Safe Liberal seats may turn teal. Can the Teal Tsunami of self-motivated thinkers also swamp rusted-on believers in safe National Party seats?
Election signs for Nationals candidate Sam Birrell and independent candidate Rob Priestly beside the highway in the federal seat of Nicholls. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian (from the Article)
The Goyder Line marks the line of reliable rainfall in South Australia. The Brisbane Line marks the apocryphal plan to abandon northern Australia during the second world war. The Barnaby Line, then, could mark the boundary of Barnaby Joyce’s appeal to rural voters.
It has long been assumed that Joyce is a Coalition plus in the regions and a minus in the cities, but his regional appeal may be changing in the southern states. If it is, that would mirror the challenges of all major parties, trying to straddle the divide between what voters want in the north compared with the desires in the south-east.
North of the Barnaby Line – in northern New South Wales and all but the south-eastern part of Queensland – the Nationals leader is considered a plus: bringing in more votes than he loses.
But is he a negative in the southern states, losing his MPs and candidates more votes than he attracts? This is a live question that the National party will be watching, particularly in the seat of Nicholls.
Editors comment: This is another article in a series exploring the possible electoral impact of a tsunami of teal independents who seem likely to hold the balance of power in a new kind of government in Australia: One forced to face and work with the reality of a rapidly changing world by a flock of independent, self-motivated thinkers and doers concerned above all else by the climate crisis and ethics to represent the people who elected them. Can government controlled by rational thinkers replace (or at least control) a government of complacent believers happy to follow the guidance of patrons in the fossil fuel industries who try to blind people with clouds of bulldust, humbug, misrepresentations and outright lies?
Our two green light candidates, Greens’ Ian Christoe and Fusion Party’s Andrea Otto were late registrants, but given green lights because of their parties’ policies.
Vote Climate One has ranked Rob Priestly in the red light category, but he rejects funding from the coal industry and there are definite hints of teal in his corflutes and statements on climate and energy.
A net zero emissions target is required to combat the effects of climate change and protect our trade exposed industries from carbon tariffs on our products. Reaching a net zero target by 2050 will be challenging – it requires immediate changes to energy and transport sectors to ensure our children don’t shoulder all the burden of this transition close to 2050. Although the Morrison government has committed to net zero, the lack of policy urgency suggests that they would prefer to leave the difficult work to a future government.
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The transition to net zero emissions is happening regardless of who is in government, so the old arguments about should we take action or not are finished. The real question is what is the best way forward.
I support a 2030 target in line with the Business Council of Australia, which is a 46 to 50 percent reduction. As a business person and big energy user I know that energy assets last 50 plus years, so early action is important to avoid big price shocks later.
We need to make sure our region doesn’t wear all the costs associated with transition and get none of the opportunities. Bioenergy from agricultural waste is a great example of an opportunity that we should be capitalising on in this region. Without some competition for the seat, investments will go to marginal seats elsewhere in the country.
… [Priestly’s statement of true independence]
All the funds for this campaign are from people who live, farm or do business in the seat of Nicholls. The exception to this is a couple of my family members living outside the electorate who wish me well and want to donate.
I am not taking any money from Climate 200 or GetUp. Unlike the Liberal and National parties, I’m not taking donations from coal, gambling or alcohol companies.
Our donors are people who have skin in the game here. They’re mostly small business people who have seen the investment an independent can bring at a state level and individual people who want change in the tone of our politics. Many are farmers who are keen for better representation on water policy.
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I have decided not to engage in any preference deals. I’ll be asking supporters to vote 1 for me and then decide who they want second, third etc. If you really want someone else at 1, then put me at 2. Please remember to number all the boxes.
Jenny Ware is upbeat as she walks around a picturesque waterfront park in Como, in Sydney’s south.
She’s on a mission to introduce herself to as many people as possible, but knows her time is short.
“Hi, I’m Jenny Ware. I’m the Liberal candidate for Hughes,” she tells a handful of parents and grandparents supervising kids in a bustling playground.
Her reception is mixed, but she’s not daunted.
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Two pro-climate independents are also running and sense an opportunity.
“I think people are seeing the internal party machinations as a debacle, but I won’t ever be subjected to internal party politics, so it is a bit of a bonus I think,” independent candidate Linda Seymour said.
