By Stephen Brook and Kishor Napier-Raman
It is hardly news to learn that Climate 200 founder and godfather of the teal movement Simon Holmes à Court has made a political donation. But it is when that donation turns out to be to a Liberal MP.
Simon Holmes à Court: “Good luck attracting talent to join the party after this debacle.” Credit: Kristoffer Paulsen
First some background: Holmes à Court, son of Australia’s first billionaire, Robert Holmes à Court, used to be a Liberal Party supporter and fundraiser until a major beef with Josh Frydenberg over an oped Holmes à Court wrote in The Guardian supporting the closure of a coal-fired power station.
Holmes à Court then swiftly exited Kooyong 200, a Liberal fundraising unit, and founded Climate 200, which supercharged the whole teal movement at the 2022 election. The rest, as they say, is political history, including Frydenberg, who lost his seat of Kooyong to teal candidate Monique Ryan.
So we can be forgiven for thinking that the $500 donation in Holmes à Court’s name to a GoFundMe page set up for former Victorian Liberal leader John Pesutto to help pay legal costs after his defamation case against fellow Liberal MP Moira Deeming was just a troll having fun.
After all, the fundraising page records obviously fake donations for desultory amounts from the likes of neo-Nazi “Blair Cottrell”, former opposition leader “Peter Dutton”, the “Plymouth Brethren”, a “Dan Andrews” and even $5 from a “Josh Frydenberg”. But Holmes à Court tells us the donation is genuine.
“It’s unconscionable that entities associated with the Victorian Liberals – with investments approaching $200 million — are prepared to leave John and his family destitute, especially when he was acting as the leader of the party and with the full support of the leadership team,” he told us, before adding a final sting.
“Good luck attracting talent to join the party after this debacle.”
Pesutto, who was ordered to pay $2.3 million in legal costs to Deeming after the Federal Court found he had repeatedly defamed her by falsely implying she had associated with neo-Nazis, must be Holmes à Court’s kind of moderate Liberal.
The fundraiser has collected $124,000 from more than 300 donors, including two donations (anonymous) of $10,000 each. But also, someone has set up a fake GoFundMe page to mock the crowdfunding appeal to raise money to pay the costs, which are on top of the $300,000 in damages Pesutto was also ordered to pay.
Pesutto has had to put out a statement decrying the fake fundraising page as he tries to raise the costs cash, which he must pay in a lump sum or face bankruptcy, which would force him out of parliament.
“Why anyone would try and sabotage these efforts defies comprehension … ” he lamented, directing people to the genuine page.
Others come forward
Also a genuine donor: long-standing pre-teal Frydenberg tormentor Oliver Yates, the former Clean Energy Finance Corporation chief executive who previously tried to unseat the former treasurer in Kooyong before the teal movement got going. He donated $500, he told us, before begging off the phone to attend to his dog, which upon hearing that CBD was calling was immediately violently sick.
And Rob Baillieu has genuinely chipped in $500. Baillieu is son of Liberal ex-premier Ted Baillieu, who along with fellow ex-premier Jeff Kennett has been trying (and failing) to get the Liberal Party to stump up cash for Pesutto.
Rob Baillieu, son of former Victorian Liberal premier Ted Baillieu.Credit: Simon Schluter
Young Baillieu, a councillor for the City of Boroondara, is tipped by local political experts as a potential winning candidate for Pesutto’s state seat of Hawthorn, if the MP is forced into bankruptcy and needs to quit parliament.
Baillieu would not be standing for the Liberal Party, which he despises, but as a teal independent. He wrote in an Age opinion column that a job interview with a Liberal MP was “was one of the most homophobic experiences of my life”.
“It’ll be up to the community to decide if an independent should run and who that person should be,” he told CBD.
“It’s appalling that the Liberal Party has so far chosen to abandon their former leader and put him at risk of bankruptcy. There are no independents in the Victorian parliament and this lack of independent representation is a clear disservice to the community.
“We would be well served by an independent in Hawthorn, as the community is by our federal member, Dr Monique Ryan.” Watch this space.
Technical hitch
Rough Friday for e-conveyancing platform PEXA, which suffered a technical outage, leaving its mum and dad customers unable to settle on their family home transactions for hours.
The company has an effective monopoly on the Australian e-conveyancing space, and Friday’s brief outage excited rival platforms like Sympli, which have so far been unable to dent PEXA’s market dominance despite spending big and talking up federal and state reform to the sector.
A PEXA spokesman was quick to assure us that no Great Australian Dreams were crushed, telling us the exchange “experienced a technical issue affecting mobile signing capability” that was resolved within three hours.
“We estimate that the disruption impacted less than 10 per cent of settlements during that period, which then went on later to settle or reschedule,” they said.
Still, it was enough to trigger whispers that the NSW Liberals would push for a parliamentary inquiry into the glitch.
The outage came after a few big changes at PEXA, which just brought in a new chief executive in Russell Cohen from a job with rideshare-cum-delivery platform Grab in Singapore and poached Seven’s old chief regulatory and sustainability officer Clare Gill to run corporate affairs.
Meanwhile, the broadcaster has just hired former NSW Liberal staffer Kaycie Bradford as communications director, corporate. Her predecessor Robert Sharpe departed some time ago to head up corporate comms at LinkedIn, where he no doubt spends his days fielding complaints that its online games offerings such as Queens and Zip are getting too easy.
Despite talk that Seven West Media would move everything in house, rest assured it can still call on the external services of legendary silver-tongued spinner Neil Shoebridge, via Shoebridge Knowles Media Group, which spruiks on its website that it is in the business of “sparking smarter conversations for exceptional results” and that “SKMG placed 689 pieces of proactive media coverage for Seven West Media in a single year”.
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