A personal tale: How GetUp and unions tried to break me
Nicolle Flint suffered vicious personal attacks. Picture: John Feder
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Liberal backbencher Nicolle Flint has survived what she describes as “a concerted attack to destroy me mentally” at this year’s federal election, saying the aggressively personal tactics of GetUp have become so toxic that good people will be afraid to enter politics.
Ms Flint, who registered one of the toughest wins of the 2019 campaign despite an all-out assault by GetUp and the unions in her marginal Adelaide seat of Boothby, has revealed the full extent of the abuse she faced, saying it got to the point she feared for her safety.
Her office was egged, her posters defaced, labelling her a prostitute, she was shouted down at candidate debates and she was also stalked and had to call in SA Police to guarantee her safety.
Ms Flint has also revealed that, since the May 18 election, male colleagues have confided they would discourage their daughters from a political career on the basis of what she endured.
“This was a campaign to destroy me personally, a concerted attack to destroy me mentally,” Ms Flint told The Australian.
“They wanted to get me to a point where I could not function as a candidate, where I was afraid to go out. It was a campaign that has very serious ramifications for how we conduct politics in this country.
“We regard ourselves as an open and civil society. Instead, I ended up feeling unsafe for much of the campaign. I credit both GetUp and the unions for creating an environment where abuse, harassment, intimidation, shouting people down and even stalking became the new normal.
“By running such an abusive personal campaign in my seat, GetUp and the unions created an environment where all these things were not only possible, but probable.”
Ms Flint is 41, single, and lives alone in her electorate, a fact she was willing to divulge to put her campaign experience in its context: “I was scared, and towards the end of the campaign I did have a moment with the egg attacks and vile graffiti and stalking when I wondered if it was worth it.”
Eggs thrown at her campaign office.
Her assessment is backed by former SA premier John Olsen, a 40-year political veteran who is now president of the SA Liberal Party. Mr Olsen said the Boothby campaign was without precedent in South Australia.
“The campaign against Nicolle Flint was a new low,” Mr Olsen told The Australian. “It was ugly, offensive, and unfortunate in that it may dissuade other women from a career in politics.”
A spokesman for GetUp yesterday rejected responsibility for Ms Flint’s treatment, saying the group had written a tweet during the campaign condemning the attacks on her campaign office.
“GetUp condemns the sexist and cruel attacks Nicolle Flint and other women, such as Zali Steggall, faced during the election, as well as bullying from within the party.
“We specifically condemned the attacks on Ms Flint’s office at the time. There is no place for that in our politics,” it said.
“GetUp volunteers campaigned in Boothby to champion climate action, by singing alongside children’s entertainer Peter Combe, having heart-to-heart phone calls with their neighbours and volunteering on election day.
“We will continue to hold politicians to account on the issues that matter.”
Ms Flint was the only woman among a group of six pro-Dutton MPs from last year’s leadership putsch against former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull who were specifically targeted by GetUp and the unions for removal at this year’s poll.
Of the six, only Tony Abbott was defeated, with Ms Flint registering a 3.5 per cent increase in her primary vote on her 2016 result, up to 45.19 per cent. Of the remaining Dutton backers, Peter Dutton and Kevin Andrews also secured an increased primary vote, with Greg Hunt and Christian Porter surviving small swings.
Mr Andrews strongly backs Ms Flint’s assessment of GetUp’s tactics, revealing he was falsely accused of supporting gay conversion therapy, a topic he has never even discussed, with GetUp withdrawing the claim only after he threatened legal action.
He was also targeted by a multicultural group called Colour Code, which shared the same address as GetUp, and distributed material in Mandarin to Chinese-Australian voters in his Melbourne electorate of Menzies labelling him a racist.
“Nicolle is 100 per cent right when she says it has never been like this and will scare people off public life,” he told The Australian.
It was Ms Flint’s support for Mr Dutton and her purported climate change scepticism that inspired the initial GetUp attacks on her at the start of the election campaign, with material distributed by the group describing her as “the most backward politician in South Australia”.
The SA Liberals estimate that more than 100,000 anti-Flint phone calls were made into Boothby by GetUp and unions.
In a South Australian first, high-rotation advertisements aimed purely at attacking Ms Flint were crafted for the FM radio market in a bid to convince politically disengaged voters she was unfit for office.
Graffiti on a campaign corflute.
As the campaign started, Ms Flint had regular protesters at her electoral and campaign offices, some haranguing staff and volunteers, with GetUp activists being assisted by members of the CFMEU, the Australian Education Union and the Nursing and Midwifery Association.
She was pursued throughout the campaign by a stalker who would stand outside her electoral office, or be tipped off by unknown persons as to her whereabouts in the electorate.
He would peer through her electoral office window or stand by the stage at events and take photographs of her.
The man was warned off by the Australian Federal Police but relented for good only when SA Police sought a restraining order against him.
On the Friday before polling day, Ms Flint arrived at her Daws Road campaign office to find it covered in eggs and the words “$60 p/h” (per hour) written over her neck on her election posters.
Now, two months on from the election, Ms Flint has collated all the online and mainstream media material that was unleashed against her, estimating that several million dollars of GetUp and union funds were spent trying to unseat her.
“The one heartening thing is that it didn’t work,” she says.
“When you look at this volume of material, it was clearly their intention to break me. It was relentless, a war of attrition, but in the end I think it backfired because their tactics were deeply unAustralian. It was one big bullying exercise. Aussies are all about a fair go and, to use an Aussie rules analogy, they were playing the man and not the ball.
“The ball was down the other end of the field and they were punching me in the head. We got a lot of contact from people in the community who were appalled and thought their tactics were unfair and indecent.”
Ms Flint said, while “some” Boothby voters unfavourably raised her support for Mr Dutton, she believes most of them were already Labor voters rather than disaffected Liberal moderates or swinging voters, meaning the impact on polling day was negligible.
And, while the campaign against her was almost exclusively personal, Ms Flint ran on local promises involving road and infrastructure projects.
She also targeted Bill Shorten’s franking credits policy in a seat that has the oldest age profile in SA and one of the highest proportions of retirees in the land: “That’s why I held on. They were getting down in the gutter and I was focused on issues that affect people’s lives.”
Labor’s attempt to win Boothby, which has been held only once by the ALP since World War II, was always the subject of deep scepticism among wiser heads within SA Labor.
Opposition Leader Peter Malinauskas, a member of the party’s Right faction who is close to factional heavyweight Don Farrell, became unnerved at the midway point of the campaign when Labor figures from the eastern states came to Adelaide for an event with Mr Shorten.
Mr Malinauskas was repeatedly asked whether he was confident of a Labor win in Boothby, amid firming intelligence within the ALP that the Queensland vote was collapsing and the Victorian vote failing to surge.
An alarmed Mr Malinauskas, who had only ever rated the seat a remote chance of a Labor win, sought out Labor’s campaign directors and asked: “Fellas, please tell me you haven’t got Boothby down as a must-win?”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/a-personal-tale-how-getup-and-unions-tried-to-break-me/news-story/e0bb460d204fa03f2cb8c3dc1173a103
