Australia's Political Trim Tab - Ep162: Simon Holmes à Court

Bryony Worthington
Hello, I'm Bryony Worthington, and this is Cleaning Up. My guest this week is Simon Holmes à Court, the Australian investor and philanthropist who has a passion for using data to change the world. In 2022, the federal elections in Australia delivered an upset as around a third of the electorate turned their back on the established parties and voted in seven new independent MPs taking the total to 10. Simon was responsible for a crowdfunding initiative that supported 23 candidates in all, pledging to act on climate, political integrity and gender discrimination. He remains very involved in the challenge of pivoting Australia from a fossil fuel based economy to a clean energy superpower. Please join me in welcoming Simon Holmes à Court  to Cleaning Up

Michael Liebreich 
Before we get started, if you're enjoying Cleaning Up, please make sure that you like episodes, subscribe on YouTube or your favourite podcast platform, and leave a review; that really helps other people to find us. Please recommend Cleaning Up to your friends and colleagues, and sign up for our free newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com, that's cleaninguppod.substack.com. 

ML
Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital.

BW  
So Simon, welcome to Cleaning Up. It's a delight to be here with you in Melbourne. I'm just going to start by asking you to just tell us who you are and what you do, in your own words.

Simon Holmes à Court 
Firstly, thanks for having me on the show, it's great, I'm a long-time listener. And so where do I start? So I'm an investor. Some call me an activist. I guess easy to put that label on something - I've worked for change a lot. I do a lot of advocacy in the decarbonisation space. Wear quite a few hats and I think we're going to go through some of them today. 

BW  
Yeah, great. Well- so I first came across you with your Climate 200 initiative, and I can remember sort of - this is probably after the '22 election, so after it'd had this great success - and I remember thinking, "wow," you know, "that's a really, very thoughtful intervention into a very political situation, and it actually won." So, you know, I'd love you to just explain to us-

SHC  
-so what is it? 

BW  
Yeah, what is Climate 200?

SHC  
So Climate 200 is a crowdfunding campaign and organisation that supports pro-climate, independent candidates for political office in Australia. Specifically, we support candidates that are backed by the community under the community independence model - which we can talk a bit more about - who share our values. And the values of Climate 200 is a science-based response to climate change, restoring integrity to politics, and advancing respect and safety for women in Australia. So the three crudely: climate, integrity and women, are the three values, and where we found communities that were putting forward a candidate that shared those values, we backed them in the federal election in 2022. We supported 23 candidates, 4 of them were already in office, and they were all returned, plus another 7 candidates, 3 in the lower- sorry, 6 in the lower house and 1 in the Senate.

BW  
And so- and the name Climate 200 - am I right in that, initially the thought was: we want to get 200 people to donate some money to help fund these political campaigns, but you exceeded that.

SHC  
Yeah, so it's quite common in the political space the parties have- one particular party has a lot of "200 clubs", and they're clubs that they set up generally in the wealthy electorates. And the aim is to find 200 people who will bankroll the campaign of the incumbent member in that seat. I had spent a fair bit of time working for change within the system. I had been a member of the fundraising club for my local Member of Parliament, who was on the political ascendancy. When I first met him, he was just a backbencher but I watched him become a minister and then become the treasurer. And he was sort of on-track, many thought, to become the next Liberal Prime Minister of the country. My interactions were generally around the- well, we had we had bipartisanship on renewable energy in Australia until about 2012, 2013 when it fractured. Obviously- well, for those who haven't been following Australian politics, maybe not that obvious, but climate policy there'd been a lot of tension on that, but on renewables policy it'd been quite bipartisan. That started fracturing, and my representations to my local member were: "Your party is going in the wrong direction. History will catch up with it at some point. You've got an opportunity to be on the right side of history." And he humoured me for a few years. I eventually wrote an op-ed, that criticised the direction that the government at that stage was, was going in, and within 24 hours, I'd been kicked out of the fundraising group. There were a few other episodes a bit like that, but I realised pretty quickly that change from within wasn't going to work.

BW  
Right

SHC  
And so I copied the structure they had of setting up a fundraising organisation, a "200 club". When I launched it for the, sort of- we did a launch just online, just on Twitter in September of 2021, so 8 months before the election, and I was wondering whether 200 was a good name for it, because what if we didn't get to 200? It'd be a bit embarrassing? 

BW  
Yeah.

SHC  
We got to 210 on the first day. 

BW  
Yeah. 

SHC  
And it was 11,200 by the time the election came around- was much more successful than we thought.

BW  
That's incredible. So it is actually "Climate 11,000" really! 

SHC  
11,200! 

BW  
Yeah. And that raised, you know, 13 million or so?

SHC  
Yeah, we raised about 13 million Australian dollars. 

BW  
Yeah. 

SHC  
As I said, we supported 23 campaigns, but really focused our attention on the ones- as we got closer to the election, we were very data-driven, a lot of polling, a lot of analytics, research, to work out which campaigns were moving. And the ones that we supported the most was because they were the most viable, had the strongest community support behind them. 

