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Despite claiming successes against the Greens, right-wing lobby group Advance shifted very few votes and contributed to the Liberal Party’s massive loss. By Jason Koutsoukis.

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Inside story: Advance ‘siphoned’ Liberal resources

An electronic billboard authorised by Advance.

Credit: AAP Image / Jono Searle

In the 28 days since the election, Liberal Party operatives have begun to cast doubt on the effectiveness of Advance – despite the right-wing lobby having a war chest of more than $15.6 million and being the country’s richest non-party group.

“Not only did they siphon precious resources from our campaign, donors who might otherwise have given their money to us, but their messaging reinforced the perception that we were joined at the hip to Donald Trump,” says one Liberal strategist, who was based at the Coalition’s Parramatta campaign headquarters.

“We could not point to a single message put out by Advance that worked with undecided voters. And voters on the right who liked their ads probably ended up bypassing us to vote One Nation or Trumpet of Patriots – but with the catch that many of them ended up preferencing Labor and not us. So, not great.”

Another member of the Coalition’s campaign team puts it like this: “Overall, I don’t think they helped our campaign. Yes, they might have energised parts of the Liberal base or those further to the right, but they ended up muddying our own messages and probably alienated the undecideds.”

A third Liberal adviser, who is Canberra-based, says Advance’s efforts may have backfired in key contests: “Their messaging left voters so confused that I would not be surprised if they actually cost us seats in some areas, particularly in Victoria and Queensland.”

Advance, of course, does not accept any of this.

In an email sent on May 13, executive director Matthew Sheahan boasted that while the Greens had “set their sights on nine seats”, “in every electorate we targeted their vote collapsed, and their leadership was wiped out”.

He neglects to mention that in many of those contests – including the seat of Melbourne, which former Greens leader Adam Bandt lost to Labor – Advance ran no advertising at all.

In another email, Sheahan blamed the Coalition’s poor campaign performance for dragging down Advance’s efforts.

“When we started this campaign a few months ago, we could see there wasn’t an effective campaign against Albo,” said Sheahan. “And we received thousands of emails and messages from ADVANCE supporters frustrated that he was getting away with running one of the weakest, wokest governments in Australian history.”

He added: “But the truth is, this campaign was dragged down by the poor campaign performance of the Coalition. That’s not a criticism, it’s just a brutal campaign reality. I just don’t know why they kept their best performers hidden. The feedback on the ground was that ADVANCE’s ‘Weak, Woke, Broke’ campaign was the only one that did any damage to the Labor vote.”

In an interview with Guardian Australia last week, Sheahan accused anonymous Liberals of looking to blame everyone but themselves.

“No one should be surprised that bedwetting anonymous Liberals are backgrounding against Advance and don’t have the guts to stand by their comments publicly; I wouldn’t put my name to their campaign either,” he said. “The truth is that Advance does not exist to get hopeless Liberals elected; it instead campaigns to promote and defend Australia’s freedom, security and prosperity.”

According to ad transparency data, Advance poured more than $1.7 million into Google and Meta platforms during the general election campaign. This was alongside a national television and billboard campaign built around the slogan “Weak. Woke. Sending us broke”.

Their stated aim was to take seats off Labor and the Greens. Labor gained a likely 94 seats, up from 78, and the Greens vote dipped by a minuscule 0.05 per cent.

Speaking at the National Press Club on May 21, Labor national secretary Paul Erickson was careful not to feed the machine. “If I’m too critical of them, they’ll just use that as fundraising bait,” he said – before making it clear that Advance wasn’t just ineffectual in the campaign but was part of the problem for the Coalition.

“I do think they are part of the echo chamber that amplified the Coalition’s focus on culture wars,” Erickson said, “which I don’t think was productive for the Coalition in the campaign.”

While Advance has attempted to claim credit for Labor’s wins over the Greens in three lower house seats – Brisbane, Griffith and Melbourne – Erickson dismissed the idea.

“The feedback we were getting,” he said, “was that voters were concerned about the Greens’ blocking tactics and their relentless attacks on Labor.”

Advance’s contribution, he said, had more to do with stirring its base than persuading anyone in the middle.

“If you look at the content that Advance were putting out, it was making a much harsher and more right-wing argument about the Greens. That, I think, had more to do with appealing to the views and concerns of their donors than with actually having an impact among progressive voters deciding between Labor and the Greens.”

Advance, in other words, was speaking past the electorate it claimed to influence – and straight into its own funding base. It was promising to save Australia from itself.

Situating Advance within a broader critique of the Coalition’s failed electoral strategy, Erickson said the Liberal Party remained trapped in a reactive posture, driven by culture war reflexes and divorced from economic reality.

