News
As community independents look increasingly competitive in several Liberal-held seats, a concerted campaign against them is running in the Murdoch press. By Jason Koutsoukis.
The Murdoch media’s attack on the teals
By the time Alex Dyson got back from a campaign stop in Hamilton, in the south-west Victorian seat of Wannon, there was an email waiting for him from The Australian. The question was reasonably direct: had he ever masturbated at work?
The query was prompted by a decade-old Facebook post in which Dyson – then a 28-year-old triple j announcer – started an online drinking game and made a joke linking self-pleasure to the Eurodance anthem “Sandstorm” by Darude.
“You just sort of have to laugh,” says Dyson, who is running as a community independent against sitting Liberal Dan Tehan. “I’d just finished meeting with a retired GP to talk about fixing Wannon’s doctor shortage and was on my way to see volunteers from the Australian Breastfeeding Association. Instead, I had to stop and respond to a decade-old Facebook post dredged up by the Liberals and pushed by The Australian.”
The episode underscores growing concern inside the Coalition as a new wave of Climate 200-backed candidates gain ground in once blue-ribbon conservative seats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viod_ZODrsA&ab_channel=TheSaturdayPaper
With most published opinion polls showing Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party edging ahead nationally, Climate 200 sources say their private polling points to serious challenges to the Coalition in at least three regional electorates: the Liberal-held seats of Flinders and Wannon in Victoria, and the Nationals’ stronghold of Cowper in northern New South Wales. The polling also suggests that Climate 200-backed independent Nicolette Boele is ahead in the Liberal-held seat of Bradfield on Sydney’s north shore.
According to a source close to the Wannon campaign, Liberal leader Peter Dutton is proving to be a negative for candidates even in once safe seats. “That’s the Dutton drag,” the source says. “The shine has come off. Dutton has to open his mouth now – he’s in a campaign he can’t control, and it’s shambolic. If a rising tide lifts all boats, the opposite is happening here.”
Dan Tehan’s primary vote held around 44 per cent for months, the source says, high enough to stay in Liberal hands, with right-wing preferences tending to flow strongly back to the Liberal candidate. “But in the past three weeks, Tehan’s started to tank. He’s down to 40 and that seat’s suddenly in play.” While Climate 200 credits much of the shift to Dyson’s ground game, the source says the broader mood is shifting with the Liberal leader’s every misstep. “Dutton is hurting [Tehan], full stop.”
As the campaigns tighten, the negative stories in the Murdoch press have intensified. The convener of Climate 200, Simon Holmes à Court, says the conservative media’s focus on the crowdfunding organisation is relentless and far from organic, alleging that many of the attacks originate from a Coalition “dirt unit”.
“Long lists of accusatory questions drawing a long bow land at about 2pm almost every day, replete with quotes from Liberal senators, demanding a response within hours,” Holmes à Court tells The Saturday Paper. “It’s such a transparent campaign strategy.”
He points to a front-page story run by The Australian this week under the headline “Climate donors’ slave labour links” paired with a photo of him. The piece targeted Holmes à Court personally over a 2019 factory visit in China.
Holmes à Court has since filed a concerns notice, alleging the headline and photo pairing is defamatory and part of a vindictive effort to smear Climate 200 and the candidates it supports by association.
“The concerns notice makes clear they’ve absolutely crossed the line on this one,” says Holmes à Court, who compared the headline in The Australian to The Sydney Morning Herald’s 2014 “Treasurer for sale” headline, a story that was found to have defamed then Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey and for which he was awarded $200,000 in damages.
“If you went to Google News and searched modern slavery, there was a picture of me as the No. 1 hit saying, ‘Climate donors’ slave labour links’. This piece, deliberately connecting me with slavery, was clearly designed to damage my reputation.”
In the NSW seat of Cowper – long held by the Nationals – Climate 200-backed candidate Caz Heise says the same kind of anti-teal campaign is playing out.
“ ‘Are you a teal?’ ‘Are you a Holmes à Court puppet?’ ” Heise says, quoting the social media barbs that flood her campaign pages daily. “It’s cut-and-paste nonsense from troll accounts that aren’t even local.”
Like other Climate 200-backed candidates, Heise is facing coordinated messaging that paints independents as “Green–Labor stooges” – a line repeated in Nationals campaign flyers and social media ads across regional seats.