BW  
Yeah. 

SHC  
And they came in to win. But the community model is really interesting. This started long before I got involved. It was one particular community, a regional community up in northern Victoria, not a very high socio-economic group, but very strong social ties within that community. There was a prevailing sense that community had been neglected by- because it'd been a safe seat for a very long time, rural area, they didn't have much in the way of services, no local hospital, no public transport, education opportunities were greatly lacking. And a group came together in that community of some young people, some older folks, and the older folks were asking the young people like, "why are you all leaving this area?" And they explained, "you know, there's just no opportunity here." And they decided that they were going to make the seat marginal, so turn it into a swing seat. And they selected a local amongst them to stand. And by the time the election day came around, there were 1800 people all wearing orange, setting up- originally it was called Voices For Indi was the group that spent a lot of time working out what the shared values of the community was, getting people to leave their politics at the door and find out, "what are our shared values? What are our shared aspirations?" and build a policy platform around that. And then Team Orange, who ran the campaign, thought they could possibly take the- make the seat marginal, but they won. They accidentally won and their local Member did a phenomenal job over 2 terms. She announced halfway through a second term that she was not going to re-contest. They selected another person from the community and, for the first time in Australian history, power was transferred from one independent to another, both under- so now that community's had 4 terms in a row of their own candidate representing just the community. So no layers of party or-

BW  
And who were these people? Were they both women in that case? 

SHC  
In that community? Both times they selected women. Yeah. Now there's a funny thing about the movement. As I've gone around- so Climate 200 didn't- we didn't start any campaigns. These campaigns started popping up, watching this Indi model. There was another community, a very high profile fight in the 2019 election. Our former prime minister, Tony Abbott, who had been very destructive for climate policy in Australia, really the driving force behind the fracture of bipartisanship on renewable energy and sits on the Trade Board with Michael- 

BW  
Yeah, I think a lot of listeners will know who he is and we maybe just we won't go there. But-

SHC  
So he- a community group using the same model was Indi ran a candidate against Tony Abbott, and a very thumping win.

BW  
Was that Zali-

SHC  
Zali Steggall.

BW  
Zali Steggall, who had, I mean, quite an unusual background herself and- because I'm- what I've sort of- the common theme I've sort of seen through these successful candidates is they're often people who've had careers, who've had a big successful life outside of politics- 

SHC  
Pretty much all.

BW  
Yeah. Is that one of the ingredients of success? 

SHC  
Yeah, well- so I guess it's how the community pre-selection process works. The party membership in Australia - maybe it's the same in other countries - but it's really atrophied. Very few people are members of parties, and the active people within the party that have ambitions for being pre-selected and then standing for election is a pretty small gene pool to draw from. These community groups - you know, a very different model - they come together, that decide, they have the passion that they want local representation, and then they go out and find the best person they can. So in my community in Kooyong, the group took out an ad in the biggest Saturday paper in Victoria and a national newspaper on the same day, saying, "Are you the next member of Kooyong?" A big, big ad, early in the paper, a huge splash, and they had a whole bunch of applicants. So rather than the two or three ambitious people that have hung around the political party branches, it was a whole palette of people from the community who had never thought about politics before or couldn't see themselves in the party system, and they could see that there was this active community group behind them.

BW  
Right. And one of the things- you said that when you were selecting campaigns to back, you useed data. Because one of the things you did was you did polling, that rather than say, "would you vote for an independent community member?" you used examples of previous community members didn't you, to test- so that you were getting a sort of better response than saying, "would you vote for someone like Zali?" basically? 

SHC  
Yes. So first thing we would say, in trying to get the temperature of a community, we would generally only do this where we knew that there was a group active in the area. And we would, after consulting them saying, you know, "are you okay with us doing this in the area?" we'd run a poll, we would say, yeah, without any prompting, "are you prepared to- if there was election tomorrow, who would you vote for: party A, party B, party C, or an independent?" And it would generally be pretty low, and then you would ask- low for the independent. And then you would ask again, "if a candidate like Zali Steggall was running in your electorate, and you know, Zali Steggall is an independent chosen by our community and now represents," (we would explain that). And then you'd ask the question, again: "knowing what you now know about independence, how would you vote in the next election?" And if there was a significant bump in that, then we knew that the community model had started resonating, or that the demographic was really alive to that. 

BW  
Yeah. 

SHC  
So there would be campaigns, we would get more deeply engaged with-

BW  
Yeah. And you could also then introduce the themes of integrity and climate and women in to that slight priming of the question, or not?

SHC  
Well we would also poll on, "what are the biggest issues in your area?" 

BW  
Yeah. 

SHC  
And very much at the last election, they were red-hot issues. Whether we lucked out by just nailing it, or whether just the intervention in the campaign, I think it is a bit two-way wherein: just by having another candidate in the race on those- pushing those issues, the media focused on those issues and put pressure back on the incumbents in those areas and made those into election issues. It was very gratifying. 

