The atmosphere around the Kooyong pre-poll station off Burwood Rd in central Hawthorn is not quite carnival but it is largely collegiate.
The three main candidates - Liberal, teal and Greens - have navigated the initial awkwardness of being corralled on a narrow footpath leading into the pre-poll station.
Rival sides are even trading notes, grassroots supporters outlining why they have donned rather ordinary t-shirts to help their chosen party, how some Greens have become teals and Libs swapped teams as well.
Put to one side the occasional beef over sign placement or “stolen” car park spaces and people largely seem to get on in a Kooyong sort of way.
Enter Simon Holmes a Court.
Holmes a Court is clearly, and perhaps even understandably, irate about the way anti-semitism has entered the campaign in the two Victorian teal seats.
In Goldstein, Zoe Daniel is threatening her Liberal opponent Tim Wilson with a defamation suit, accusing him of making comments implying that she and her campaign are anti-Semitic and racist.
In Kooyong where he lives, Holmes a Court is threatening legal action after referring to former Liberal PM John Howard in a tweet as the “angel of death”, sparking condemnation and claims this was a reference to the Nazi Josef Mengele.
Holmes a Court insists it wasn’t a reference at all to the Auschwitz scientist and mass murderer, rather, he said, it drew on an anonymous political quote in a weekend newspaper about Howard being used as life support for ailing Liberal candidates.
.@LiberalAus's "angel of death" — john howard — is expected at #KooyongVotes prepoll any moment.
— 💧simon holmes à court (@simonahac) May 17, 2022
keep in mind he:
• undermined kyoto agreement with the australia clause
• then refused to ratify kyoto
• lost the 2007 climate election _&_ his own seat.
welcome to kooyong john!
The problem for the teals is on two fronts.
First, neither Melbourne teal campaign needs to be embroiled in such awkward debates in what are two conservative-held seats where knowledge among older voters of the Holocaust would be high.
Both Goldstein and Kooyong could be decided by hundreds of votes.
There are 10,000 people who practice Judaism in Goldstein alone while Kooyong is less Jewish it would probably still number in the high hundreds to low thousands the number who maintain connections to the faith.
There are, for example, more than 1000 children attending Bialiak College, the major Jewish private school in the electorate.
Second, it’s the way Holmes a Court has gone about defending his honour.
The Liberal Party has posted on twitter a hostile exchange on the Kooyong pre-poll footpath between Holmes a Court and Liberal Senator Jane Hume, who asks clearly to be left alone when he confronts her.
“Just leave me alone Simon please leave me alone. You are suing me for defamation Simon, I don’t want to talk to you,” she said.
Holmes a Court didn’t want to let go.
The optics for the teal-backing businessman were quite poor.
At best it could be described as a political misjudgment to confront the issue in such a publicly awkward fashion.
It is hard to see, in a hard-nosed campaigning sense, many teal volunteers being anything other than privately unimpressed, particularly given the demographic of voter being pursued by Monique Ryan and Zoe Daniel.
While Holmes a Court’s Climate 200 group does not represent all of what the teals stand for, he is tied inextricably to their campaigns.
His first lesson might be that, unless used judiciously, not much good comes from Twitter.
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