“They’re not taking the temperature of the room,” Heise says. “People here are asking why we have got only six mobile phone towers in 10 years while in the seat of Indi, people there have got 48 phone towers under community independent Helen Haines. Most people in Cowper are not asking who funds my campaign, they’re asking why they can’t see a doctor or get childcare.”
Heise says her campaign is supported by more than 650 local donors alongside national crowdfunding platforms such as Climate 200 and the Regional Voices Fund. “Meanwhile, the major parties are taking money from gambling, fossil fuels and tobacco, and nobody’s asking questions about that. They’d rather yell ‘teal puppet’ than talk about why big corporations pay next to no tax.”
Heise, a nurse and former public health administrator, says the personal smears have changed slightly this campaign. They are less about her and more about Climate 200. “Last election, they whispered about my sexuality – that I was married to a woman, that I wasn’t of ‘moral standing’,” Heise says. “This time, it’s more about Holmes à Court and how dangerous it is to vote independent, but voters aren’t buying it.”
In Flinders, a seat the Liberals have held almost continuously since Federation, teal independent Ben Smith traces the attacks against him to the moment his campaign started to gain traction against incumbent Zoe McKenzie.
“We’d been flying under the radar for a while,” Smith says. “But once we started polling competitively, the Liberal flyers started arriving.”
The attacks, says Smith, have been personalised and repetitive. “They dug up old posts from LinkedIn, took quotes out of context and tried to tie me to policies I was only ever advocating for on behalf of local housing groups,” Smith says. “There’s no interest in what I actually believe. It’s just guilt by association.”
Smith, a former church minister and now head of a local community support centre, believes the campaign has crossed personal lines – but says the most egregious attacks have come not from his Liberal opponents but from right-wing media commentators such as Peta Credlin and Andrew Bolt on the Murdoch-owned network Sky News.
According to Smith, one especially cynical hit piece in The Australian implied he had brokered a preference deal with a One Nation candidate after being seen speaking with him at a public event. “I’ve been very clear I’m running an open ticket,” Smith says. “It was just two people talking, but they spun it into some kind of secret deal.” He believes the story, and others like it, were fed directly to journalists by Liberal operatives. “It was completely choreographed.”
Smith says that as his campaign picked up, his Liberal opponent was forced to start doing public events. The party also started spending more in the seat. “They weren’t spending a cent on advertising six weeks ago. Now they’re spending $10,000 to $15,000 a week because, for the first time in a long time, this seat’s actually in play.”
Not everyone sees the attacks on the teals as a coordinated smear campaign. Jason Falinski, the former Liberal MP for Mackellar, who lost his seat to teal candidate Sophie Scamps in 2022, has since re-emerged as the spokesperson for the campaign group Australians for Prosperity. The Liberal advocacy group has 57,000 registered supporters and has received substantial funding from the coal industry – and, Falinski hastens to point out, two donors who are also investors in renewable energy projects. Alongside campaign group Advance, it is running high-volume digital and mail campaigns against Climate 200-backed candidates.
Falinski says that far from being victims, the teals are benefiting from an extraordinary financial and organisational advantage. “Climate 200 has literally dozens of people working for it. Many of them are lawyers. You do something and suddenly you’ve got 10 legal threats flying at you,” he says. “Neither the Labor Party nor the Liberal Party has anything like their resources.”
Falinski says Australians for Prosperity is not just about stopping the teals, it’s about promoting debate on economic reform. “Economic reform has been off the table for decades. Since Peter Costello left, there’s been no serious push to fix the system. Wages are stagnating, our standard of living is slipping and few people in parliament have the guts to say, ‘We need to change course.’ ”
While acknowledging that politics has always involved negative campaigning, Falinski insists the scrutiny teals are facing is mild in comparison with major party candidates. “I spent six months being accused of dual citizenship – with no paperwork – because of the Holocaust. That was real scrutiny. What these candidates are experiencing is basic accountability. If you’ve made sexualised jokes or questionable public comments, it’s going to come out. That’s politics. If you can’t handle it, you shouldn’t be in the race.”
The Saturday Paper asked Alex Dyson if he had ever masturbated at work. The answer was “no”.
The Saturday Paper also asked Climate 200 if they had dozens of people, many of them lawyers, working for them. The organisation said it has a single lawyer on retainer and is not her only client.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 19, 2025 as "Murdoch and the teals".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
