon footprint is something the teals urge on others rather than themselves – do as they say, not as they do. Steggall came to prominence through Olympic snow-skiing, a sport that is up there with drag-racing when it comes to carbon intensity.
Still, they mean well. Spender is active on a dog park issue in her electorate, which must take the pressure off the local councillors. Never mind that dogs have a carbon footprint equivalent to a small car.
Spender’s teal colleague running for the state seat of Vaucluse within Wentworth is a Karen (Karen Freyer) who has been touting an anti-development line and illustrating it by complaining about the lack of a watchmaker in Double Bay, one of the poshest shopping and eating precincts in the nation. This is a First World problem if ever there was one, especially given there are at least a dozen jewellers in Double Bay and a rather miffed watchmaker who was surprised to read of his demise.
The teals win votes promising to save the planet yet this is what they deliver. They will keep their pets and dog parks while the farmers have to cull their cows.
This is where we pay the price for compulsory voting. When we force the disaffected to vote, we can get feel-good politicians such as the teals, easily manipulated by the likes of Holmes a Court and the green-left parties to whom they owe their preference-driven victories.
The ABC’s most controversial reporter, Louise Milligan, followed teal candidates through their election victories all the way to Parliament House in Canberra. Along the way the ABC reporter and crew showed us the former ABC reporter Daniel being introduced by the former ABC reporter Pippos who pronounced that the ABC’s Antony Green had declared Daniel the winner.
Talk about falling into the looking glass. Once in Canberra, Milligan told us: “One of the hallmarks of the teals is that everyone seems nice.” No, seriously.
And she used Ryan’s silly bossiness over Covid masks as an example of “how this new breed of politicians might wield their power”. Except they are powerless in a parliament where Labor holds a clear majority.
Milligan also praised the ability of the teals to raise funds through large donations from wealthy benefactors. It was exactly opposite to the way in which the ABC would normally criticise the Liberal Party for accepting funds.
During the campaign, and since, the teals have argued the ABC’s case for more taxpayer dollars. But of course.
ABC’s Four Corners also showed us the angry, masked teals walking around Parliament House whinging about how the government had allocated lower than expected staffing entitlements. Milligan described this as an “act of huge bastardry”. Yep, before they had even spoken a word on the floor of parliament, the teals were focused on themselves and demanding more from taxpayers. And the ABC was prosecuting their case.
Nothing stays the same like politics.
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The so-called teal independents and our taxpayer-funded public broadcaster are a match made in Gaia. From the hustings to the chamber, they have been co-operating on a mission to save the planet by first looking after themselves.