The Greens will finally begin campaigning for the 2025 federal election. That’s right, what you’ve seen so far — giant toothbrushes, oversized cheques, DJing with Abbie Chatfield — has been nothing. Tonight is the night the party formally launches its campaign at a brewery in the Melbourne seat of Wills.
Thirty-three days after the prime minister called the election, and just three sleeps before election day, the Greens have decided it’s finally time to “officially launch the Greens’ election campaign”, as it put it in an email to reporters this morning.
Crikey reckons the Greens must mean the lower house campaign, given it already announced the launch of its Victorian Senate campaign two weeks ago. Actually, it’s also launched its national campaign already… or maybe leader Adam Bandt’s office meant something different when it emailed reporters on March 28 to say: “The Greens will today kick off their biggest ever national campaign with a record number of Greens representatives around the country ready to hit the campaign trail.”
As it turns out, the Greens are not alone in waiting until the last minute to make claims about officially launching a federal campaign.
“The major parties typically wait until the weekend before the election, once pre-polling is already underway,” LaTrobe University PhD candidate Phoebe Hayman told Crikey. “Campaign launches are big, flashy events that typically garner a bit of press attention.”
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That appears to be the reasoning behind the lateness of tonight’s Greens launch.
“We wanted to time our campaign launch to be something voters hear going into the final few days, with our key policies and priorities,” a party spokesperson said. “We had our policies out early, before Labor and the Liberals, but have been outlining our priorities throughout the campaign.”
The Coalition and Labor both launched their respective campaigns on April 13, which was earlier than usual and likely timed so that public holidays wouldn’t get in the way.
Other than some extra media attention, waiting until shortly before election day to formally launch a campaign may have a specific benefit for parties with incumbent MPs.
As is frequently cited in the media, there is a “convention that most expenses after the official campaign launches should be paid by the political party”, as The Sydney Morning Herald put it in 2019. This means that after a campaign is launched, campaigning activities should then be paid for by the party itself.
But that convention rarely stops parties from spending taxpayer cash on travel during the campaign, with trips by incumbent MPs put down as “official duties” and “parliamentary business”. In 2019, the total spend was in the millions of dollars. In 2016, the total cost of flights and other travel costs during the eight-week campaign was more than $2 million.
The money spent on this year’s campaign won’t be revealed for several months.
Does it matter when parties “officially” launch their campaigns?
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