Wentworth a battle over school ties, defending Israel and oh yes, the climate

ANNE SUSSKIND: In the murky world of social media, Dave Sharma and Allegra Spender are in the trenches over BDS, allegiances, campaign colours and more

HE SAYS, SHE SAYS. She says, he says. One street in Tamarama is festooned with Wentworth MP Dave Sharma’s smiling face and a parallel one sports his challenger, Independent Allegra Spender. She’s on the cover of the Wentworth Courier, and a couple of weeks later, we see Sharma.

There are stories about who’s lining up where. One family, at least, has brothers who differ: Lyndell Droga and her financier husband Daniel are two of Spender’s main backers, while The Australian reported that investment adviser Marcus Droga was spotted at a post-budget “nibbles” gathering in Sharma’s office.

Sharma says Spender is on a “mid-life vanity project”, which her supporters think is unbelievably patronising, and on it goes… Spender says Sharma is copying her campaign colour, teal, and next it will be her policies.

He replies that he’s always been on the blue spectrum and no-one owns a colour, and claims she is riding on the coat tails of his very pro-Israel stance, taking it as her own, while not having spoken to him about it.

This week, when The Australian raised a connection between Spender and Blair Palese (a climate activist who is also a reported BDS supporter, and was part of the now-defunct Wentworth Independents group that recruited Spender), Sharma said Spender “must state clearly her own position on this issue”.

Spender, who emphasises her strong record of support for Israel, said in an online statement on Tuesday: “I have always opposed BDS… To be absolutely clear, I stand with Israel.” To which she received an Instagram reply from a ron.dowd, reading: “Thanks for being absolutely clear, I’ll be unable to vote for you.”

It’s early days still, but this is how it is in Sydney’s eastern suburbs as the two battle it out in house meetings, forums at the pub, outside markets, in halls and the media.

The Jewish Independent took a deep dive into the media coverage, in print and online.

It may be stating the obvious, but readers of the SMH and The Guardian, who generally go to the ABC for their news, will find themselves in a parallel universe if they check out Sky news and the Australian and other pro-Coalition Murdoch media (although Wentworth’s Labor candidate Tim Murray says he was recently surprised by a Daily Telegraph article that quoted Sharma critics on the MP’s apparent distancing from the Morrison way of Liberal government).

Coverage of the Independents is sometimes more nuanced, too. In The Australian, on March 25, columnist Jack the Insider wrote: “Internal polling on the fate of Liberal MPs in blue ribbon seats shows Dave Sharma in Wentworth in deep trouble, with Josh Frydenberg in Kooyong on the next shaky line….”  

On matters Jewish, the two main candidates are in fierce competition to show who has the most love. Many people in the electorate apparently still think Sharma is Jewish, and he goes along with that. He has a menorah in the background of a photo in one of his publicity brochures (the one that is blue, not teal, and bears the Liberal Party logo), but we hear rumours that he’s worried about the views of the progressive Jewish community, where Spender is gaining ground on climate change and a host of social issues.

On climate, Spender has been bolder from the get-go, saying she will fight to cut emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2030, while Sharma’s best efforts have led to a Liberal target of zero emissions by 2050.

At her campaign launch last night, Spender said car manufacturers should be bound to a fuel efficiency standard on new vehicles, and advocated a major push to electric vehicles, saying no new petrol and diesel cars should be sold after 2035. Sharma was quoted in the SMH yesterday saying he was open to an increase in fuel efficiency standards but was sceptical about “arbitrary targets” for EV sales.

But on Israel, they appear perfectly in sync, despite attempts in The Australian and on Radio 2GB this week to cast Spender as in league with Palese. On March 30, following a spate of terror attacks in Israel, Sharma tweeted: “I condemn unreservedly recent terrorist attacks in Israel that have claimed innocent lives in Ramat Gan, Bnei Brak and Hadera.

“I am appalled by these attacks, which are morally repugnant and opposed to peace. There is no justification. Thoughts with bereaved family & friends.”

At 6.37am the following morning, Spender tweeted: “I strongly condemn the terrorist attacks in Hadera, Beersheba, and most recently Ramat Gan and Bnei Brak. The murder of innocent civilians is abhorrent. My thoughts are with the victims' loved ones and anyone else affected across Israel.”

On Spender’s website, a tweet from the Biting Flea seems less than impressed: “Hard to condemn when there's an active prosperous influential lobby within your potential electorate.”

