The AEC Candidate Return data that was released on Monday confirms what we in the electorate of Cowper all knew and felt but couldn’t prove. Caz Heise and her Climate 200 partners spent close to $2 million in their attempt to unseat the National Party, making the Caz 4 Cowper campaign the most expensive Teal campaign in the country in 2025. I can confidently advise that this campaign outspent the National Party’s Cowper campaign by more than two to one.

Additionally, Caz took out the title for largest individual candidate donation from Climate 200.

You have to ask yourself, why is that? Why did an electorate like Cowper receive more Climate 200 money than any other, including Bradfield, the seat that was earmarked as a key battle ground for the Teal movement in the wake of former Teal MP Kylea Tink’s North Sydney seat being abolished during the AEC’s redistribution. It was also an inner-city seat that had a retiring Liberal Party member and a Teal candidate on her second run, arguably more fertile ground than a regional electorate with an incumbent Member when it comes to the generally metro-centric Teal movement.

Following the links to the electorate that sit on Climate 200’s Advisory Council may provide an answer. A former National Party defector and unsuccessful Cowper candidate in both the 2016 and 2019 elections is a prominent member who will undoubtedly have some level of personal motive. How else can anyone explain how a regional electorate took out the gong for most expensive in the country?

Amid a sea of questions, the figures published by the AEC do provide one obvious answer; there’s a good reason why Caz’s donations weren’t listed on her website. This was despite promises of transparency and in fact assurances in the 2022 election that donations would be disclosed in real time. It would have been hard to claim ‘I am not a Climate 200 candidate’ when you received the highest Climate 200 donation in the country at almost $1.28 million. Claiming to be ‘predominantly sponsored by local businesses’ while receiving $271k from Bondi Beach CEO Rob Keldoulis for the second election in a row would also have been difficult to promote. Additionally, the official AEC data lists just 55 donors for the Caz Heise campaign. Compare that to fellow regional Teal candidate Alex Dyson in the electorate of Wannon that listed 1,786 donors or Monique Ryan in the affluent Melbourne electorate of Kooyong with 3,242 individual donors, and you have to start assessing some of the claims made by Caz’s camp during the election and scratching your head.

Much fuss was made of political donations to ‘major parties’ during the campaign from the Teal candidates, with Climate 200 affiliated media outlets like Gazette News, owners of local publication The Mid North Coaster, publishing a stream of at times bizarre claims against Coalition offices across the country, many of which displayed a deliberate lack of understanding around how funding distributions within a Party actually work and provided no balance in terms of questions to Teal candidates regarding their own funding sources.

While Transparency and Hypocrisy may loosely rhyme, they certainly don’t belong in the same sentence. And I intend to remind the electorate of that in 2028, when the next obscenely expensive campaign is hurled on us by Climate 200 and its elite inner-city partners.