“They operate in an echo chamber,” Erickson said. “They are more concerned with the prejudices of their hard-core supporters than the experiences of working people.”

Matthew Sheahan did not return calls or text messages from The Saturday Paper this week. In previous phone conversations he has come across as cagey – reluctant to engage in any meaningful conversation. The only salient fact he volunteered was that he lives in Queensland, where he grew up.

Bankrolled by some of Australia’s wealthiest conservative donors, including Queensland coal baron Trevor St Baker, tech investor and former Shark Tank judge Steve Baxter, Kennards Self Storage owner Sam Kennard, Bakers Delight founder Roger Gillespie, Pitcher Partners founder Ronald Pitcher, Melbourne Storm director and transport businessman Brett Ralph and former fund manager Simon Fenwick, Advance’s breakthrough came during the Voice referendum campaign in 2023.

According to a report produced by La Trobe University after the referendum, “Influencers and Messages”, Advance used the “No” campaign not just as a political moment but also as a structural launchpad that involved harvesting donor lists, building supporter databases, refining culture war narratives and developing a digital infrastructure.

Mainstream Australians – the rhetorical construct at the heart of Advance’s messaging – were cast as a besieged tribe who were mocked by elites, betrayed by the political leaders and left behind by a country they no longer recognised.

From this flowed the 2025 playbook: a torrent of fear-based advertising, death tax scare campaigns and angry mailouts about wind farms, gender and Welcome to Country ceremonies.

Advance was no longer just a political participant – it had become a machine. Not a machine that seeks office, but one that stokes grievances, raises money and shifts the debate further right, one billboard at a time.

Its campaign against the Greens in Queensland and inner-city electorates reflected this strategic evolution. The seats may have changed – and the metrics driving it – but the message did not.

“They pushed the envelope a bit,” says Andrea Carson, professor of political communication at La Trobe University and a lead author on the “Influencers and Messages” report. “But I don’t think it’s outside the boundaries of what other parties and interest groups do – fear campaigns, negativity. That worked for them during the Voice. So why wouldn’t they deploy that again in an election?”

Carson argues that Advance used the referendum to build infrastructure and test messaging that would carry into the federal campaign – especially the construction of an embattled “mainstream Australia” at odds with progressive elites. “They deliberately equated ‘No’ voters with ‘real Australians’, casting support for the Voice, climate action and housing reform as elite fixations,” she said. “That framework – the war on ‘woke’ – carried straight through.”

Carson is sceptical of Advance’s claims of electoral impact, especially on the Greens. “If you look at their vote share nationally, it held steady. Yes, they lost three seats – but that was more about local conditions than any dent Advance made. I live in Melbourne and I didn’t see the Greens campaign much. I didn’t get doorknocked once.”

While Advance flooded digital channels with anti-Greens ads, Carson says those messages were largely absorbed by people who “weren’t going to vote Greens anyway”.

This, she suggests, is Advance’s dilemma: “They were very good at speaking to their base, but did they move swing voters? I doubt it.”

Where Advance was undeniably successful, Carson says, is in building a long-term political machine. “They used the referendum to build digital infrastructure – data, followers, a message-tested playbook. That’s what they’re deploying now. They’re not a party, they’re a permanent campaign.”

According to Sydney University’s Professor Simon Jackson – who worked with Carson on the “Influencers and Messages” report – Advance’s noisy presence needs to be understood relative to the deeper network of its opponents.

“Labor has deep capability across the spectrum of campaign tools,” Jackson says. “And any accounting of Advance’s effectiveness has to be set against what Labor was up to on socials – not just in the formal campaign period but going back into 2024.”

Jackson also noted that Advance’s high-engagement messages – sharp-edged culture war attacks and anti-elite rage – were far more potent during the Voice referendum than in the context of a general election.

“The messages that Advance is known for work better in the context of a Voice-type question,” he said, “but maybe not a general election post Trump’s Liberation Day intervention.”

It was that intervention – Trump’s declaration of a “Liberation Day” and the global shudder it sent through centre-right parties – that Jackson argues “snapped” the election’s trajectory.

“Around the time of the RBA rate cut, the campaign was already beginning to pivot from a retrospective on Labor’s economic performance to a prospection about who will look after Australia better,” he says. “That shift hit like a wind change. The Coalition were completely unprepared for the new framing. Labor, by contrast, was already homing in on Dutton and just surfed home after that.”

In such a political environment, Jackson argues, Advance struggled for relevance. “Suffice to say, it wasn’t a great operating environment for them. They may have been more effective going after the Greens than Labor – but maybe not even that.”

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 31, 2025 as "Inside story: Advance ‘siphoned’ Liberal resources".

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