Climate Action Now

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Back in the day when I was at uni, an election was held for our Student Representative Council. The usual mix were there – Labor, Liberal, Socialist Alternative, a few unaffiliated candidates – and one party with the enticing name of “Free Beer”. It claimed to be vaguely left-leaning, and laid on the alcohol at its events. The problem was, “Free Beer” was a shill for the Liberal Party, the name deliberately chosen to deceive student voters and capture their votes.

It worked. A majority Liberal SRC was elected – and our university went through a miserable year of cuts to certain student clubs, as well as the abolition of recycling programs, counselling for women who’d suffered sexual harassment or assault, and the queer collective. That SRC responded to criticism from me in an article by threatening to sue.¹Spoiler: they didn’t carry out their threat, after getting roundly called out by a student assembly.

Monica Smit is the person behind Climate Action Now (hereafter referred to as CAN), previously known as the Save the Environment Party (SEP). Smit has dabbled in politics before, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when she infamously declared that old people should be happy to die if it meant younger people didn’t have to worry about public health restrictions. She ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in the 2022 Federal election (see above for link), accompanied by her then fiancé Morgan Jonas. Their campaign was backed by Monica’s organisation, Reignite Democracy Australia (RDA), although Smit and Jonas claimed they were running as Independents.

At the time I wrote that I considered this behaviour deceptive, as Smit was utilising the resources of RDA (which largely depended on donations) to support her campaign without registering the organisation as a political party, while claiming to be unaffiliated. Now she’s engaging in misrepresentation again.

In its first incarnation, CAN (known then as SEP) was designed to present itself as a progressive party, but would in fact use Group Ticket Voting to funnel votes to One Nation.

Unlike her co-conspirator, Avi Yemini, Smit didn’t call her targets useful idiots. She did, however, refer to them as uneducated. She also attempted to excuse her deception with time-honoured whataboutism – other people (read: “the Left”) have done it, so why shouldn’t she call attention to a practice she claims to find unacceptable by doing it herself?

That’s nonsense, of course. Calling out bad behaviour by engaging in the same bad behaviour demonstrates nothing – especially when SEP/CAN’s election literature had nothing whatsoever to suggest it had such motives.

Once Group Ticket Voting was established, one might reasonably have thought that Smit would end her crusade. She pivoted. Now, according to CAN’s website, the motivation for running a party with a deceptive name is to prove that compulsory voting might increase participation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it improves democracy. Quite how she intends to accomplish this is a mystery, given she can no longer automatically assign voter preferences.

Or perhaps she thinks she can, with her four candidates, somehow manipulate voters into voting as she wishes them to. Perhaps there are more candidates to be announced? At any rate, this exchange with me on X suggests her original aim hasn’t altered:

So we have a party designed from the beginning to deceive and manipulate voters, now masquerading as a crusader against compulsory voting. So what about their policies? I’ll let the CAN website speak for itself:

That’s right. Not a single policy. Not even the sham “policies” offered up by her co-conspirator, Avi Yemini. The contempt shown here for voters is staggering, and CAN’s claims of proving some moral point simply don’t hold water.

What’s more, even Smit’s stated aim of funnelling votes towards One Nation or other conservative parties falls at the first hurdle. There are no bios to introduce voters to her candidates, and no How to Vote cards. What’s more, her candidates are running in the same seats as Yemini’s Free Palestine Party and her brother’s I’m Voting to Avoid the Fine party. I would say Smit’s done the bare minimum in setting up CAN, but I don’t think it even qualifies for that.

This party is a thought bubble. It started as a “gotcha” idea, an “own the Left” tactic, and it’s fizzled away into a confusing morass of impossible, poorly articulated goals. And all the way along, CAN has self-admittedly attempted to deceive voters. At this point, it’s difficult to say if there’s anything to CAN except deception.

Smit, in concert with Yemini, has demonstrated nothing but contempt for you as voters. “Uneducated”. “Useful idiots”. That’s what they think of you.

Show them how wrong they are.