Cooper takes teal troopers to storm Sturt
An InDaily reporter joined Dr Verity Cooper’s quiz team, learning about the cost of her campaign for Sturt and why she’s sick of millionaires being bulk billed.
When we meet at Norwood’s Republic Hotel, she’s the leader of Cooper’s Troopers, a quiz team of mostly Gen Z voters. Armed with an Aussie Lager, Cooper is ready to answer our tough questions about policy and Quizzame’s on pop culture.
Using opportunities like the local quiz night is essential to her campaign, which she said “started off with nothing, and it is very expensive to run a campaign”.
Cooper is backed by the Climate 200 group and said her campaign has run on about $190,000 – much less than the cap that applies to major parties after political donations reforms passed last year.
“The major parties teamed up together, had a bipartisan agreement that they should limit funding to $800,000 per candidate, per campaign,” Cooper said.
“Let me tell you, I would think it was Christmas, Easter and my birthday rolled into one if I had got $800,000!
“At the moment, we’re running on about $190,000, which means we have to strategically work out every cent, every dollar where those donations come, which means we don’t get many ads on Instagram, social media, it means we’re limited to where we put our funds.”
She said the Climate 200 funding gave her campaign a start, but it doesn’t level the playing field “because we’re never, ever going to have as much money as what the corporate donors give the major parties”.
Transparency is a key part of her platform, and she’s critical of “loopholes you could drive a truck through” in the political donation reforms and wants to ban lying in political advertising.
As she’s telling me about the 83 separate companies the Liberal Party has associated with its name that accept political donations, more young faces appear to join the quiz team.
You might like
One is 19 years old and said she’s excited to live in Sturt because they have an independent candidate with a shot in an election that looks likely to serve a minority government.
When asked how she would navigate a hung parliament if she’s elected, Cooper said she will always be independent.
“I will never join a party, the independents who’ve done that in the past, every single one of them rued the day, because once they came in under the wing of the party, they were ignored, told to ‘sit down, shut up, you will vote our way’,” she said.
“I would negotiate with either side based on what’s going to be best for Sturt and young people.”
Verity Cooper with young campaign volunteer Jay Wellens at the Republic. This picture: Helen Karakulak
Asked if it comes down to one policy bargaining chip she would barter with a major party to help them form government, she said “for young people it would be no new oil and gas, end of story”.
We met a couple of weeks into the campaign, and at the time, she said Labor were offering more policies to benefit people over corporations.
“We haven’t heard all of the policies, at this stage that will be where I will be leaning to but it is absolutely not a done deal,” she said.
Healthcare has been a feature in the fight for Sturt, with Labor and Liberal candidates committing to a new urgent care clinic in the electorate.
But Cooper, who worked as a GP for 35 years, questions how much difference urgent care clinics make to addressing problems with Australia’s healthcare system.
“We haven’t seen a reduction in emergency department presentations, nor have we seen a reduction in ramping, so to say that they’re helping, we just don’t have the answers, because the program hasn’t been evaluated properly,” she said.
She said clinics, which can increase the number of patients seen and reduce strain on GPs, are “not a bad idea” but that the community perception that bulk billing GP visits is the best option is “unfortunate”.
Stay informed, daily
“That is a really unfortunate perception, because what it means is that taxpayers are paying for everyone, including millionaires,” she said.
“I got so sick of millionaires, rich people asking to be bulk billed and then telling me about their next cruise.
“Why should every taxpayer be paying for rich people? I just don’t get it.
“I think it’s much more cost-efficient and sensible that we subsidise the people who are doing it tough, and that can also include both parents working and paying full price for their kids for healthcare.”
With a focus on mental health in her policy platform, she said when she worked as a GP she would make sure to bulk bill patients suffering depression, anxiety or requiring counselling because “they didn’t need the cost of healthcare to deter them from coming back to see me”.
“It was actually one of the hardest things in my practice, actually determining who am I going to bulk bill,” she said.
Given the demographic of the quiz team – most of whom didn’t recognise Simple Minds’ ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ from the John Hughes classic film The Breakfast Club – I asked Cooper if the youth vote is her main focus this election.
“Personally, I don’t care who you are. It’s just like when I was a GP, that was one of the exciting things, you never knew who was going to come through the door,” she said.
“You never knew what problem they were going to present with, if it was new and challenging and exciting, so I love meeting everybody.”
Cooper faces an uphill four-way battle to unseat Stevens – the last federal Liberal in metropolitan Adelaide – who holds Sturt on a razor-thin 0.5 per cent margin over Labor.
Labor has lawyer and local councillor Claire Clutterham as their candidate while the Greens Katie McCusker is gunning for the job.
“I know that there are people who are interested in strategy, you know, we’ve got to get this many votes off the Liberals, we’ve got to get this many votes off Labor, personally, I don’t consume myself with that too much,” Cooper said.
“As an independent, we can look at every single bit of legislation, whether it’s Greens, whether it’s Liberal, whether it’s Labor and choose the best policies and vote on the best policies and get rid of the bad ones
“Whatever government or whatever party forms government, we keep them to their promises.”