BW  
Yeah, and I guess, people- it's hard: every Parliament's got its own kind of character and watching from- you know, watching from a distance you never really know. But I always got the feeling that Australian politics was quite a brutal place, you know. The misogyny was almost visible. And there's that famous Julia- 

SHC  
Gillard - the Gillard speech. 

BW  
- the Gillard speech, sorry - where you know, she just calls it out and it felt- Was it a hostile environment for women? 

SHC  
It has been a very hostile environment. I've heard stories of women who have been in the building - you know, staffers - for 30+ years, have stopped the Independents and thank them that they've changed the tone of the building. Still a fair way to go. Our- Question Time is an absolute zoo. I think it is in the UK too as well.

BW  
I think yours is worse. But yeah, similar, yeah.

SHC  
The Independents - it's called the crossbench, as you know, so they're sitting a little bit back and in the middle between the two parties, and the parties joke and call that "prefect's corner"-

BW  
-because they're keeping an eye on them! 

SHC  
Yeah, there's eight, nine women who are sitting there, and they're actually- you know, they're all the kind of- they're all accomplished, smart. They don't have 20 years of political baggage or, you know, haven't compromised their values over long periods, and they call out bad behaviour often. But I'm told it has changed the tone in the building. 

BW  
Yeah. And, and  thinking back towards this recipe for success- well, firstly, I should probably ask you this question, which is: has there been any pushback about- you've become quite synonymous with this group, with this Climate 200 effort and the the Teal Group, as they're referred to, because they've sort of adopted a common colour.

SHC  
Well they- that's interesting. No one knew how to refer to these candidates when they started. Many of them came out of processes- out of groups or aligned with groups called the "Voices Of" which was- there's no central coordination, it's just a movement and people would read about in the paper, how Voices For Indi work, and they would implement their own version. There's a couple of books on it. And so people copied that model, so originally, they would call the "Voices Of candidates", and then that didn't really work, especially when a lot of Voices Of groups said, "oh, no no, we just started the conversation but these campaigns have grown up independently of us." They were called - unfairly - Climate 200 candidates. So we did a lot of matching-funding for the campaigns. We helped meet campaigns up with expertise that they were missing; if they didn't know how to do door-knocking, we would introduce them to people who had long experience in door-knocking, or how to man the voting booths on election day. So lots of training in sort of basic campaign technology, or campaigning strategy, we would introduce them. But we didn't run any of the campaigns. We didn't start them, we didn't have anything to do with the pre-selection. 

BW  
So you were kind of ushering from behind, you know, just supporting with training. But you- in a way, perhaps you've become- I suppose what I'm asking is: as a man, do you feel at all sort of odd that somehow you've become the figurehead that's sort of talked about in relation to the Teals, who are all pretty much universally women?

SHC  
And not all- of the candidates that we supported, there were I think two or three men amongst them. Now, we didn't choose any of the candidates as I said before, but if you went around any of the groups, I think 80% of the people who were running these groups that I met where women [and] are women still? 

BW  
Yeah.

SHC  
And I think that's very common in community groups. If you pick any community group in your own community, chances are it's women who are getting the work done. But the movement also- it was in a context of: the echoes of that misogyny speech, it's still echoing now in Australia, and we had some very high profile cases in 2021 that came to light and a big national discussion about it. The government at the time dealt with it very poorly, and women were whit-ehot with anger. It's not surprising to me that the most politically active people in the lead up to 2022 election, and the most active people in community groups were women. And it's not that surprising that they largely - not universally, but largely - chose women. 

BW  
Yeah, but have you become a sort of de facto spokesperson or not, or are you trying to avoid that?

SHC  
Some parts of the media do try to give that role to me. It annoys everyone else involved in- annoys me because I'm not. It annoys everyone in the movement. And some have said it's a form of misogyny to assume that these women need to have a man behind behind the scenes, some sort of Svengali or some kind of puppet master. But yeah, I mean, the amusing thing for me is I talk more about policy with our Liberal Party and the Labour Party and the Greens than I do with Independents. I've actually got a very strict rule that I don't go near policy discussions with with the Independents because we're very sensitive to, you know, to that. 

BW  
Yeah. Okay. So let's like move on from that particular era because actually - as you describe it -what got you into this was you were an investor in a renewable energy project weren't you, a wind farm. So talk to us about, you know, what led you into this.

SHC  
It's funny because I didn't see it as- I didn't see it as an investment. Let me tell you about it. It was- I've got a farm in central Victoria that, when we built the house in 2004, it was too far from the power lines to drag- it was going to be very expensive to bring power in. So we built the power off-grid. We didn't realise how early on it was, but it was- there were a lot of teething problems getting it going. Really enjoyed being off-grid, but in the middle of winter there's just not a lot of sun in this area. And I was looking for a small wind turbine to supplement our solar panels. I started asking around in town. Someone introduced me to a lovely but slightly eccentric Danish builder of straw bale homes in our community, and he told me, "let's not muck around with these small wind turbines. Let's build large ones. Let's build a community wind farm." 

