The woke money behind the No camp and the daunting data before the Yes camp

Simon says Retired fund manager Simon Fenwick has a lot of views about what companies should do with their resources: “How could so many CEOs read the temperature so badly [on the Voice]? What gives them the right to think they speak for the shareholders, customers and staff? I would say it’s hubristic,” he told The Australian this week.

For his part, Fenwick has fought back against out-of-touch elites by throwing three-quarters of a million dollars at the No campaign since April via his donations to Advance, which loves saying things like “Go woke and literally go broke“. This notion of corporate elites spaffing a bunch of money on woke causes is a long-standing preoccupation of conservatives in the US, and is bleeding with dispiriting inevitability into the discourse over here. With that in mind, a tipster suggested we take a look at some of Fenwick’s current investments.

Silver River Investment Holdings, owned by Fenwick and his wife Elizabeth, is the organisation via which he has donated a quite a lot of money to Advance since 2020. It is also heavily invested in companies that spout utter woke nonsense. For example, it owns a 21% stake in Outlier Energy, which is focused on “fugitive methane capture and upgrading to hydrogen, low carbon fuel or renewable natural gas projects that are implemented under article‘s 6.2 and 6.4 of the Paris Agreement”. The Paris Agreement??

It doesn’t stop there. Silver River’s other shareholdings include Sustainable Food and Water Pty Ltd, which promises to “provide Australian and South Pacific households, businesses and communities with sustainable food and water solutions whilst meeting as many of the UN’s 17 sustainable development aoals as possible.” Taking orders from the UN? How long until we start collectivising Australia’s rural population in pursuit of a communist utopia?

Then there’s hippy commune Hemp Harvests Pty Ltd, a “collection of people that see hemp as an important tool in our journey to a sustainable future”. Quit honking that jazz cabbage and get a proper job, buddy!

There’s more, but you get the picture — and given he’s spent well over a million bucks on conservative politics in recent years, it would appear going woke is not sending anyone broke in this instance.

Abbott time On Monday my colleague Anton Nilsson spent three hours at an Australians for Constitutional Monarchy event, presumably feeling his will to live curl from his body like cigarette smoke as messages from former prime ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott were played and broadcaster and furious garden gnome Alan Jones reheated a brimming Tupperware container of hard-right talking points on “our future constitution”. Notably, it was the first time a concern for the future of something appears to have intruded upon their collective 231 years on this planet.

First, can we talk about the absolute state of this event image, with its pixelated image of Abbott and the visible flecks of white around Howard like it had been cut out of a newspaper by hand.

The trio sang the hits with the slick vigour of a top cover band; Jones gave us his rendition of an Andrew Bolt classic by insisting “I’m an Indigenous Australian,” and Abbott showed he was down with the new stuff with an extended tribute to Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s recent contention that there were no ongoing negative effects of colonisation in Australia — whatever sins occurred, he said, “the settlement of Australia has had a wonderful impact not just on Australians, but the wider world … and indeed, Indigenous Australia is better today. And it would have been thanks to the British settlement of this country.”

Which is interesting, because back in 2014 Abbott conceded “Initially the impact [of British settlement on Indigenous people] was all bad — disease, dispossession, discrimination, at times wanton murder”. This may have been as a corrective after he was slated for his contention earlier that year that Australia was “unsettled” before the British arrived, and by 2018, he was back arguing “what happened on the 26th of January 1788 was, on balance, for everyone — Aboriginal people included — a good thing because it brought Western civilisation to this country …”. It shows that while Price’s sentiments were not new, they have reinvigorated the assimilation chorus to say what they think without equivocation.

Man knoweth not the price thereof Speaking of Price, in last Wednesday’s The Australian Janet Albrechtsen called it:

Regardless of whether the October 14 referendum succeeds or fails, the biggest winner will be Jacinta Nampijinpa Price …

Indeed, if the Liberal parliamentary party is smart, it will move her to the lower house and start testing her for the leadership.

News Corp in general and The Australian in particular are certainly doing all they can to help. In the same edition, we got Paige Taylor, not usually prone to this kind of thing, taking a similarly lyrical approach to Price, cast here as a literal saviour, the last barrier between Australia and all that “division” that she’s done everything to avoid stirring up:

A busy cafe run by Vietnamese Australians was an ideal setting for Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s message about a united yet diverse nation living with the sinister threat of racial divide …

Yes advocates thought they would own the concept of bringing Australians closer together in this referendum. But Senator Nampijinpa Price has taken it from them and it appeared to be working on undecided voters and hard Nos alike.

Further, a news story about Price telling a No campaign in Perth that she didn’t “need a Voice to Parliament” as prerequisite for all her achievements. We don’t imagine this tone will shift if her campaign ends in success on Saturday, and she moves on to her stated aims of attacking trans rights and, apparently, all spending on Indigenous programs.

Burney it all down And that success is looking increasingly likely, if recent polling in The Australian Financial Review is to be believed. According to the polling, a final indignity may be inflicted on the Yes campaign in general and the Labor Party in particular — not only are they facing the prospect of collapsing national support, but the possibility they could fail to make believers out of their own constituencies. The AFR reports that “a string of high-profile Labor MPs have failed to convince a majority of voters in their electorates to vote Yes in the Voice referendum, according to polling that signals many progressive seats are on track to vote No”, including that which elected Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney. 

Now the polling is being circulated by senior Liberal officials and thus requires a grain of salt the size of the Cullinan Diamond, but it gives a sense of what the Yes campaign is facing in coming days. It’s no wonder high-profile figures such as Miranda Tapsell and Briggs are taking matters into their own hands with last-minute pushes for the Yes case.

Tell me Q+A Q+A Q+A It takes quite a lot for a program that has earned the unofficial appellation of “the bad show” to promise something noteworthily bad, but this is the world we live in. For next week’s Q+A, the panel will feature former foreign affairs minister Alexander Downer, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe, LNP Senator James McGrath and long-time creative director for Labor’s advertising Dee Madigan.

Apart from what you can divine about the optimism levels in the Labor camp from the realisation that not a single MP made themselves available for the show’s first episode after the national decision regarding the Albanese government’s defining first-term policy, here’s a prediction: Thorpe will say something provocative about race relations, and probably draw parallels between the settler colonial states in Australia and Israel, and The Australian will produce a small book’s worth of words condemning her and calling for at least a week afterwards for the ABC to be folded. I’d love to tune in to see if this prediction is correct, but unfortunately that’s the night I have my chainsaw juggling classes.