The supposedly large campaigns run by community independents have been used to justify the Albanese Government’s rushed changes to electoral laws. Labor Special Minister of State Don Farrell explicitly linked the laws to an attempt to limit funding for community independents, saying “if you can’t get your message across after spending $800,000, then maybe you shouldn’t be in politics”.

Liberal MP Paul Fletcher claimed that “[t]hese amounts being spent on campaigns in individual electorates are without precedent in the Australian political system”.
Since these claims are being used to justify sweeping changes to Australian electoral law, they warrant close scrutiny.

The data reveals that the line being pushed by the two major parties does not stack up.

Despite what the Labor and Liberal parties might wish to suggest, million-dollar campaigns were not uncommon before the 2022 election.

Former Senator Kim Carr claimed that Labor spent $1 million on the 2018 Batman by-election campaign in the hope of preventing a once-safe seat from falling to the Greens and the same year, the Liberal Party reportedly spent $1 million on its Wentworth by-election campaign, which was won by independent Dr Kerryn Phelps. Her campaign cost $145,265.

Even since the 2022 election, both Labor and the Liberal Party have had a million-dollar seat campaign. The Labor Party spent $1 million on its campaign for the competitive Dunkley by-election in March 2024, and national secretary Paul Erikson predicted the Coalition had ‘easily matched this’.

However, the key issue is that while each independent candidate discloses their expenditure separately, parties report only aggregate expenditure for the year. Labor or Liberal for example do not have to disclose how much each spent trying to win a specific marginal seat. But we can calculate how much is spent, on average, per electorate.

For example, the Labor Party spent just under $116 million for 151 House of Representatives candidates in 2022, compared to $131 million for 155 candidates from the Liberal and National parties. The 22 community independents spent a combined $14.4m.

On this measure, Labor and the Coalition spent on average $112,000 and $189,000 respectively more per candidate than the community independents.

There are limitations to this approach. The data available for the major parties does not distinguish state campaigns from federal campaigns. Nor does the data tell us how much was spent on party administration rather than electioneering per se, nor do we know how much was spent in certain seats. After all, we know that competitive races are likely to be much higher than the average figure.

A measure that does give us a sense of spending in competitive races is digital advertising expenditure on Google and Meta ads. Once again there are limitations to this approach given Australia’s inadequate campaign disclosure laws.

Between the issuing of writs and polling day for the 2022 election, there was no clear pattern of independents outspending the incumbent major party, the Liberals.
In the six electorates that community independents won in 2022, the independent candidates spent an average of just $5,200 more than their Liberal counterparts on digital ads.

That figure obscures large variations among those six electorates. Katharine Deves, the Liberal candidate for Warringah, spent more than twice as much as independent Zali Steggall’s spending. Then-treasurer Josh Frydenberg outspent independent challenger Monique Ryan by more than $85,500.

Importantly all these figures ignore that that major parties and incumbent parliamentarians start with a significant financial advantage over new challengers. Over each parliamentary term, lower house MPs enjoy about $3 million in incumbency advantages (including salaries, printing and travel allowances, electoral and office staff), as well as considerable name recognition and media coverage.

Parties can also run multiple campaigns from a single office, produce generic electoral material for national distribution and redeploy resources in response to new information. They can also target their resources at heavily contested seats while spending relatively little defending ‘safe’ seats.

The Albanese Government’s proposed changes to electoral laws would effectively cap independent candidates more strictly than party candidates, allowing the major parties to continue “piling in” to target seats.

The Albanese Government has based its proposed changes to electoral laws on an unfounded premise – that spending by independent candidates is a more serious threat than spending by political parties.

In fact, from the limited data available, community independents actually spent less on average than their major party rivals.