BW  
And what year was this, roughly? 

SHC  
It was 2006 when I first spoke to him.

BW  
Okay.

SHC  
And he gradually got people in town enthused about building Australia's first community owned wind farm. When we were talking about this, at that stage, most wind farms in Denmark were owned by either community groups, you know, a guild or local government or farmer cooperative. 

BW  
And I think we had one in Cornwall which was the Delabole, which was the first one - I think that was community-owned as well.

SHC  
Yeah, we read a lot of the literature on what was coming out of the UK. There were some really interesting models. And he worked with a small wind farm developer, they got a permit largely through, and he held a townhall meeting for the community to decide: are we going to go ahead with this project or not? I was pretty captivated. I really wanted this project to succeed. So went along to the meeting to give my big resounding, "yes, we should proceed," and I accidentally came out of that meeting as the chairman-

BW  
-of the company.

SHC  
- of the newly-formed cooperative.

BW  
Right, okay. 

SHC  
So it was a corporative. It was very important to the community that this cooperative is one person, one vote, not $1 or one share per vote. 

BW  
Brilliant. 

SHC  
Right from the beginning, the benefit-sharing to those around the wind farm and to to the broader community, whether they were shareholders or not, that was very important. And being the chair, it was a real baptism of fire for me. So there's the project development side of things around us- planning permit and the technical requirements for grid connection, the commercial arrangements for construction, the capital raising. Then there was the media and political side. It was in a very- it was at a contested time, there was a wind farm. I don't know if people remember but there was a period - it was very strong in Australia and we saw echoes in other countries - where for a while, there was this scare that wind farms are making people sick. 

BW  
Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah. It hasn't gone away, by the way. Those troops still come through.

SHC  
Right. It was a big thing in Australia. We had four or five Senate inquiries and the National Health Medical Research Council put together a research program on it. It's very fringe now, but it was- we had senators talking about it often. It was- and so we were building this project in that political context. So yeah, it was a baptism of fire for me and a whole bunch of other volunteer directors. It was all- we're all volunteers, we eventually hired staff.

BW  
And did it have any policy support at this point, or it was actually just-

SHC  
We did get some state government support, but- and there is the Renewable Energy Target. We were very naive; we thought it would take us about about six weeks to raise the money, we put out our share offer in 2008. The Global Financial Crisis cut in just two weeks after launching and it took us more like three years to raise the money, or two-and-a-half years. The costs went up dramatically. We thought the bank would loan us most of the money and institutional investors. We thought we'd need to raise just a couple of million dollars; we ended up needing to raise 10 million for the project, very, very low debt. But we managed to get 2000 people to come on as members of it, and the community engagement was really strong right from the start. So when the first tower went up, and the nacelle went on top, we had about 320 people on a hill, brought along their lawn furniture, we had bands and a barista. And we sat and had a community picnic day where we sat and watched the first turbine come up. So it was a great- it was a really great, positive response at the same time as there were anti-renewables rallies happening on the other side of the country. So it was a real sort of- the contrast between a community really embracing the change, and other people fearing the change. 

BW  
And here we are, fast-forwarding, I don't know 15 years later or so, and, you know- we're at a conference, we should say. So here we are in Melbourne, and one of the things that struck me yesterday with one of the speakers was a gentleman called Les who talked about what it feels like to be a rural Australian, especially if you've got a heritage in kind of the coal mining heritage of Australia. And that for the longest time, it was kind of pitted as a, you know, it was either: you're pro-coal or anti-renewable. And he said something really smart, which I thought- he said, "you know, you've got to talk about this as a continuation of providing Australians with the power they need", right? Yeah. And but what also really struck me was that he hadn't benefited- his community hadn't really benefited from the coal mining economic boom, because he still doesn't have internet access, the roads are poor, there's hospitals. So in a way, if we can marry up this next wave of investment with community benefits, that's going to be a far stronger outcome for everyone, where fossil in a way has sort of failed to deliver? 

SHC  
Well it's amazing how much time we spend talking about about coal workers. In Australia, obviously it's important we consider every individual that's touched by this transition. But in the coal power industry, there are fewer than 8,000 workers across the entire country. There are fast food chains that have more more than that in just one state. 

BW  
And this is just the power sector? 

SHC  
In the power sector. Now the export coal, different story, and really a different industry, is probably about five times bigger than that. And it's been mechanising as much as it can. So they're shedding jobs even as they increase production. But it's a significant number of people, but 8,000 jobs, we can afford to look after every one of those workers as we transition. And these jobs aren't going to transition quickly, it's not- We had a car industry with about 80,000 people in it. That was switched off over about two years, just almost overnight, it felt for those workers. Here we have a much smaller industry that's going to phase out- it's been phasing out over the last decade, and it'll be another 15 years before it's phased down to almost off. It's a small enough problem in size that we can afford to look after every one of those workers, help them. Many are near retirement anyway now, but many others will, you know, there are going to be many other opportunities. And I think we owe it to them; we owed it to car workers, we owed it to all the other industries that have rapidly transitioned, but this particular group is a protected species in Australian political discourse.

