The who’s who of lobby groups, industry groups and think tanks
Lobby groups
Advance
Right-wing campaigners Advance have had a mixed couple of years. Thanks to its stupendously rich financial backers and some impressively vile messaging, it had great success in opposing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the October 2023 referendum.
Since then, Advance went hard in the Dunkley by-election in early 2024, centring a campaign on a 2023 High Court decision that found indefinite immigration detention was unlawful, leading to the subsequent release of asylum seekers. Advance focused on the criminal records of some of the released individuals — people who had already served their jail sentences — calling them “rapists, paedophiles and murderers”. As psephologist Kevin Bonham put it at the time: “The biggest losers here are Advance, who spent heavily on Willie Horton tactics to zero visible effect.”
Advance received half a million from the Cormack Foundation, a Liberal Party fundraising group, according to AEC donations data released on Monday.
Australians for Prosperity
Launched by former Liberal MP Julian Simmonds in September last year, Australians for Prosperity (AFP) plans to target teal independents at the next election by running against the government’s proposal to raise taxes on people with $3 million in superannuation.
Between October and December 2024, AFP spent about $32,000 promoting ads on Facebook, overwhelmingly targeted at wealthy inner-city suburbs in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide that were lost to teals or the Greens in 2022.
Coal Australia donated $725,000 to AFP last year, according to the Electoral Commission of Queensland.
Climate 200
This year is a huge test for the durability of the teal project, and by extension the ongoing influence of Climate 200. Any question as to how credible a threat the movement still poses to the major parties was laid to rest this week with Labor putting forward its donation reform legislation (a stitch-up with the Liberals) as a priority in this parliamentary sitting week.
Climate 200 can already claim a scalp of sorts for 2025, with former communications minister Paul Fletcher quitting Parliament rather than facing independent Nicolette Boele. Planning a “second wave”, as The Australian Financial Review puts it, Climate 200 is backing up to 30 candidates in 2025.
Investors Rob Keldoulis and Marcus Catsaras were its biggest donors last financial year, pitching in roughly $1 million each. Previous donors include Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes and former CEO Scott Farquhar, who donated $1 million and $1.5 million respectively.
Australian Christian Lobby
One of Labor’s stated priorities for the coming sitting week is the implementation of hate speech laws it first introduced last September. The Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) has previously attacked it as having the “clear potential to serve as the instrument of viewpoint suppression on ideological grounds, even to criminalise political beliefs and expression contrary to a government-approved orthodoxy”, based on the legislation’s provisions regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.
Of course, after nearly a decade of failing to stop the generally progressive shifts on those issues, the ACL probably feels a Coalition government is its best bet for getting a leader to say what it likes to hear — indeed, the Liberal candidate for Tangney, the Western Australian seat unexpectedly snatched up by Labor last election, is former ACL activist Howard Ong.
The ACL doesn’t disclose where it gets its money — and didn’t even before it was granted an exemption after threats in 2017.
Industry Groups
Minerals Council of Australia
Since late last year, the pro-nuclear campaign backed by Australia’s mining industry has been flooding the internet with Wicked and The Grinch memes urging Australia to “rethink nuclear as part of our sustainable future”. It’s no surprise then that the website’s registration reveals the hand of Topham Guerin, the New Zealand-founded agency best known for riding deliberately crap memes to electoral success with the Liberal Party and the UK’s Conservative Party.
The Minerals Council of Australia made a total of $382,465 in political donations in 2023-24. The largest two were to the major party’s federal branches: $82,500 to Labor and two payments totalling $95,500 to the Liberals.
Of course, the minerals industry can put its feet up a little this election, given the role as industry lobbyist undertaken by WA Premier Roger Cook — unpaid so far, but history suggests it’s only a matter of time.
Business Council of Australia
The major employer association is — if reporting in The Australian Financial Review is to be believed — facing accusations that it has “lost its mojo” and that its “influence is at the lowest level since it was formed”, following reforms by the Albanese government to tip the level of influence back towards employees in Australia’s industrial relations system.
Indeed it’s noteworthy that as we come to an election year, the usual lead talking points — deregulation, cutting company tax, the cutting of employee entitlements — have been expressed as fears of “skills shortages” and the “education reform” needed to ameliorate them, including incentives for employers to engage apprentices.
The BCA is funded by its 130 or so members and doesn’t make political donations, although those members certainly do. In the past, it has found other ways of making itself heard.
Australian Industry Group
Meanwhile, the Australian Industry Group has kicked off the election with its annual Australian Industry Outlook survey. According to the scan of 220 corporate leaders, there are fears in the business community that skills shortages, labour supply and, you guessed it, industrial relations will have a “strongly negative impact” on business in 2025.
Research by The Australia Institute found that, as of 2021-22, Ai Group had $68 million in revenue via its members.
Australian Banking Association
The Australian Banking Association (ABA), whose head for eight years, Anna Bligh, stepped down on Monday, has most recently been pushing for Australia’s prudential regulator (APRA) to loosen its rules around the interest rate test for first-home buyers. The ABA said APRA’s rules made it more difficult for banks to lend to housing developers, “a burden that is not applied to private capital more broadly”.
The ABA donated roughly $50,000 each to the ALP and the Liberals in 2023-24.
Unions
The union movement is not as uniformly behind the Labor government as one might expect this year. Reports of alleged criminal bikie connections within the CFMEU construction union led to the organisation being put into administration, a move undertaken by the Albanese government and supported by peak union body the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU). In response, the Electrical Trades Union (ETU) announced it would withhold more than $1 million in political donations to the ALP in protest, and ETU parent the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union disaffiliated from the ACTU.
Nevertheless, unions remain the Labor Party’s major source of donations, collectively donating $5.7 million in 2023-24.
Think tanks
The Australia Institute
A progressive think tank and every Guardian reader’s go-to for policy prescriptions since GetUp! fell off a cliff after 2019, The Australian Institute promises “high impact research that combines rigorous fact-driven material with cutting-edge communication strategies”. Its experts — including Emma Shortis, Richard Dennis, Greg Jericho and Amy Remeikis — are frequently on the ABC, The Project and elsewhere, spruiking greater transparency in politics, more action on climate change, and the end of policies like negative gearing.
The Australia Institute reported $10.6 million in revenue in its 2023-24 annual report. It says it’s funded by donations from “philanthropic trusts” and individuals — in the past it’s listed how many individuals, but not this year — and indeed $9.9 million of its 2024 revenue came that way. It also takes grants and commissions from business, unions and NGOs. It does not accept donations or commissioned work from political parties.
The Institute of Public Affairs
Apart from its advocacy again warding off any change to Australia Day (it wasn’t a particularly close-run thing), The Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) — advocates of small government and free speech and opponents of climate change action — has been deeply influential on the intellectual make-up of the Liberal Party since the 1980s.
Most recently, and most jarringly given its stated philosophy, the IPA advocated for huge increases in military spending. Who pays for all this has long been the subject of great mystery, but in the past it appears to have been largely run on mining magnate Gina Rinehart’s spare pocket change.
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