Zoe Daniel on what it costs to win an election

From Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. The historic Teal wave at the last election delivered the two major parties their worst electoral results in decades, so perhaps it's no surprise that the government looks set to introduce new laws that could make it harder for newcomers

My pleasure. Thanks for having me so.

I thought we could start by going back to twenty twenty two, when you run against and you successfully unseated Liberal MP Tim Wilson. Why do you think you won?

I mean, I must say when I was asked by a community organization to run in Goldstein, my initial response was, there is no chance we can win that seat. You know, it had been a safe liberal seat with a male member for more than one hundred and twenty years. But it became very evident during the campaign that a lot of people felt the same way as me, that they was sick of two party politics and they wanted someone

I think that we were able to.

Build momentum around that issues and run a really positive campaign. What we have achieved here is extraordinary safe liberalcy two term incumbent.

Independence.

And of course at the time a lot was made of the so called Till wave and the backing that you had from Climate two hundred. Can you tell me about how you raised money for your campaign and how much you raised.

So we spent I think in the end it was about one point eight million dollars on the campaign, and we raised over a million of that from within the electorate.

So I had very few large donors.

I didn't have any one individual donating hundreds of thousands of dollars or even one hundred thousand dollars to my campaign. It was predominantly people inside and outside the electorate who were keen to get an independent into Parliament. If not us, if not, now, let's do this Goldstein. So as an independent, you really need to spend a lot of time building that reputational respect, if you like, and the only way of doing it really is through direct engagement with people.

I'm with Zoe because I believe in positive change.

I'm for Zoe because I want to see the gold in Goldstein. I'm with Zoe because the current federal government is not doing enough for climate action or women's equality.

So although we did a lot of fundraising, that money was spent on the right staff with the right skills to enable the kind of campaign that iran. Predominantly the funding went to advertising, vote on the Issues, Vote with Conviction authorized by Zoe Daniel Brighton, billboard advertising which is extremely expensive, social media advertising, and call flutes so the election side that people put on fences.

So it's quite a lot of moving parts.

And so obviously all of that worked. We of course saw a whole lot of community independence including you people like Monik Ryan, a Leke rospender win against major party incumbents. So how important was being able to raise funds to campaign in the ways that you're describing, so billboards, social media, hiring the right people. How important was all of that ultimately in changing the makeup of the parliament the way that Australia is now represented.

Look, it's really critical.

It's unfortunate that you need a substantial amount of money in each of the independents that were elected at the last election, spent a substantial amount of money to get elected in.

Save seberal seats.

As a new face and a person with new ideas, you have a really limited amount of time and runway to actually get those ideas out to people and to help people to understand what they're voting for. I mean, obviously I can see where you're going with the conversation, and I think that you know the tension is the fact that that's required in order to enable fresh thinking.

That's definitely not where we want to end it.

The Special Minister for State Don Farrell, is expected to table a set of proposals that if they pass, they will be some of the biggest changes to the way that we run elections in this country that we've seen. Can you tell me what your understanding is of what's being proposed and why you think it is that the government is doing this now?

So I haven't seen an exposure draft.

I would love to see one because we do have concern that the two major parties will collude to protect their Coals and Wullies duopoly and to cut out new entrants. My understanding of it is that they're looking at real time disclosure and reduce thresholds for real time disclosure. This is something that I and everyone on the cross Bench did anyway at the last election, and I think reducing the threshold for that, to say one thousand dollars is

Do you agree with donation caps and spending cups?

Well, it depends what they are.

And really the devil is in the detail here because the playing field is already to filtered in favor of the major parties because of their history, their visibility.

The entrenched awareness in the community of them.

But also that they have the collective power if you like. So a general ad that just says vote liberal or vote labor will still benefit the individual candidate within my electorate, because some people don't really care who the candidate is. They'll just go in and put a one next to a particular party and if, for example, has been I think has been floating around in the press that the cap could be a million dollars per electorate while the vast majority of that still flows to the major parties.

And they also have sort.

Of external funding vehicles, and they do things like run dinners where they charge you know, five thousand dollars a seat to sit next to the minister, and those sorts of things, and there's a level of opacity around those kinds of fundraising mechanisms. So I think the key to it is the level playing field, but also the transparency and you can't sort of let the major parties get around it with you know, things that are convenient to them.

And to me, that means that the roughly thirty percent.

Of the population who didn't vote for either of the major parties is not being heard.

So is the government listening to crossbench concerns. That's after the break Zolli. The government is working on this draft legislation to change the parameters on electoral spending. Have you had any consultations with the minister who's driving is Don Farrell, about your concerns and how have those conversations gone.

The Independence as a group have had a couple of meetings with the minister. I'm not going to talk about what's happened in those meetings. I mean they're in effect meetings in which the cross Bench has been able to articulate the kinds of concerns that I've articulated to you, and the Minister's done some listening and the cross bench has since been doing some waiting for an exposure draft so that we can look at the kind of details that I'm talking about.

And Don Farrell has accused Independence of being hypocrites. Essentially, He's quoted as saying that some of the tills are saying to us that they agree with banning big money, just not theirs. What's your response to.

That, Well, I mean he kind of would say that, I suppose, but I guess I would throw the same thing back to him. I mean, take a look at how much money the major parties are raised, which is in the hundreds of millions for the last election. You know, a single donation from a Union could have funded my entire campaign, but all that money went into Labour's coffers,

Regard to the independence.

That you know where funded by a billionaire or a multimillionaire, is just complete rubbish and is very sort of convenient for them.

To foster their own position.

And what you've seen in New South Wales and Victoria, for example, is that changes to donation rules in Victoria in effect meant that the independents all lost their seats at the last election. And I don't think that that's what the population wants.

And so if that is the case, if the smaller players do get cut out, what is it that voters stand.

To lose, accountability, pressure a new way of doing politics. This is still a very new phenomenon and look, I think anyone who expects you know, politics to miraculously metamorphous into something that's perfect in two years after you know, one hundred and twenty plus years from Federation of Bad

Saway, Thank you so much for your tame.

My pleasure, thanks for having me.

Also in the news today, Northern Territory. Senator Melanderie McCarthy has been named as the new Minister for Indigenous Australians as part of a cabinet reshuffle announced yesterday afternoon. Senator McCarthy replaces Linda Burney, who will retire from federal politics at the next election. Linda Burney was the first Indigenous person elected to the new South Wales Parliament and the first Indigenous woman to be elected to the House of

This is seven a m. Thanks for listening.