Teals are Labor-lite and they think we’re too dumb to spot a fake

Allegra Spender Campaign posters line the sides of New South Head Road in Sydney’s Rose Bay. Picture: John Appleyard

It used to be easy to spot a fake: handbags, clothes, shoes, humans. Back in the day, when hi-tech was having a cordless home phone and the latest six-disc stacker CD player in your car, fakes of every persuasion were easy to spot.

Not so nowadays. Financially, at least, the trade in fake goods accounts for roughly $US500bn of the global economy. The production of counterfeits has become more organised, more sophisticated and more brazen. From high-end leather goods to cosmetics, medical goods, food and beverage, clothing and, I propose, in the middle of this election campaign, political candidates: fakes. Namely, fake independents who trade the power of that word while having no real resemblance to what it means.

The teal T-shirt brigade, the co-funded, co-branded, hand-picked candidates of Climate 200, have failed the independent test time and again. When they first emerged, they carried perhaps a whiff of credibility, but with just one week to go until polling day it’s clear what they really are: the political equivalent of a Gucci handbag flogged for $20 on the beach at Kuta. Fake.

Satan himself is always hiding in the detail, and Team Holmes a Court’s obsession with climate and a federal independent commission against corruption has exposed the group for what it actually is: a bunch of entitled, elites who don’t know and don’t care about the challenges of everyday Australians.

When asked reasonable questions about policy detail, they screech “climate” at every turn because they can afford to. They tweet their disdain for fossil fuels from smartphones produced with fossil fuels. They are collectively and without exception targeting government seats.

They only talk about their pet love, renewables. Never about nuclear, a far better option by any metric. They do so in a lord of the manor, “let them eat cake” kind of way. They don’t talk about things you and I face because they don’t need to. Theirs is a world of protected privilege. A world where, for some at least, you can trade on a legacy and a surname.

They’ve nothing to contribute on the issues that shape our lives every day. About plummeting standards of education. National security. Our fractured federation. Taxation reform.

I’d love to hear one, just one of them, explain how they would manage the upward pressure that renewables place on energy prices and the concurrent threat (greatest against the most vulnerable) of energy poverty. Oh, but that stuff is for people who live outside of Wentworth, Curtin and Kew. Paying the bills and staying warm? Those are proletariat concerns.

You can’t feed your kids by shouting climate change every five seconds. Pay your mortgage. Your parents and grandparents can’t keep warm in winter if there are rotating brownouts and blackouts.

I’d have more respect for them if they welcomed debate on these matters and offered solutions that demonstrated an understanding of the problems and a path forward. To acknowledge and debate the challenges. They don’t seem to understand that running a country is not a single-issue proposition. That, for example, guaranteeing security of supply, that offering policy detail, is in fact everyone’s job.

I’d respect them more if, like the rest of us, the teal party candidates would declare frankly and openly who they will align with, based on the policies on the table. That’s what you and I do when we go to the ballot box.

So far only the candidate for Wentworth, Allegra Spender, has sort of almost declared her hand. The rest say, we’ll tell you when you vote us in. You and I must decide now, why not them? Integrity in politics demands transparency. We deserve to know.

I’d also have more respect for them if their primary backer, Climate 200, was more transparent about perceived and actual conflict. A simple step in that direction, for example, would be to put up a page on each candidate’s website detailing the financial interests of each Climate 200 board member in the renewables sector, and let voters consider that information in their decision. Isn’t that what the transparency they claim to champion looks like?

In some ways, the major parties have only themselves to blame. The fake independents have been spawned, allowed to temporarily thrive in a broader leadership vacuum. Obsession with self, internal factional garbage that media and those in the political bubble think matter to those of us watching on. There’s always a price to pay for such folly and it’s dressed in teal.

The commonality of all three is their self-obsession and contempt for the electorate. The contempt that has federal Labor dropping Kristina Keneally all the way from the Pittwater into Fowler, and Andrew Charlton into Parramatta from his harbourside estate. The way the Liberal Party spent nearly three years squabbling over who gets to pick candidates rather than focusing on exceptional candidates. Climate 200 candidates are Labor-lite. They’re ALP wolves in sheep’s clothing and they think we’re too dumb to spot a fake.

Next Saturday will tell if we are or not.