Anyone who wants to represent their community in the Parliament ought to be able to run for election on a level playing field. But last year, the major parties joined forces in a dirty deal to amend our electoral laws to tilt the playing field in their favour, making it harder for ordinary people to run for Parliament to represent their communities and ultimately eroding our choice at elections.
Summary
In 2025, the major parties joined forces in the Parliament to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 - the law that regulates federal elections.
The Albanese Government did a deal with the Coalition to pass the laws without proper or genuine consultation, nor any meaningful public discussion with our communities about how the changes will impact a key feature of democratic government - elections.
The new law places annual caps on the amount of money that candidates are able to raise, but also creates loopholes that allow large political parties to collect more money than independent candidates through different party structures across the states and territories. The law means that regular people running as independent candidates or smaller locally focused parties face significant challenges to running an effective campaign against party candidates who rely on a party’s brand and can exploit the loopholes.
Practically, the new laws mean that donations are capped at $50,000 annually per person for a locally focused party or independent candidate, but major parties can receive up to $450,000 annually per person, because donors can give $50,000 to each of their state, territory and federal branches – money which can then be transferred between the branches so it ends up in target seats. And certain wealthy “nominated” entities can contribute unlimited amounts to their party.
On top of the donation laws, there are new annual spending caps of $800,000 for each candidate to spend on campaign materials and staffing in their electorate. But the major parties have $800,000 per seat on candidate-specific advertising and can tilt the playing field again by drawing from a massive $90m national budget and their well- resourced party infrastructure for general Labor/Liberal material, branding and advertising, as well as having paid party staffers running their campaign. All those big plastic wraps we have to wade through to get to polling stations that say “Vote Labor” or “Vote Liberal” or corflute signs that list policies and have pictures of the leaders of their parties would not be counted in their $800,000 cap.
A person from the community running as an independent without complex spiderweb-like party structures behind them would only be able to spend $800,000 in their electorate across all of these materials, plus staffing, advertising and other big-ticket campaign expenses.
The law embeds major parties in our Parliament by preventing a single donor, such as Climate 200, from giving to more than five candidates in a state or territory, but it allows major parties to tap into massive national budgets capped at $90m to provide funding in as many electorates as they would like. Increases in public funding that favour incumbents mean that around half of the $90 million cap will be funded by us.
Former Independent MP Zoe Daniel and former Senator Rex Patrick have filed a case in the High Court of Australia where their highly respected legal team will argue these laws are unconstitutional because they create an unequal playing field for our community and breach all Australians’ “implied right to freedom of political communication". Zoe and Rex are asking the court to declare these laws invalid.
Money in politics is a serious issue, and must be looked at in a way that means people running as independent candidates and for locally-focused parties will have a fair opportunity to run for office to represent their communities. It should not be a deal that rigs the rules for the major parties and forcibly seeks to undermine the ability for people in our communities to choose candidates that they believe will best represent them.
The Case
The case is a constitutional challenge in the High Court to parts of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 as amended by the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Act 2025 (Cth), which passed in February 2025.
Ms Daniel and Mr Patrick's expert legal team will argue that these amended laws impermissibly burden the ‘implied right to freedom of political communication’.
They will ask the High Court to declare the following parts of the Act invalid:
(i) Div 3AB of Part XX of the Electoral Act, being the caps on electoral expenditure;and
(ii) The amendments made to Div 3A of Part XX of the Electoral Act by the amending act, being the caps on donations.
If the case is successful, the Court will strike down these parts of the law. If the case is successful, the government must undertake a proper process of formal consultation to design a campaign financing system that achieves both a level playing field and protects the integrity of our elections.
The long overdue and important donation transparency measures of real time disclosure and lower disclosure thresholds are not being challenged. They will come into effect on 1 July 2026.