Choice of seats appears to reflect ALP concerns in the southern state, where the Libs have hopes of multiple gains. Plus: Sophie Scamps cuts looseRead more from the shadow campaignElection 2025 live updates: Australia federal election campaignSee all our Australia 2025 election coverageWith the election finally off and racing, candidates in 150 seats across the nation are out of the blocks – but most eyes are turning to the 20-odd seats where the election will really be won and lost.What’s happening in safe seats such as Grayndler, Maranoa or Melbourne won’t have much impact on the bigger political calculus. But we can take a deep dive into which seats the major parties are blasting with their social media ads to see where (at least at this moment) they’re putting resources – thanks as always, to the Meta ad library for Facebook and Instagram spending. Continue reading…Choice of seats appears to reflect ALP concerns in the southern state, where the Libs have hopes of multiple gains. Plus: Sophie Scamps cuts looseRead more from the shadow campaignElection 2025 live updates: Australia federal election campaignSee all our Australia 2025 election coverageWith the election finally off and racing, candidates in 150 seats across the nation are out of the blocks – but most eyes are turning to the 20-odd seats where the election will really be won and lost.What’s happening in safe seats such as Grayndler, Maranoa or Melbourne won’t have much impact on the bigger political calculus. But we can take a deep dive into which seats the major parties are blasting with their social media ads to see where (at least at this moment) they’re putting resources – thanks as always, to the Meta ad library for Facebook and Instagram spending. Continue reading…
With the election finally off and racing, candidates in 150 seats across the nation are out of the blocks – but most eyes are turning to the 20-odd seats where the election will really be won and lost.
What’s happening in safe seats such as Grayndler, Maranoa or Melbourne won’t have much impact on the bigger political calculus. But we can take a deep dive into which seats the major parties are blasting with their social media ads to see where (at least at this moment) they’re putting resources – thanks as always, to the Meta ad library for Facebook and Instagram spending.
Shortly before budget week, Labor’s national Facebook page launched a series of short video ads for their seats of Holt, Bruce, McEwen, Corangamite, Chisholm, Dunkley and Hawke – all in Victoria, and all in the firing line if the Liberal vote swings back up in the state, as many are predicting. The ads, all exactly 15 seconds long, run through local commitments and achievements for those Labor MPs, such as getting a Medicare urgent care clinic set up in their electorate, and broader cost-of-living relief.
On the other side of the ledger, the Liberal party’s national page is running negative ads featuring some of those same MPs. In black and white graphics with unflattering photos of Anthony Albanese and the local Labor MP, the ads note stats such as “a typical family in Dunkley has $19,208 less disposable income per year”.
Those ads are targeting not just Victoria but Boothby in South Australia, Pearce and Tangney in Western Australia, and Paterson in New South Wales. Each ad has been boosted with about $800 of paid advertising so far, reaching between 80,000 and 100,000 people.
The solulu to the delulu
When Anthony Albanese in budget week claimed the Coalition were “delulu with no solulu”, we thought he was just going for very obvious TikTok cringe-bait (hello fellow kids), or that a zoomer on his office staff had sneaked a joke into the written speech.
Turns out the answer is a bit weirder. Last Wednesday, a public relations agent sent around an email saying Albanese had joined the podcast Happy Hour with Lucy & Nikki where he was dared to use the expression ‘delulu with no solulu’ in Parliament, and he instantly delivered!”
The podcast, hosted by two young women with about 40,000 followers on Instagram, welcomed Albanese last week, with one section of the chat including them teaching the PM about some modern slang. When they told him about “delulu” (or delusional), Albanese off his own bat offered “like Peter Dutton on nuclear”.
“I dare you to drop that in a speech,” one of the hosts said. Clearly he delivered.
Posting a clip of Albanese fulfilling his promise later, the hosts posted on Instagram: “When the chicks say jump Albo says how high?”
“Lucky we didn’t teach him ‘hot in the jocks’,” went another post. We’ll let you figure that one out on your own.
How to make friends and influence voters
Which brings us neatly to another curio from last week: the stable of content creators (don’t call them influencers) Labor accredited to cover the federal budget. While the press gallery slaved away in their normal offices, a number of young creators focused on news and finance topics were squirrelled away in a conference room, making videos and online posts about the budget for their audiences of mostly younger people and women.
Labor sources said it wasn’t new, that they’d done a similar program last year, but that few had noticed. Some of the content creators accepted offers from the Labor party campaign (not public funds) to have some hotel and travel costs covered, but all the creators we spoke to maintained strongly there was no obligation for them to post any positive content, that they weren’t paid for their work, and that they could have posted nothing from the trip if they wanted to because there was no agreement guaranteeing coverage. We covered this story last week, so you know all this. But the broader issue here is interesting.
Labor sources said there had been a long-running outreach effort with some content creators to bring them into the fold to an extent, including providing some policy briefings, in an initiative we hear is being led in part by Katy Gallagher’s office. In budget week, this extended to granting access to some creators for interviews with Albanese, Gallagher, Jim Chalmers, Tanya Plibersek and more. It’s unlikely these creators will spend any time on the campaign trail – as some reporting speculated last week – but we understand some independent “new media” outlets, with a more online focus and younger readership, may pop up on Albanese’s campaign bus. One to watch.
AI election trail
The parties do anything they can to gain traction online, and in their more youth-friendly social media feeds, that often means politicians and campaigns jumping on trending memes and topics. This week you’ve probably seen a thousand “Ghibli-fied” images, photos filtered through OpenAI’s ChatGPT image generator and given a makeover in the style of beloved Japanese animators Studio Ghibli – and a few Auspol versions.
We saw a few examples of this on the trail, with Nationals senator Matt Canavan producing one with two young children jumping for joy behind their dad, who is reading a copy of the Australian bearing the headline “Dutton delivers cheap power for all”.
Canavan went on to make an AI-generated profile pic for himself, wearing a hard hat with a “COAL” sticker, holding a lump of the stuff.
The Liberal party machine got in on the act too, running an image of Albanese on Insiders (confronted with a graph showing budget deficits) through the generator. At least they put an “AI generated” watermark on the bottom.
Nothing wrong with this – all a bit of fun (as long as we don’t have to see any more AI-generated feet from the Liberals).
Lime teal mixer
We’ve seen Adam Bandt turn his hand to DJing, now the teal independent Sophie Scamps is getting in on the musical act. The first-term MP, looking to defend her seat of Mackellar from a Liberal challenge, is advertising on YouTube for an “election beats” event in early April which will be headlined by northern beaches royalty – the popular Australian indie band Lime Cordiale.
For the uninitiated, that’s somewhat akin to getting Silverchair to play your Newcastle election party, or Powderfinger to headline a get-out-the-vote event in Brisbane.
The free outdoor gig in Mona Vale will feature other musicians and DJs, and is hosted by TV personality Danny Clayton. The ads for the concert, boosted with a few thousand in Google ad spending, look like a General Pants advert, full of young people with sun-bleached blonde hair, and Scamps herself at the front of a previous gig, dancing with volunteers.