“After the last 12 years [of Craig Kelly] I think this electorate is ready for change.”
Another independent candidate, Georgia Steele, is hoping to stage a Zali Steggall-style upset and snatch a safe seat.
Read the complete article….
Editor’s comments
This is a very interesting contest to see how a reasonably affluent urban fringe electorate dominated by lower tier professionals and tradies with moderately high level of home ownership and commuting requirements respond to the choice between three fossil-fueled spin merchants given the ‘red light’ by Vote Climate One, three climate emergency realists given the ‘green light’, and an ‘orange light’ Labor nominee with little to offer but the party line.
In Hughes, I doubt that any candidate will achieve an outright majority in the election. Thus, how voters in this electorate manage their preferences may be critically important in determining whether the type of candidate they want is elected. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System is designed to help you rank candidates by Traffic Light categories so your intent to vote for a climate friendly government isn’t accidentally lost to a fossil fuel puppet.
There are three red light candidates. As summarized in the featured article, the Liberal candidate, Jenny Ware, suffered a major loss in campaigning time in an epic preselection battle between the Liberal Party federal executive and the local branch that was only settled with a High Court ruling. Ware was nominated to replace the once popular ex-Liberal incumbent, Craig Kelly, who moved to the extreme right and is seeking re-election as ‘leader’ of multi-billionaire coal miner Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party. The third red-light candidate is Narelle Seymour, representing Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, is completely unknown to Google or even One Nation’s web site as at 29/04/2022. If this was the USA, I would say Narelle Seymour is probably a bogus candidate whose name was put up to draw votes away from Linda Seymour who is a credible teal independent running for the seat.
The Labor Party, that held the seat for most of its history prior to Kelly’s election as a Liberal, is represented by Riley Campbell, who, as a relative unknown with no obvious qualifications, seems to be nominated as a place holder.
Then there are three green light candidates: ● Peter Thompson – the Green – who grew up on the beaches, waterways and National Parks of the Southerland Shire (similar to my own childhood in Southern California), a science teacher for 24 years, and a strong environmentalist for 20 years; and two teal independents: ● Linda Seymour – Also home grown in the electorate, an environmentalist and high-level professional architect and communicator with experience on a number of major Australian and overseas projects; and ● Georgia Steele, born in Southerland, high school and uni in Canberra, a high-powered corporate lawyer and litigator across 4 continents, ‘obsessed with politics’ from her time in Canberra, and settled down back in Southerland to raise a family.
I quote Georgia Steele’s well expressed reasons for running because these seem typical for most of the ‘teal’ independents I have studied:
A few years ago, I started waking up in the early hours of the morning, worrying. Worrying about my kids. Not about their current lives, but about their future. Worrying that it’s only so long that they will continue to have the same opportunities that I had when I was growing up. That all the driving, coaching, cooking, will all be for nought.
This is because, if something doesn’t change – and fast – the world they’ll be living in in their 40s, will be unrecognisable from the world that we live in now. The waterline of the beautiful Wonnie will be who knows how far up the hill and the Royal National Park will have been so badly hit with bushfires that there will be almost nothing left of it.
What really kills me about this, what keeps me up at night, what frustrates the hell out of me, is that it’s a fixable problem.
Humans have got this. Humans have already invented, manufactured and commercialised all of the technology that we need to get the planet back on track. Remember what it was like to be a world leader at something? [Editor’s emphasis]
In those early morning sleepless hours, I’d ask myself whether I was doing enough. I had banned single-use plastics from the house, I had put solar panels on the roof, I’d bought a hybrid car. I’d even become a vegetarian. But somehow, it really didn’t seem enough.
Then it dawned on me. The problem is a political one. It requires a political solution. I’m a litigator. What great qualifications for being a politician! I can write. I can argue. I can persuade. I can negotiate. I can compromise. I can do that job. And surely that would be doing enough?
So, I said goodbye to the law. I put aside my dream of writing the great Australian novel, and I’ve decided to run for office. Because things need to change, and quickly. In 30 or 40 years’ time, when my kids come to me and say “Mum, how the hell did we let it get this bad?” I’ll genuinely be able to tell them that I did everything I could. With any luck, we won’t have to have that conversation at all.