While Sharma gets ridiculed on Twitter by many for including his perfect TER of 100 in his campaign flyers (at age 46, how long ago was school?), Spender is chastised for a video endorsement from her Ascham school headmistress Rowena Danziger.

Says rharley on Twitter: “Allegra either forgets or doesn’t realise how many parents in Wentworth loathe Rowena Danziger. There was a meeting of 1000 parents and former parents at the Clancy Auditorium speaking out against her return to Ascham. One who took the podium to speak against her was the late Sir Laurence Street. My wife is mulling switching her vote to Sharma.”

Sharma’s attack on Spender’s candidature - “a mid-life frolic, or as a hobby, or as a vanity project. I’m not here because of who my parents are, or where I went to school” - has drawn the ire of women.

In early April, @Gds Gds tweeted: “Why did Sharma have to roll in the muck with the rest of his party? That patronising insult he hurled at his female opponent won’t go down well with the women in his electorate,” while Spender’s supporter and funder, Simon Holmes a Court, called the dig at Spender “somewhere between patronising and misogynistic”.

Another tweeter said Spender’s mid-life “frolic” was actually that of “a mature person losing faith with the Party in which she was raised”, and that it was “absurd that someone from the LNP should criticise someone on the basis of a privileged high school education….”

In the bruising world of social media, Sharma certainly gets the short end of the stick, but Spender does not go unscathed. Her wishful thinking post-budget: “Imagine a budget that treated climate change seriously… an end to fossil fuel subsidies, support for solar and wind, and more choice in electric vehicles – it’s what business has been crying out for, but tonight – nothing” earns this from someone called Steve Balzary: “Yes. Can’t wait for the Chinese and Indian budgets to do that. In 2050.”

When Spender says she would like to see funding distributed on the basis of need, she is greeted with sarcasm by Nathan Bernasconi: “I find that an interesting, noble take for someone running in Australia's wealthiest electorate. So you'll be voting for funding to go to projects in the places that need them most, rather than Wentworth?”

Wentworth is, again in the view of Labor candidate Tim Murray, a battle between two conservatives, one with a better climate policy.

There is also the fact that one candidate is in a party and the other is not. But Sharma begs to differ on that. In The Australian few weeks ago, associate editor Brad Norington wrote that Liberal MPs like Sharma argued that independents were running a “pseudo party” to oust the Government by winning seats that Labor and the Greens could not.

The rest of the “exclusive” investigation was devoted to proving that some independents, Spender included, had shared the same campaign house, Populares, owned by Labor and Getup veterans and staffed by former Labor and Getup “associates”.  

Chris Kenny, who is a columnist at the Australian, said on Sky News that climate-led independents are just “another green left party for rich areas… phoney independents, of course… sharing policies, campaign materials and funding sources… So if you like billionaires and millionaires imposing policies that will hurt the living standards of working families, vote for the free left party of the leafy suburbs…”

From here, it’s not a far cry to get to @Margaret on Twitter, and resentment of the whole Wentworth electorate: “Spender will be far more far in favour of keeping wealth in the hands of the wealthy than Sharma. She answers solely to the people of Wentworth, the wealthiest people in Australia (by a significant a margin). The Liberal Party, on the other hand, still need to retain some consideration for middle-class and working-class people, and cannot solely appease the people of Wentworth.”

In the SMH, Sharma is interviewed about what he calls “dodgy undeclared push polling” in Wentworth, and makes accusations of “digital dirty tricks” after a February surge in his Instagram followers, which he argues could later be weaponised to say he inflated numbers with fake supporters, while actually many of them appeared to be bots, and from Taiwan.

Spender, who has instructed her campaign volunteers to try remain dignified at all times, denies all involvement in these activities.

The plot thickens. On Facebook, former SMH columnist, the legendary David Dale, sees it this way: “No amount of fake independent campaign literature pushed through my letterbox will persuade me that Dave Sharma is anything more than a number who'll vote with Dutton or Frydenberg after the election. I'm still going: 1. Allegra Spender; 2. Green; 3. ALP; Last: Sharma.”

It’s pretty obvious who the Murdoch media are going to endorse in this campaign but it’s not quite sure which way Dale’s alma mater, the SMH, now owned by Nine, will lean when the time comes. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

It's a murky world out there in the old media and the new, hard to unpick, and this is just the beginning, before the election date has even been announced.