BW  
Well I think also, you know, they've got the sort of- the people at the very top have made huge amounts of money, and therefore and have used that money to buy influence and, you know, even buy newspapers and media outlets to ensure that their position remains dominant. And so I suspect they're benefiting from the fact that it's the very wealthy at the very top of the pyramid.

SHC  
Yeah, I think quite often these workers are used as political pawns. 

BW  
Yeah, that's I mean, that's kind of- yeah.

SHC  
Yeah, exactly. The real concern is for the people who are making the megabucks from selling the coal. That's where the real concern comes from. 

BW  
Yeah. And that has dominated politics here, hasn't it?

SHC  
It's had a really outsized influence. 

BW  
But I suspect also though, I mean, you know, workers and - as you say - I'm sure that there's enough wealth being generated that we could look after them. But it's actually possibly the balance of trade and the export revenues that the government looks at and thinks, "oh gosh, you know, quite a big chunk of our economy is dependent on that trade." And that must be-

SHC  
Yeah, I had a really interesting discussion with a German official that came to visit a few years ago about that and she put it- really, I thought, put it really well that: "the end of Australian coal won't be an Australian decision, it'll be a decision by our trading partners," so: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and then to a lesser extent these days, China and India. They're buying almost all of our coal. And it'll- it won't be because we stop selling; it'll be because they stop buying. Now all of those countries have announced phase down of their fossil fuel burning. So the sunsetting of that industry is is quite foreseeable now.

BW  
Yeah, if they can build enough clean. Which kind of brings us on to the: how do you build clean well? And I suppose what Australia has is a vast country - it's the size of the United States, isn't it minus Alaska - with 25 million people in it, which is, you know, the size of one Chinese city. So, you know, it's got that amazing geographic resource.

SHC  
Yeah, I was in Japan recently and I had a slide up showing that we are 20 times the size with 20% of the population. And it's some of the best wind and best solar, lowest population density of any developed country in the world. So we are in a wonderful position to where we should have a very significant cost advantage in the clean energy future. 

BW  
Yeah. And also, currently exporting quite a lot of raw materials that go into the manufacturing of the next wave of technologies, but not holding on to them here and manufacturing them here. That's what I find curious.

SHC  
We do relatively little, yeah. So, I'm the director of a new organisation called Superpower Institute. Professor Ross Garnaut is a very respected Australian economist, and he put out a book, I think it might have been 2018 or 2019 called "Superpower", just simply "Superpower", and the argument is that- well he was commissioned to do a major review of Australia- well, of what climate change meant for Australia economically, in about 2006 - I think he was first commissioned to do the review. And at that stage, he identified that climate change was going to cost Australia a lot. We are at the frontline of the impacts; it's going to cost us a lot, but not acting would cost us more. He redid that work around about 2018 and came up with the realisation that the economics have shifted so much that climate action would actually be a net benefit to Australia, that as the world decarbonises, the value of our mineral resources - we'll talk about that in a second - and our clean energy resources would put Australia in the box seat to be a clean energy superpower. 

BW  
Yeah.

SHC  
And The Superpower Institute is a is a policy think tank doing the the techno-economic and policy research to help policymakers, politicians to grab these superpower opportunities.

BW  
And is that- has that helped shape the recent policy document that came out called Made in Australia, you know, the kind of government- 

SHC  
Yeah, I think we've certainly been influential. There's still a lot of debate about what a future "made in Australia" policy will be. There's quite a spectrum. At one end, there's your, "should we be making EVs and solar panels?" At the other end, "should we be doing more with our raw materials?" I'd say the Superpower Institute is focusing at the areas where we have a definite advantage. So just for listeners who don't know: half of the lithium in the world is coming from Australia. If you think of every EV running around and every grid scale battery, half that lithium is coming from Australia, but the vast majority is sent as a lightly processed concentrate off to China. The same with a very significant amount of where we have huge rare earth resources in Australia, very large percentage of the world's iron ore, significant reserves of bauxite which are used- we ship some bauxite, we ship a fair bit of alumina, but we don't process much aluminium in Australia. So we're very good- our economy has been built up over the last 50 years into a "dig it up and ship it out". What we see is, with an energy advantage, it's going to make a lot of sense to do the processing in Australia. 

BW  
Yeah. And it will be, I suspect, seen as a geopolitical advantage for some of the reshoring to come to Australia where I mean, there's, you know- I find it a little bit curious that we're suddenly very concerned about Chinese dominance on solar panels whereas we didn't really care about the mobile phone manufacturing - that was fine. But you know, there is a concern that if they control all of the battery manufacturing and all the car production, and it would seem that their domestic market is so huge that they can justify this manufacturing for export and for their own domestic market. I'm hoping I guess that Australia will develop a manufacturing industry that serves its own domestic market and then starts exporting to its neighbours. That must be part of the vision of the superpower, I guess? 

