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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones. This is 7am.

As the search to explain the Coalition's disastrous election results continues, inside Liberal campaign headquarters there’s one group being singled out: the right-wing lobby Advance.

Flush with a multi million dollar war chest, Advance promised to “take back” the country, yet Labor won 17 new seats and the Greens vote barely moved.

With Advance and the Liberals blaming each other for the failure, there are questions about whether the two will ever work together again.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Jason Koutsoukis, on how Advance “siphoned” Liberal funds, muddied its message and yet, is still claiming victory.

It’s Tuesday, June 3.

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RUBY:

Jason, the lobby group Advance, it poured more than $15 million into the election campaign that's just gone. Tell me a bit about the strategy though, and what informed the direction that Advance took with its campaign.

JASON:

Well, Ruby, I think they had at least a $15.6 million war chest. That's just the money that they raised in the last financial year. And what they raised to spend in the financial year that we're just coming to the end of, we don't actually know yet. And we won't know that until October when those returns are revealed by the Australian Electoral Commission. And I think Advances' strategy was to spend as much of that money as they could on a very aggressive campaign that first targeted the Australian Greens. And I think we saw a lot of that roll out in the second half of last year. And then from the beginning of this year, we saw Advance really try to go after the Albanese government and they built an election campaign around this slogan: Weak, Woke and Sending Us Broke

RUBY:

Right. So tell me more about that campaign.

JASON:

So this was a campaign that featured a grainy black and white photograph of Anthony Albanese and the tagline, Weak, Woke, and Sending Us Broke. It was trying to kind of tap into all of those things that, I guess, Advance felt had, sort of, shone through during the Voice referendum campaign. That this was a sign of weakness on the part of the Prime Minister, you know, he's not displaying this kind of red meat, conservative, strong man type figure. Instead, he's caving into this pressure to advance reconciliation with Indigenous Australians. And also, you know, it was seen as this very woke idea, this idea of an Indigenous voice to parliament. The sending us broke was kind of, I guess, an attempt to tap into this cost of living crisis, but I felt in a kind of indirect way. It's not really clear how the Albanese government has been sending the country broke over the last three years.

Audio excerpt – Advance:

“The federal government has wasted millions of dollars funding woke projects like decolonising breast feeding, an anti racist dentist curriculum and a drag show for scientists. Authorized by Sandra Bourke Advance Australia Canberra.”

JASON:

But they did put a lot of money behind this campaign. They poured about $1.7 million into just advertising on Google and Meta alone during the actual election campaign. How much the national advertising, television advertising campaign cost, with the billboards that went with it in a lot of electorates around the country, we don't yet know how much that costs, but I would guess it was in the order of many millions of dollars. They declared that they would oust the Albanese government and crush the Australian Greens, and it didn't turn out that way.

RUBY:

No, it didn't. And you mentioned the referendum, Advance obviously had a lot of success with its campaigning for the No vote there, which then informed the way to approach this election. So why didn't it work this time around? Where did Advance's campaign go wrong? Why were they not able to influence voters in the same way?

JASON:

Well, this is a great question and the answer wasn't immediately obvious to me. I guess, if you just look at what happened, Labor gained 17 seats, which is certainly not ousting the Albanese government. It was, I think, the best ever result for the Australian Labor Party at a federal election, going back to the beginning of federation. They really didn't make that much difference with the Greens either. The national Greens vote dipped by a minuscule 0.05%. So, I don't think you could say that that Advance had any impact on either of the two parties that it was targeting.

Now, I did speak to a few experts about this. Andrea Carson is professor of political communication at LaTrobe University. She's the lead author of a report produced by LaTrobe University that looked at the referendum – that was titled Influences and Messages – and a big part of that report was the impact that Advance had on the No campaign. But I think according to Andrea Carson, the big difference is that a referendum is just a binary question. It's yes or no. And a lot of people had doubts about the Voice for different reasons. Even though it was something that was put forward by the Albanese government, opposing the referendum didn't mean that you opposed the Albanese government itself.

RUBY:

So it's, Advance confused potential No voters with potential Coalition voters, assuming they would be one in the same and they weren't.

JASON:

That's right. They assumed that everyone that voted No would carry that No vote forward and vote against the Albanese government when the federal election campaign. And they built that campaign against the Greens and the Labor government very much around the same themes that they used during the Voice campaign. They even had the Prime Minister in a Yes t-shirt on those weak, woke and sending us broke billboards. And every chance they got, they tried to reference the Voice campaign.

RUBY:

But the point is, I suppose, that none of that shifted votes.

JASON:

That's right. They tried to really keep the Voice in the minds of voters, but they didn't really shift any votes by doing that. So you have to wonder just how effective they were in opposing the referendum. Yes, they got a great result there, but I don't think any of the tactics or the campaign strategies they used were really, in the end, that innovative.

It's pretty easy to oppose a referendum. Only eight referendums have succeeded in the time since federation. And it was just probably a simple case that voters didn't understand it. They didn't really like the idea of what the Voice represented, and in the end, they voted against it. But when it comes to a federal election, there's a lot more at stake. And it seemed that Advance weren't able to convert that success they'd had in the referendum into the federal election campaign.

RUBY:

So, can Advance survive this? That’s after the break.

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RUBY:

Jason, as the election campaign unfolded, we saw senior members of the Coalition use Advance's lines of attack on Albanese and the Labor party.

