Fintech executive Amelia Hamer, the blueblood Liberal Party's hope to retake its former blue ribbon stronghold, Kooyong, may have obscured a serious potential financial conflict of interest in her campaign, which includes strong links to China.
I am a voting resident of the Federal electorate of Kooyong in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. Traditionally a blue-ribbon Liberal seat, it gained special notoriety at the last election by dumping out the sitting Liberal Member and then Treasurer Josh Frydenberg in favour of Dr Monique Ryan — a so-called “Teal” Independent.
The Liberal candidate opposing Dr Ryan this election is Amelia Hamer, and both candidates have gained national attention over various incidents in what has been described by some as a “bitter” campaign.
Through investigating Ms Hamer and her life before the 2025 Election campaign, I have discovered important information that voters have the right to know about before they vote tomorrow.
If elected, I believe Hamer intends to lobby furiously for the deregulation of digital payment systems that embed themselves in online commerce. I believe that the conflict of interest in this regard and the broader implications for global finance are of great public interest.
It is well-known that 30-year-old Oxford-educated Amelia Hamer, a former global investment banker, more recently worked as director of strategy at Airwallex. This start-up tech “unicorn” provides financial services and, crucially, high-speed transfers of funds between countries via licences to issue money in various jurisdictions.
Airwallex itself isn't particularly interesting; the company offers little genuine innovation and appears to have succeeded due to the networks and resources of its founders and key players, such as Hamer herself. It has pursued a “blitzscale” model, focusing on market dominance before delivering value to investors.
More importantly, Airwallex reflects Hamer's deeper interest in digital payment systems and their ability to extract enormous amounts of wealth through inserting themselves at as many points-of-sale as possible, throughout the world economy. Her intentions here are fundamentally rent-seeking: she aims to benefit from widespread adoption of new digital payment systems that offer the global capitalist class a new opportunity to extract value out of nothing.
For some broader context, observe the below analysis of new developments in digital finance from prominent economist and former Greek Minister for Finance Yanis Varoufakis, when addressing Australia’s National Press Club (NPC) last year (13 March 2024).
Varoufakis talked about "cloud capital" and "cloudalists", which can be substituted for "digital technology capital" and those who stand to benefit from its power:
America’s hegemony, built on its trade deficit, relies entirely on its capacity to extract rents from the rest of the world courtesy of its monopoly of international payments. But Chinese cloud capital has already achieved something that the dollar system cannot achieve: a seamless integration of cloud capital with a free digital payments system – for example, WeChat, the private App belonging to Tencent, and the public digital currency already offered by China’s Central Bank.
Why is there no American equivalent seamlessly blending Big Tech and Big Finance? Because Wall Street refuses to share their financial rents with either U.S. cloudalists or with the Fed. And there is the rub: America maintains its dominance over international payments travelling along a rickety dollar highway, one full of potholes but still the highway of choice for global capitalists.
Meanwhile, Chinese cloud capital has built an all-singing-all-dancing payments superhighway, denominated in yuan, that few used. But, this superhighway’s very existence is a clear and present danger to the U.S. monopoly of the dollar payment system on which America’s hegemony rests.
Amelia Hamer is of an elite pedigree, including being the grand-niece of former Victorian Premier Rupert Hamer. More recently, her family have legitimately been seen as being broadly associated with the "global capitalists" that Varoufakis mentioned.
These moves to use technology to invent new forms of extraction are not unique to Amelia in the Hamer family:
- Her brother Tom Hamer founded a startup of his own called Marqo that uses browsing data to help online advertisers, essentially embedding digital technologies in e-commerce to extract value.
- Her father is Richard Hamer, a patent lawyer specialising in pharmaceuticals. His focus after 40 years at Allens seems to have devolved into working on meaningless hypothetical test cases that have no bearing on the real world, but crucially incorporate digital technology and how its potential can allow for the generation of wealth without labour.
In short, Hamer has been surrounded by a family culture of using digital technology to raise funds in perpetuity without working.
The real danger of her move towards public life, however, is the conflict of interest in her likely intent to influence policy-making for herself and her family's personal gain. More concerning still, any such intentions in this regard seem to support a broader shift in the global economy and international system, as noted by Varoufakis above, towards the power of Chinese finance over the U.S.-backed dollar.
This situation is summarised below:
- Airwallex is backed by Chinese company Tencent, which owns popular Chinese social media platform WeChat. This indicates Hamer's proximity to finance executives who network with Tencent and other such players.
- Tencent owns WeChat Pay, a Chinese payment system with over 1 billion users. This kind of financial technology threatens the U.S. hegemony of dollar transactions.
- I believe Hamer seeks to expand systems like Airwallex as a kind of Western alternative to these Chinese payment systems and to insert herself as the beneficiary of these expansions.
- Hamer has already demonstrated her personal problems with the current regulatory framework of digital payment systems such as Airwallex. She argues that these systems are not banks and should not be regulated like banks, despite the systems basically being banking arbitrage instruments.
- As policy advisor to Liberal Senator Jane Hume, she advised on digital finance, ostensibly lobbying for outcomes in this regard that benefit her own interests.
Hamer is clearly very knowledgeable in these matters, but her campaign has obscured how she seeks to benefit from digital finance policy. The implications here also seem to point to her valuing Australia's trading relationship with China, a matter that has been absent from the Liberal Party line of cosying up with the United States, echoed by her campaign.
In my view, it is in the public interest for voters to be aware of these facts and observations, so they can make an informed decision on Saturday.
The identity of the author has been withheld at his request.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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