SHC  
Yeah, absolutely. With the vast tracts of land, and obviously, we're a lot more sensitive these days to- we no longer think of them as being-

BW  
No they're not empty!

SHC  
-uninhabited or empty. Just 20 years ago, people would say, you know, "the whole inside of Australia is empty," we now have a much better understanding of our relationship to the land and to the traditional owners of the land. So there are a lot of- there's a very large scale development in- that hasn't broken ground yet, but the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, for example, is a 26 gigawatt wind and solar farm, off grid. If built in and I believe BP has a major stake in the project and is actively working on bringing it to development. But 26 gigawatts in a single project would make it the largest energy generator by capacity in the world, bigger than Three Gorges Dam. 

BW  
Yeah. 

SHC  
And its job would be- sorry, is to produce green hydrogen for the steel industry up in the northwest of Western Australia, but off grid which is really interesting, I think about six of these large- off grid, large scale projects that have been- that are in early stage development. Massive. 

BW  
Yeah. Well regular listeners to the podcast will know that we have lots of fun debates about hydrogen and its future. But what was- there was a really interesting thing that played out in Australia, I thought, where you had two very successful businessman Andrew Forrest and Mike CannonBrookes both co-investing into a project, which  had a cabling 

SHC  
The Sun Cable. Project up to Singapore.

BW  
The Sun Cable, and then falling out a little bit about whether it should be shipped in the form of a fuel or electrons. And where's that landed, now?

SHC  
So my understanding is that the disagreement, I think, Twiggy Forrest wanted the power line to go west to the iron ore fields and Mike Cannon-Brookes wanted the original vision, which is a cable - it's a 4000 kilometre cable - all the way to Singapore. And that was what the falling out was over. They forced it into administration and Mike Cannon-Brookes has now got complete control over the project and is still pursuing the plan to take the power to Singapore, yeah. 

BW  
Yeah. And I can see why Singapore might be happy to pay a slightly elevated price, because they're so land-constrained. But 4000 kilometres is quite a long way. And it's a shame because actually, you know, probably Indonesia needs the power more, or at least- maybe not actually because they've got a lot of excess capacity on their grid. But it did seem a long way to go in one big cable.

SHC  
It is a very ambitious project. But that's part of Mike Cannon-Brookes' philosophy. I think he first shot to sort of energy fame when he challenged Elon Musk to- for the 100 megawatt battery in South Australia. At that stage, it was an impossibly large battery, where he bet with Elon was: 100 megawatts in 100 days, or it's free. And Tesla did deliver on that promise; itwas 100 days from grid connection, I think, to operation, and they made it by a few days.

BW  
Ah, so part of his strategy then is to take high profile cases to give it that kind of feeling of innovation and boldness I guess.

SHC  
Yeah, lighthouse projects. I don't know if it's the same elsewhere, but certainly in Australia, if we can't see it, it's very hard for people to get behind it. You know, the early adopters or the visionary or the futurist can imagine a large gap- in fact, I found that with that large battery in South Australia, there was a morning in March of 2017 where the our energy market operator put out a report on grid storage, and in it, they said, "batteries are great, but they max out at one megawatt. That's the maximum." It was that evening that the bet was made for 100 megawatts. So we actually increased the horizon of what was possible by two orders of magnitude on the same day.

BW  
And in quite a visible way. So yeah, got the debate going,

SHC  
Some call that "lighthouse projects". And the same in Australia, most politicians will tell you that green steel is impossible, even though there're pilot plants elsewhere, and people are investing billions elsewhere, we won't believe it in Australia until someone produces an ingot of green steel. We need to see it. 

BW  
Perfectly reasonable. And one of the things I did see coming out of one of your universities which I found fascinating, was a very small, scaled-down version of ammonia production, to almost a community farm scale - I think this came out of one of your universities - where it was, you know, literally taking solar power, water and air and manufacturing ammonia at the scale of a farm. So you sort of- cutting out all of that mass, you know, scale production. And, I did just think, "well, if Australia can crack that, that's a huge leap forward in terms-," bt first, as you say, someone's got to build it. 

SHC  
Yeah, well, we're quite good at innovation, but we're very poor at holding on to the IP and monetising it. We've got a long history of- you know, the basic technology behind modern solar panels was largely developed in Australia. We don't earn any royalties from that.

BW  
I don't think anyone does anymore. But yeah.

SHC  
Yeha. And there's- most Australians can give you a list of a whole lot of inventions where we played a major part of it, but we didn't hold on to the IP or, you know, not the way that say the Danish have with wind energy.

BW  
Yeah, so I think- we're almost out of time, I think. But let's just cast our mind forward, then, because we've got an another election coming. The Albanese government probably has another year to run, maybe?