Audio excerpt – Andrew Hastie:

“We’re starting to see people saying, you know what? This Prime Minister… He’s weak, he's woke and he’s sending us broke, as Advance is making very clear.”

RUBY:

Since their loss, you've been speaking to people inside the Liberal Party. So, how are they reflecting on the campaign Advance ran and what it meant for them?

JASON:

I think there's a lot of frustration inside the Liberal Party when it comes to groups like Advance, because the Liberal Party feels, or believes, that a lot of the money that went to Advance was money that could have gone to the Liberal Party. One person I spoke to said that precious resources were siphoned away by Advance from the Liberal Party. This is money that might otherwise have given the Liberal Party a better chance of getting its message through to voters. Other Liberal Party strategists that I spoke to said that they could not point to a single message put out by Advance that worked with undecided voters and that the ads that Advance ran also reinforced the perception that the Liberal Party was joined at the hip to Donald Trump, that that very, kind of, Trump vibe that Advance put into its campaign messaging ended up giving right-leaning voters permission to, kind of, bypass the Liberal Party altogether and go straight for One Nation or the even more right-wing Trumpet of Patriots Party. And that many of those voters didn't even preference the Liberal party, that they ended up preferencing the Labor Party. Another advisor I spoke to said that they believed Advance’s messaging probably alienated undecided voters and backfired so comprehensively that it cost the coalition seats in Victoria and Queensland.

RUBY:

Okay, so according to the Liberals, Advance actually harmed their election chances. I'm sure Advance isn't copping that though. Have you spoken to them? What do they say?

JASON:

Matthew Sheehan, who's the executive director of Advance, is a pretty elusive character. I did manage to speak to him a few times towards the end of last year and in the lead up to the federal election this year. But none of those conversations were on the record, and he didn't really want to speak to us for this story. He's a pretty cagey character. He’s not accepting any of this blame. He did give one interview after the election, and that was to Guardian Australia. And in that conversation he blamed the poor campaign performance of the Coalition for the Coalition result. He said Advance could not be blamed for that at all. And instead, he blamed bedwetting anonymous Liberals. He insists that the weak, woke, sending us broke campaign was the only campaign line that did any damage to the Labor vote. But seeing as Labor's primary vote went up by 2.3%, I think, it's difficult to see where or how the Advance campaign made any difference.

Matthew Sheehan has also sent out a lot of emails since May the 3rd, I guess trying to reassure those supporters that they have that Advance still knows what it's doing. And I think a lot of the real point of those emails is to keep the fundraising machine operating and trying to say to people, well, look, we said that we'd destroy the Greens and we had some success doing that, that they lost three of their four lower house seats. But it's difficult, again, to justify that because in many of the seats where the Greens went backwards or even lost their seat in parliament, the Advance wasn't even campaigning. Especially in the seat of Melbourne where the former Greens leader, Adam Bandt, did lose his seat, and Advance ran no advertising at all in Melbourne. So it's difficult to find any evidence that Advance made a difference. And so you do have to wonder just what is the point of this group going forward?

RUBY:

Yeah, do you get the sense that Advance has now squandered its political relevance because its campaigning was so unsuccessful? What do you think its future is as a lobby group?

JASON:

Well, I think what Advance is trying to do is emulate some of these super packs that we see in the US, you know, these public action committees that raise money and indirectly help candidates that they're aligned with. The big difference between Australia and the US is that in the US you've got to motivate people or incentivise people to actually come out and vote, but in Australia we have compulsory voting and so we don't have that trouble. And so because we have compulsory voting in Australia, I think, groups like Advance or Get Up on the left, just aren't as effective. Everybody is going to go and vote, and you've got to try to influence their choices. And Advance doesn't seem to really know how to do that.

RUBY:

So Jason, given what they're saying about each other right now, does it seem likely to you that Advance and the Coalition, or at least the Liberal Party, will work together again?

JASON:

I think they will, Ruby, because a lot of the senior people at Advance are people like Tony Abbott, Jacinta Namperjibpa Price. And I think it's the right wing of the Liberal Party is very closely aligned with Advance. And so I think that will continue. Advance will stay very close to that far right of the Liberal Party. But I think what we're also going to see is more pushback from the moderate wing of the Liberal Party that doesn't really like what Advance is doing and doesn't really like what Jacinta Nampejimpa Price is doing either, or Tony Abbott for that matter. And I think this is a fight for control of the Liberal Party. Advance is on one side of that battle and Liberal moderates are on the other side of it. Who wins will probably determine what role Advance plays in the next election campaign and how closely it remains aligned with the liberal party. We just don't know yet.

RUBY:

Jason, thank you for your time.

JASON:

Ruby, it's great to have you back in the chair and a pleasure to talk to you.

RUBY:

Why thank you. It's great to be back.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has dismissed US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s request to hike defence spending.

Pete Hegseth has urged US allies, including Australia, to “share the burden” and lift defence spending to 5% of GDP, warning that “Beijing is credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific”.

But Albanese said Australia had already committed to an additional ten billion dollars in defence across the next four years.

And,

Ukraine says it has completed its biggest long-range attack of the war with Russia, after using smuggled drones to launch a series of major strikes on 40 Russian warplanes at four military bases.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said 117 drones were used in the attacks, which come as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators head to Istanbul for a second round of peace talks.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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