Climate was right for McHarg's political foray

Climate was right for McHarg's political foray

IT'S lunchtime in Sydney's CBD. People in suits walk quickly on the footpaths, their minds focused on sandwiches, coffees and meetings. Suddenly, the noise of a kookaburra startles the crowd. They look up to see Bill McHarg, a wealthy and respected Melbourne businessman, slowly driving a garish green and red van through the busy city traffic.

The van, adorned with statements such as "Howard failed" and "Planet First", is almost impossible to miss. Almost, that is, until McHarg, 62, fires up the penetrating kookaburra call from the van's four loudspeakers.

"I feel embarrassed every time I get into it," McHarg says. "That was one of the prices I paid. It was money, it was time, it was my job, and it was my dignity. I'm a businessman — how un-corporate! It was the most undignified thing I think I've ever done."


It is now two weeks since the election, and McHarg has had time to reflect on events that changed his life and, he gently suggests, that of John Howard as well. McHarg is a swinging voter, brought up Catholic, with no family history of activism. He is a wiry, long-distance athlete who chose his career because it wasn't desk-bound, he could start his own business, and because his 17-year-old self thought it would make him a millionaire. It did, and more.

But less than a month ago McHarg quit his job at Colliers International, the prestigious property firm he co-founded 35 years ago, after warning his colleagues he was about to do something "audacious" to involve himself in the election.

McHarg and a team of family and friends then spent eight days — and $200,000 of McHarg's money — campaigning against Howard in the prime minister's marginal seat of Bennelong.

He drove the van around the electorate and the CBD and handed out flyers accusing Howard of "deliberately and wilfully" ignoring climate change. McHarg's van followed Howard on his walk, and McHarg's son debated Howard at a local shopping centre. McHarg himself placed ads in Sydney papers, featuring a cartoon by The Age's Ron Tandberg, who portrays a fiddling Howard as Nero and a burning Australia as Rome.

Why? McHarg says he was "personally offended" by Howard's long-time refusal to acknowledge or act on climate change. The aim was to force Howard from his seat.

But why do something so unusual? Successful businessmen do not quit their jobs to drive colourful vans that blare bird noises in the faces of office workers. Perhaps they write a letter to the editor, or talk to a mate on a government taskforce. But handing out flyers at a suburban mall?

Part of the story begins in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, where McHarg was born to a bank manager father and a district nurse mother, Jean. Five years later, his father died, and Jean McHarg moved her family to Melbourne.

Jean raised four children on a nurse's wage, living in "half a house" in Brighton and sending them all to private school. She died 20 years ago, but her son still tears up when he thinks of her.

It was Jean that gave McHarg his self-described "rigid" ethics, which seem almost anachronistic in this age of bendy morals and relative truths. And it was she who found and circled the ad in the paper that would give McHarg his first job in property. He still has the ad.

And part of the story begins at Raheen. There, at the gracious mansion owned by Liberal Party donor and admitted price fixer Richard Pratt, McHarg attended a breakfast featuring US environmental activist Al Gore. It was eight weeks before the election.

At the breakfast he learned that Al Gore, the world leader in fighting climate change, had spent the previous day teaching a class about global warming. This inflamed McHarg somehow. "I thought, if this is the best he can do, we're not going to make it in time," he says. "While that sort of thing is noble, if we wait for that to take effect it will be too late."

McHarg felt there was an urgency about the issue that others didn't seem to understand. "And that's what motivated me. I was frustrated."

Then it came to him. A prime minister who he saw as being culpable, in a marginal seat, in an election in eight weeks' time. "That's when I saw the opportunity. I started to think about a campaign, and decided to get up there and do something."

McHarg started planning. He told no one at first, gradually "drifting out" his plans to his family, and keeping them from all others. A month out from the election, he had a plan, and in November, the day before Cup Day, he held a strategy meeting in Sydney with members of the conservation movement.

"I had to be outrageous," McHarg says. "It was the only way to do it. It had to be a surprise and it had to be shocking."

As the implications of his plan became clear, McHarg grew stressed. He had "massive" self-doubt, and wondered whether he'd gone crazy.

McHarg is a seasoned campaigner. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked pro bono for the National Trust as it battled to save landmark buildings, and he saw from the start that it was easier to push for something if there was a business case to back it up.

He helped save the old Rialto Building, then owned by National Mutual, by finding an economic argument for its conservation. The site was later bought by Bruno Grollo and the original buildings were kept.

But McHarg's earlier activism was on a more polite scale, fought in courtrooms and offices, not streets and train stations. Bennelong was another matter.

"As I was building up the campaign in my mind, gradually committing myself, I would wake up some nights nearly vomiting," McHarg says. "I've never been so stressed in my life."

With less than two weeks to go before the election, McHarg decided it was time to tell his colleagues at Colliers something of his plan. He had already made up his mind to quit to avoid dragging Colliers into his personal crusade. His resignation was immediately accepted.

"They were keen to accept it because I was using words like outrageous, highly public, targeted. They had no option," McHarg says. He tried to convince them that, like the National Trust campaigns, this could somehow become a business opportunity.

Buy they didn't buy it. "They closed me out totally, turned their back on me," he says. "I was devastated at the response."

McHarg's family cried — they had only ever known him as a Colliers man. But they backed him "to the hilt".

McHarg loves property. As he walks through Melbourne's centre, he points out buildings he has sold. It was the property game that first opened his eyes to climate change — a client, Cbus came to him in 2002, specifying that its new building have a 5-Star Green Star rating.

"I was on their team for the design evolution of that building and that process converted me," he says. "Cbus taught me that it's not hard or expensive to (make buildings sustainable), you just have to think a bit more clearly and creatively."

McHarg's campaign was launched eight days before the election, on Friday, November 16, outside Howard's electorate office. The media picked up his story — the "prominent Melbourne businessman", the "property industry stalwart".

The family rented an apartment at McMahon's Point, with views of the harbour, bridge and city and a private swimming pool. It was beautiful, but McHarg and his team felt isolated. Sydney-siders kept asking why they were in their city.

A typical day began with the younger team members (McHarg's sons, daughter and niece) attempting to corner Howard on his morning walk. The Australian Federal Police searched the van and let them get on with it.

On the third day they got him, and made the evening news.

Every day, McHarg and his team would take the van back and forth between the CBD and Bennelong, stopping to hand out cards and flyers, going from 7am to 7pm.

There were setbacks — the van was repainted after it was judged to be not shocking enough. And McHarg's YouTube video didn't load in time for the launch.

But there were great moments. A highlight was a run past Bondi Beach, where the van was greeted with cheers. And each appearance on television was a thrilling morale boost.

McHarg sensed that Howard was losing Bennelong, and that climate change was one of the reasons why. "It was perceptible," he says.

Team McHarg assembled at Maxine McKew's election night party. Her supporters were decked out in a sea of purple T-shirts, a band was playing, television cameras were everywhere. It was electric.

McHarg said before the campaign that the closer the vote in Bennelong, the happier he would be, because it increased the likelihood that his actions made a difference. McKew won by slightly more than 2000 votes, after Greens preferences. The 2007 poll is now dubbed the world's "first climate change election".

Two weeks later, things have thawed between McHarg and Colliers. "They are now starting to understand what I did," he says. "There's no animosity. There was. But there's a happy ending."

McHarg seems to be enjoying his status as a gentleman activist. Whereas once he was well known in property circles, he now has a certain national notoriety. He hopes he has set an example, and likes to quote Margaret Mead. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

He is accepting some property work, and working on his next campaign, which he won't talk much about. It will be international in scope, it will happen in the next year, and it will involve the kookaburra van. You'll know it when you see it.

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