From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven AM.
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 multimillion dollar war chest. Advance promised to.
Take back the country.
Yet Labor won seventeen new seats and the Greens vote fairly 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 Katsukus on how Advanced siphoned liberal funds, muddied its message and yet is still claiming victory. It's Tuesday, June three, Jason. The lobby group Advance, it poured more than fifteen million dollars 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.
Well, Ruby, I think they had at least a fifteen point six million dollar 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 ants really try to go after the alban Ezy government and they built an election campaign around this slogan week Woke and sending us broke.
Right, So tell me more about that campaign.
So this was a campaign that featured a grainy black and white photograph of Anthony Albanesi and the tagline weak, woke and sending us broke. I 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. He's not displaying this
kind of red meat conservative strongman type figure. Instead, he's caving into this pressure to Advance reconciliation within Indigenous Australians. And also you know, it was seen as this very kind of woke idea, this idea of an Indigenous voice to Parliament. The seniors 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 Albinezi government has been sending
the country broke. Over the last three years.
The Bedfool government has wasted millions of dollars funding what's projects like decolonizing breastfeeding and anti racist dentist curriculum and a drag show beside.
This, authorized by sanderbook Advanced Australia Camera.
They did put a lot of money behind this campaign. They poured about one point seven million dollars 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 much that cost, but I would guess it was in
the order of many millions of dollars. They declared that they would ask the Albanesi government and crush the Australian Greens and it didn't turn out that way.
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.
Well, this is a great question and the answer wasn't immediately obvious to me. I guess if you just look at what happened, maybe gained seventeen seats, which is certainly not asking the Albanesi government. It was the 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 point zero five percent, So I don't think you could say 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 Latrope University. She's the lead author of a report produced by Latrop 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 Albanezy government. Opposing the referendum didn't mean that you oppose the Albenzy government itself.
So it's advanced confused potential No voters with potential coalition voters, assuming they would be one and the same, and they weren't.
That's right.
They assumed that everyone that voted no would carry that no vote forward and vote against the Albenzi 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 work and sending us broke billboards, and every chance they got they tried to reference the Voice campaign.
But the point is, I suppose that none of that shifted votes.
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 they 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.
So can Advance survive this? That's after the break, Jason. As the election campaign unfolded, we saw senior members of the Coalition use Advance as lines of attack on Albneasy and the Labor Party.
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. Since their loss, You've been speaking to people inside the Liberal parties. So how are they now reflecting on the campaign that Advance ran and what it meant for them.
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. That 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 un sided 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 advances messaging probably alienated undecided voters and backfired so comprehensively that it cost the coalition seats in Victoria and Queensland.
Okay, so, according to the Liberals, Advance actually harmed their election chants. As I'm sure Advance isn't coppying that though.
Have you spoken to them? What are they saying.
Matthew Sheen, 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 week work sending us broke campaign was the only campaign line that did any damage to the Labor vote, but seeing as Labour's primary vote went up by two point three percent, I think it's difficult to see where or how the Advanced campaign made any difference. Matthew Sheen has also sent out a lot of emails
since May third. I guess trying to reassure those supporters that they have the Advancers 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, will 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, Advance wasn't even campaigning, especially in the seat of Melbourne where the former Greens leader Adam Batt 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?
Yeah, do you get the sense that Advance has now squandered its political relevance because it's campaigning was so unsuccessful. What do you think its future is as a lobby group.
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 kind of 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 incentivize 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 art as effective. Everybody is going to go and vote, and you've got to try to influence their choices. An Advance doesn't seem to really know how to do that.
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.
I think they will, Ruby because a lot of the senior people are at Advance are people like Tony Abbott, to Center Namberjimper 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 to Center Nampergimper Price is doing either or Tony Abbott for that matter. And I think this is a fight for control of the Liberal Party. Advances 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, Jason, thank you for your time.
Ruby, it's great to have you back in the chair and a pleasure.
To talk to you well. Thank you, it's great to be back.
Also in the news today, Prime Minister Anthony Alberzi has dismissed US Defense Secretary Pete has Geth's request to hike defense spending. Pete hag Seth has urged US allies, including Australia, to share the burden and lift defense spending to five percent of GDP, warning that Beijing is credibly preparing to potentially use military force to alter the balance of power in the Indo Pacific. But Albanesi said Australia had already committed to an additional ten billion dollars int fence across
the next four years. And Ukraine says it has completed its biggest long range attack of the war with Russia after using smuggle drones to launch a series of major strikes on forty Russian warplanes at four military bases. President Blob Mizelenski said one hundred and seventeen drones were used in the attacks, which come as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators had to Istanbul for a second round of peace talks. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am.
Thanks for listening.