SHC  
Well, they have to have- the election has to be no later than May of 2025. 

BW  
Right. 

SHC  
It could be as early as this August, but no one thinks they'd go that early. So March, April, May, next year is the most likely scenario. 

BW  
Yeah.

SHC  
We're in a fascinating situation in Australia where the coalition - being the conservative side - has been in power for three quarters of the years since World War Two. Now, Labour has a two seat majority. It's only two- you lose two seats there, they have to form some kind of coalition. But a coalition government is 20 seats behind. It's very difficult to see them catching up those 20 seats. Now, a week is a long time in politics. 

BW  
Yes, a year is a very long time!

SHC  
A year is a very long time. So who knows what will happen. But if the election were held soon, it's inconceivable under current paradigms that the coalition can make up those 20 seats in such a short time. But it's also difficult to imagine Labour holding on to all of the seats that they did last time. So there's a high likelihood that the next the next parliament in Australia will be- might be a minority government. We've had a few minority governments before, the major parties are always saying there'll be chaos and dysfunction with these hung Parliament's but if you any reasonable analysis of both of the minority governments we've had in the last decade, they've function perfectly well. And the innovation that happens during those periods, the amount of negotiation that happens, has demonstrably landed with better policies. Our renewable energy - the Australian Renewable Energy Agency - ARENA,  Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and our carbon price, you know, lest we forget-

BW  
The short-lived carbon price, yeah!

SHC  
-all came out of the minority government in the 2010 to 13 period, Gillard period.

BW  
So your- so you will you do Climate 20,000?

SHC  
We did joke- 20,000 would be wonderful if we could get to that. But we are talking to communities at the early stage now. So obviously, we would like all the independents that were elected last time to be re-elected there. They now have big offices and they've built large volunteer networks. They probably don't need a lot of help from us, but there are lots of- there's so far, I know of about 15 communities where people are meeting regularly to say, "let's do this thing." They now have a lighthouse in Parliament. Before Cathy McGowan-

BW  
What's a lighthouse?

SHC  
Sorry, as in: that Tesla project in South Australia - the big battery - was a lighthouse. 

BW  
I see. 

SHC  
I think Sun Cable is a lighthouse project, you know, once we can start doing 4000 kilometres subsea cables, we start thinking- our horizons will open dramatically.

BW  
You just mean there's now a visible thing that people can-

SHC  
Yes. So now people can see, "oh, we could actually have our own Member of Parliament," and especially if you're heading into minority government, you've got a choice between voting for someone who will be a backbencher on one side or a backbencher on the other, or you could put your own representative forward who's going to be in the thick of it in the next parliamentary term. So we're wanting to galvanise those who helped us last time. Hopefully more people who now have the example, and really give a whole lot of other communities a good crack.

BW  
Just play devil's advocate for a second: they would never be able to be ministers though, would they? 

SHC  
Probably not. And I think that's- well there is an example at the state level in South Australia of a minority government needing needing one MP and they gave a ministry to the to the MP. I'm told that there are all sorts of practical issues with that. But one of the one of the ways I see it is that if someone's entered parliament, and they are dead-set on becoming the Prime Minister, which I think too many of them are, or at least a minister, everyday, they're working for their ambition, they're working for their faction, for their party, for their donors. And if there's any energy left for them at the end of the day, it might go to constituents. Whereas the independent, there's nothing between them and the constituents. They live and die by delivering what they said they're going to do, by holding true on the values. They're not there to compromise until they become compromised; they're there to represent the wishes of the community. And so being freed up from that aspiration for the top job and that factional journey that people have to go on if they want that job-

BW  
I can see how that works as a disruptive force and keeping everyone honest. But I suppose somebody somewhere has got to make, you know, ministerial-level decisions and create budgets. And that does require you to have a cabinet of people who are [irresponsible].

SHC  
So, I don't- people often say, "we couldn't have 151 Independents running the country." Look, I don't know what happens. I think long before we got to- long before we get to more than 10 or 15% Independents, we'll have to work out some ways that-

BW  
Well, you know, one thing that could come out of this, presumably, is that the parties, you know, the more traditional parties, start to think about how they recruit better candidates, you know-

SHC  
Well that was a big part of my initial rationale for this is: the Liberal Party is constantly being pushed further and further to the right by the media, certain parts of the media and certain pressure groups; nothing was pushing the Liberal Party towards the centre where voters are. My hope with this- our support of this movement is that the coalition would see that they had ceded the centre and they would come rushing back to reclaim the centre. 

BW  
And there's been some evidence of that, right, because we have seen in certain urban seats where it's been actually the opposition- so Labour's in power, and it's been the opposition parties who've been pushing harder on progressive issues? 

SHC  
Certainly not on the issues of climate, integrity and equity.

BW  
Oh, I thought there was some around- anyway, maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought there was an inversion where you had a sitting Labour in an urban seat. 

