While the platforms have policies on such things as misinformation and have removed a handful of ads from parties, including the Liberal Democrats, Australia does not have federal “truth in political advertising” laws, allowing politicians to spread tendentious or false claims.
But those figures, which are the most recent available, reveal only a fraction of total expenditure because individual candidates and party branches spend money that is counted separately. In that period, the Liberal Party spent $31,132, the United Australia Party spent $54,041.
On Facebook and Instagram, Labor spent $32,684 between April 4 and 10. The weight of his expenditure, combined with digital ad price rises and privacy changes, will likely crowd out much of the microtargeted ad expenditure that has been prominent in previous contests. Unlike last election, Palmer’s ads have not swung decisively against either party, instead taking a “plague on both your houses” approach. March Google figures provided to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age by Firewire Digital, a marketing agency, show searchers for the “United Australia Party” were up 9900 per cent year over year, albeit only to total monthly searches between 10,000 and 100,000. The effect of Palmer’s advertising, which trashes the major parties and spruiks grand-scale policies on debt and the cost of living, is clear. Other videos doing the rounds highlight a 2012 speech from Albanese that cribbed lines from the 1995 film The American President, or have Morrison championing coal over footage of koalas fleeing bushfires and people fleeing floods. “We know that the best protection for those girls is that they get themselves into a secure relationship with a loving husband,” he said at the time. In one with 138,000 views, she delivers historical clangers such as Barnaby Joyce’s 2011 argument against marriage equality on the basis that it would hurt his daughters. They fit another genre of political content on TikTok: resurrecting the greatest blunders (depending on your politics) of years gone by. “I would not have thought that a 56-year-old lesbian feminist trade unionist would find some kind of audience, but there you go.” Several of her videos, created in just the last two months, have received more than 100,000 views. “I’ll be honest, I’m as surprised as the next person,” says Wil Stracke, assistant secretary at the Victorian Trades Hall Council. But some left-wing TikTokers have found big audiences on the platform by being entirely themselves. Other union accounts added authorisations that made their operators explicit after queries from the broadcaster. Some explicitly political content on TikTok has overstepped the mark, with an ABC report revealing the United Workers Union had paid users to create videos targeting the government.
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