‘Like a child throwing toys from his cot’: Kylea Tink lashes Liberal MP

Kylea Tink uses a succinct phrase to describe Liberal MP Paul Fletcher.

“Like a child throwing his toys out of the cot,” she says of the long-time MP for Bradfield in Sydney’s north.

Tink’s electorate of North Sydney – which was abolished in the most recent seat redistribution by the Australian Electoral Commission – neighbours Fletcher’s seat of Bradfield.

Kylea Tink will not stand in the lower house at the next election.Credit: Edwina Pickles

But relations are frosty, especially since Fletcher gave a speech on Monday labelling teal candidates like Tink “a green left con job” with campaigns “carefully designed to dupe traditional Liberal voters”.

“The intention was to get people to think, ‘That nice teal candidate could almost be a Liberal, I’ll vote for her’,” Fletcher asserted in the Sydney Institute talk.

Says Tink in response: “He is again absolutely failing to accept any personal responsibility for where the Liberals found themselves in 2022.

“It’s disappointing that they lack the capacity for introspection. Rather than the party look at itself … they’ve chosen to say, ‘The community is stupid, they were conned’.”

Since the “devastating” abolition of her seat, Tink has considered whether to run against Fletcher in Bradfield at the 2025 election. She has decided she can’t, “in all good conscience”, but talks up the teal movement, saying it will continue to expand and threaten the major parties’ dominance.

In a very genteel power transfer, Tink will throw her backing behind community independent Nicolette Boele, who ran against Fletcher in 2022.

Boele turned Bradfield from safe Liberal seat to marginal, with Fletcher suffering a 15 per cent swing against him.

ABC Electoral analyst Antony Green estimates the former Liberal minister is now sitting on a slim margin of 2.5 per cent.

Kylea Tink and Nicolette Boele. Credit: Edwina Pickles

Fletcher also said in his speech the teals “constitute the most serious threat to majority government in 80 years”.

Tink agrees with this. “We are going back to the earlier roots in our democracy, where it was much more about constructive coalitions.”

She is considering running for the Senate as a community independent, as some in the movement believe it’s time the teals extend their reach to the upper house.

She says Labor’s proposed political donations reforms are designed to “kill off the community independent movement”.

Instead, Tink believes the laws will force the movement to evolve and “take the shape of a coalition or alliance”.

“Something is going to have to rise up … to bring us back to a sensible centrist right”.

The “decline” of the Liberal Party and its lack of women candidates for the 2025 election shows “how deeply embedded the sexism is when it comes to the Liberal National Party”, Tink says.

But her biggest concern with the Coalition “remains what seems to be their intractable obsession with fossil fuels”.

“Even now, what we hear from them is a strategy that would condemn our children’s children to a lifestyle we can’t even imagine.”

Tink also targets Labor, which she predicts will lose its majority. She warns that community independents will soon start to run in Labor seats.

“Labor has been very gun shy,” she says. “Every time the opposition has barked, they’ve flinched.”

Asked if she thinks Anthony Albanese is a good prime minister, Tink pauses for a long moment.

“I think Anthony Albanese is a good Labor Party man,” she says. “I think he’s a good human being. But is he the person to lead us forward in the next 10 years? Is he a transformational leader? No.”

Teal candidates took seven seats from Liberals at the 2022 election and are hoping to broaden their electoral footprint in 2025.

They are not formally aligned – Tink says the community independent MPs (as they prefer to be known) met in person for the first time when the 47th parliament commenced.

But they all share the backing of Climate 200 – a multimillion-dollar fund created by wealthy philanthropist Simon Holmes a Court.

Climate 200 is already supporting about 30 candidates, up from 23 at the last election, including those running in fresh territory like the Liberal seat of McPherson on Queensland’s Gold Coast.

Last election there were four Climate 200-backed incumbents; this time there are 10.

In Bradfield, Boele has continued to campaign since she ran against Fletcher in 2022.

Boele, who has a background in green-tech finance and policy, says she was approached by the grassroots body Voices for Bradfield in 2021, asking if she would be interested in running as an independent.

She decided to accept following an encounter with Fletcher at North Turramurra shops.

Boele says he gave disappointing responses to her questions about near-term emissions reduction targets.

“I just couldn’t believe as a moderate Liberal he didn’t say: ‘I agree it’s hard, but I believe in climate solutions’,” she says.

Bradfield candidate Nicolette Boele, who will take on sitting MP Paul Fletcher.Credit: Edwina Pickles

Afterwards, Boele says, he asked for her name and wrote it down “in his little black book”.

Fletcher declined to comment in person, but sent a statement saying “people in Bradfield know that a vote for a teal is a vote to keep Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister in a Labor-Greens-teals minority government”.

Boele dismisses this as a “recycled scare campaign” that “shows how the party fails to understand how disillusioned people in the community are with the Liberal Party”.

“He basically called all the people who decided to put ‘independent’ above him or his party, dim and naive.”

She says she will run on a platform of housing affordability, easing cost of living pressures, climate action and government integrity.

Boele says her campaign has raised about $450,000 from a mixture of local small donors and “major donors” who gave more than $1500. There was a bump in donations this week following Fletcher’s speech, she says.

The campaign has also received a donation of $42,000 from Climate 200. Last election, Boele received $100,000 from Climate 200.

“I want to make it clear that yes, Bradfield is in play,” she says.

“A lot of people get engaged when they think their vote might actually count.”

Boele will not say which party she would back in the event of a hung parliament, but says she would prosecute her stated policy priorities in any conversation about guaranteeing supply.

Community independents have been criticised for their multimillion-dollar backing, for mostly voting with the government and the Greens and for being ineffectual.

Tink counters that “in this 47th parliament the legislation has been more scrutinised than any other parliament because there are people like me on the crossbench”.

“I absolutely believe the legislation that has gone through is better because of the input we have provided.”