Billionaires tried to buy this election. At least they’ve provided some much-needed comic relief

Bring on the 2028 election! (Too soon?) Although I expect some of Australia’s wealthiest citizens won’t share this sentiment. That sound you hear emanating from luxury mansions and compounds around the country is the gnashing of teeth and the smashing of crystal champagne glasses as Australia’s politically engaged billionaires and millionaires realise that for them, the party is over. Or at least downsizing from a catered black-tie affair to a backyard barbecue.

Australia has an estimated 170 home-grown billionaires and around 15,000 ultra high-net worth individuals (worth more than $US30 million) and their power over Australian elections is real. A recent report in The Australian Financial Review found “the majority of elections since 1999 have been won by the party that spent the most”. The exception that proves the rule seems to be any party linked to Clive Palmer, who spent approximately $123 million in the 2022 federal election, which netted him one senator and the world’s most expensive democracy sausage. This still might be better value than the doughnut he got – zero MPs – for splurging $60 million at the 2019 election. The Queensland billionaire defended that as money well spent for helping Scott Morrison to “ensure those little grubs [Labor] stayed out of office”.

Clive is my favourite billionaire political activist.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

With the 2025 election set to go down in history as the most expensive ever, the campaign finance reforms putting caps on donations and expenditure that are due in 2028 can’t come soon enough, despite the fact they will impact Clive, who is my favourite billionaire political activist. (And I’m not just saying that because he’s spent so much on political advertising with this masthead that I think he might now technically be paying for this column.) Thanks to his bottomless pockets we all enjoyed some much-needed comic relief this election, via his Trumpet of Patriots party logo. Its portrayal of a lion with luxuriant Fabio-style tresses tooting a trumpet encapsulates the incoherent messaging we can expect when a billionaire gets involved in politics. For starters, lions aren’t Australian, making it an odd choice of patriotism. Secondly, lions are native to Africa and India, which I’m guessing aren’t the places the Trumpettes had in mind when they said they wanted to “prioritise migration from nations with compatible values”​.

The Trumpettes also state that “Globalism is the scourge of the free world”, which is a bit rich for a party that lifts its policies and ideology wholesale from the MAGA movement in the United States. Then again, confused messaging is probably to be expected ​from any organisation that believes an apex predator ​would be amenable to joining a jazz ensemble.

Another unhelpful billionaire intervention during the election campaign came from Australia’s wealthiest person, Gina Rinehart. Having missed the “Peasants and their Irritating Cost-of-Living Whinge” memo, Rinehart made her major non-financial contribution to the election campaign by calling for the doubling of Australia’s current defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP. This had everyone banging their heads against their calculators in frustration, given that Peter Dutton’s promise to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP had been estimated to cost Australian taxpayers around $100 billion up to the mid-2030s.

Gina didn’t address the pesky detail of where the extra hundreds of billions for her pet project might come from but hey, that’s the fun part of being a billionaire during an election campaign. Major party donors can throw out uncosted wild thought bubbles which everyone then has to waste time responding to and treating like a serious contribution to the policy debate.

Palmer and Rinehart were arguably the most visible wealthy people working to influence the 2025 election, but you can be sure there are plenty more who stayed under radar. One likely contender is Duncan Turpie, the reclusive Gold Coast mathematician and professional poker player. Turpie’s donations to the Greens over the years have resulted in uncomfortable moments for MPs forced to justify accepting his money while simultaneously promoting an anti-poker machines platform.

There’s also Climate 200, the funding vehicle behind the teals, which is backed by Simon Holmes à Court, gazillionaire Atlassian founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, and the lesser-known Rob Keldoulis and Marcus Catsaras. Taking an optimistic perspective, it’s not implausible that Turpie and Climate 200 might be motivated by a genuine commitment to a political cause and principles. And then there’s packaging billionaire Anthony Pratt. Having supported the Coalition to the tune of $1.3 million in 2021-2022, his company made a panic donation of $1.5 million to Labor the day after the 2022 election.

But these are just the major individual donors that we know of. Tied to recognisable faces and personalities, we can at least surmise a superficial understanding of their interests and motivations, which is entirely absent for other major donors. Faceless funding entities with boring names like Sugolena Holdings and Jefferson Investments were among the major donors to the 2022 election, but if the names Isaac Wakil or Judith Parker are unfamiliar, you’re not alone in having no idea who might be using their money to influence our elections.

In our current age of hyper-visible influencing it’s remarkable to think that we won’t know who was busy billionaire-ing behind the scenes of the 2025 election, until many months, possibly years, after the results have been tallied. But you can be sure they were there, attempting to pull the strings of our democracy and calling the tune for lions to play on their trumpets.

Melanie La’Brooy is an award-winning novelist who has lived in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and writes on politics and social justice issues.

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