SHC  
Oh, New South Wales' politics is a bit different, where the Liberal Party has actually become more progressive on climate than the Labour Party. That's right. We do have an inversion of this. Yeah. The Labour Party in New South Wales is in the process of extending the life of a coal power station, and the Liberal Party is really upset - their key spokesman on this is really upset. So there is- politics, from country to country, there's always weird quirks, and Australia is-

BW  
Also there's nothing to stop you from funding a party from any candidate- from any party as long as, you know, the values align. 

SHC  
As long as their values are aligned. Yeah. But the really exciting thing about this movement is that it's engaged a whole lot of people into-

BW  
-into politics, which I think- I mean, that is the fundamental thing for me is that, over the last decades, we've seen a steady erosion of trust in parliamentary democracy. And you know, as you saw, you know, through your work and with the wind farms, and actually you did a lot of work with asylum seekers didn't you, as well, politics really matters. Those decisions that we take, you know, on behalf of the collective through our representative democracy really affect lives. And if we disengage or we cease to trust in it, you know, what are we left with? I mean, really, nothing.

SHC  
Well, one thing I love about this moment, I think before if- five years ago, if I said to someone, "hey, let's go to a political event," none of my friends would agree to go, it's just a, you know- only strange people got involved in- but someone told me early on, "it's the ambitious, the lonely and the strange make up most people in party politics."

BW  
It doesn't used to be like that. It really didn't. 

SHC  
It didn't, not it didn't. But in Australia it's a very particular kind of person that has ended up in politics. And for most of us, most normal people, politics is something done by other people. And this movement has, on election day and in my electorate, the candidate Monique Ryan had 2000 volunteers out there just absolutely- you know, it felt like every second front lawn in the electorate had her sign on. 

BW  
So totally engaged. And actually that's the thing: it isis quite adrenaline-filled and there are victories, there are celebrations- 

SHC  
Yeah, putting some fun back into politics.

BW  
Yeah, exactly. And also- sorry, you have a family foundation, which- I just love the name of it, because it's the Trim Tab Foundation. Can you just quickly tell us what that is?

SHC  
Yeah, so the name comes from Buckminster Fuller, who would have been a household name for anyone who was alive in the middle of the 20th century. He talked about himself as a "trim tab". And at that stage, the Queen Mary was the largest cruise ship in the world, I think it was about a quarter-of-a-mile long. And at the very end of the of the ship, there's a 12 foot long rudder. And when it's going full bore through the- you know, full steam ahead, the wall of water on either side of that rudder makes it almost impossible to turn the rudder. But right at the very end, there's a little trim tab, just a little flap, might only be four inches long, easy to move that four inches. And when you do it creates low pressure on one side and high on the other which makes it very easy to turn the rudder. So just the right amount of pressure at the right time helps- 

BW  
-in the right place- 

SHC  
-in the right place, helps move the thing that can move the ship around - might take two hours to turn 180 degrees, but it all started with one little intervention. And Buckminster Fuller tried to be a trim tab, put himself where the smallest amount of effort could make the biggest- might take a time. And his tombstone is very plain, it just says on it: "call me trim tab".

BW  
Well, so you're a trim tab. 

SHC  
I try to be. I try to encourage all of us ot be.

BW  
Yeah, exactly. But I think that's the wonderful thing that I think you know, what you've achieved really gives people hope, is that actually, there are points of leverage in the system, and they are-you know, certainly democracy is about individuals making their voices heard and getting the right people there to represent them, and then that's a highly leveraged point. And an election is always highly leveraged because all the decisions that follow from the next four years are decided by that.

SHC  
It's the biggest impact we can have. We're at a philanthropy conference where everyone's trying to work out what's the biggest impact they can have? Well, now there are 11 people in Parliament who are working every day for climate, integrity and gender equity issues. It's an incredibly impactful intervention, and not just by me, but there are 11,200 trim tabs who helped make it happen.

BW  
Wow. That's amazing. Well, thank you, Simon. I think we'll end it there and we could go on for many more hours, but thank you.

SHC  
Thanks a lot. 

BW  
So that was Simon Holmes à Court. In this big year of politics, it was great to have the opportunity to find out more about the Climate 200 initiative, and the group of community Independent MPs who are reshaping Australian politics. The 2022 elections highlighted the importance of engaging in representative democracy to make sure it works for everyone, and of finding the trim tabs that can help move mountains. As usual, we'll put relevant links in the show notes including to the Superpower Institute Simon is also involved in. My thanks are due to the Australian Environmental Grantmakers Network, and Boundless Earth for inviting me to Melbourne, and to Amanda Martin, Heidi Taylor and Zak Cebon for making this episode possible. And finally, thanks to you for listening. That was Cleaning Up.

ML  
If you've enjoyed today's episode, please make sure that you like subscribe and leave a review. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram and sign up for the Cleaning Up newsletter at cleaninguppod.substack.com.

Cleaning Up is brought to you by the Liebreich Foundation, the Gilardini Foundation and EcoPragma Capital Thank you for listening and we'll be back with another episode next week.