Pundits think the seat will return to the Libs. I think otherwise [See post-election note below]
The demographics of Hughes suggests that the electorate is well populated by smart, practical, largely self-made people who are good at thinking for themselves. Such people are not so likely to sheepishly follow either the party-line blather and humbug of the COALition’s fossil fuel puppet brigade or Clive Palmer’s puppet Craig Kelly anti-scientific and anti-climate fairy tales. Any one of the three green light candidates is better qualified and more likely to develop and negotiate rational and effective responses to the growing climate emergency (and many other fraught issues as well) than are any of the other candidates in this electorate.
If voters consider the evidence and THINK before they vote, I have little doubt that the green light trio will gain the majority of first preferences amongst themselves. Whether one of them will win the seat in the end depends on how voters manage their remaining preferences. Vote Climate One’s Traffic Light Voting System and its voting guides are designed to help people rank their preferences in such a way that if a green light candidate is given the first preference, and doesn’t win, the vote will still go to another green light climate friendly candidate as long as any remain in the running. Only if there are no more green or orange light candidates alive can the vote be given to a red light candidate.
Vote Climate One is also providing downloadable blank ballot formats so preferences can be decided at home, so the choices can easily be transferred to the formal ballot paper in the voting booth.
See Climate Sentinel News‘s Corrupt leaders, casual media, gullible believers for a different and sometimes humorous take on how use preferential voting to make the kind of humongous political transition we need to make to cleanse the Parliamentary stable of its many years accumulation of bulldust.
In any event, the IPCC tells us that this election is probably our last chance to change our current puppet government to one that will act in our behalf to resolve or at least mitigate the accelerating climate crisis.
We need to turn away from the the Apocalypse on the road to hothouse hell, and we won’t do this by continuing with business as usual!
It seems to have taken the clear thinking of Greta Thunberg, a 16 year-old girl who concluded school was pointless as long as humans continued their blind ‘business as usual’ rush towards extinction.
Listen to Greta’s speech live at the World Economic forum in Davos 2019. Except for her reliance on the IPCC’s overoptimistic emissions budget, everything she says is spot on that even she, as a child, can understand the alternatives and what has to happen.
In other words, wake up! smell the smoke! see the grimly frightful reality, and fight the fire that is burning up our only planet so we can give our offspring a hopeful future. This is the only issue that matters. Even the IPCC’s hyperconservative Sixth Assessment Report that looks at climate change’s global and regional impacts on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities makes it clear we are headed for an existential climate catastrophe if we don’t stop the warming process.
Scott Morrison and his troop of wooden-headed puppets are doing essentially nothing to organize effective action against the warming. In fact all they doing is rearranging the furniture in the burning house to be incinerated along with anything and everyone we may care about.
In Greta’s words, “even a small child can understand [this]”. Like Georgia Steele, people hope for their children’s futures. Greta doesn’t want your hopium. She wants you to rationally panic enough to wake up, pay attention to reality, and fight the fire…. so our offspring can have some hope for their future.
Let’s hope that we can stop global warming soon enough to leave them with a future where they can survive and flourish.
Featured Image: Boundaries of the Huges Electorate from Vote Climate One’s Hughes Electorate page. Click candidate names for more details.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
There’s only one issue people in Wentworth want to discuss.
“It’s all about bloody climate change,” laughs Bianca Wesson, sitting on the Bondi beach promenade on a grey and ominous Monday in March.
“It’s very boring but it’s true.”R
From well-heeled Watsons Bay in the east, through Paddington and out to the edge of Redfern, climate is the one issue on the lips of voters (well, that and the potholes on New South Head Road).
Editors note: The Guardian’s Seat Explorer and a variety of other election specific material can be accessed via links in the Featured Article here for different ‘climate friendly’ perspectives from Vote Climate One’s. You may still want to print out our ballot forms for your electorate, so all you need do when you get to the voting booth is transfer your considered preferences to the formal ballot paper.
Featured Image: Boundaries of the Wentworth Electorate from Vote Climate One’s Wentworth Electorate page. Click candidate names for more details.
Views expressed in this post are those of its author(s), not necessarily all Vote Climate One members.
