Revealed: Labor’s missing million in election campaign finances

Labor leader Bill Shorten, flanked by his wife Chloe Shorten, concedes defeat following the results of the 2019 federal election. Picture: Getty

The Labor Party discovered an accounting discrepancy of close to $1m in its federal election campaign finances just days before Scott Morrison’s miracle in May last year. Late on Thursday, May 16 (the day former prime minister Bob Hawke died), Labor found its budget bottom line wasn’t adding up.

Essentially, money coming in was being counted differently on the revenue and expenditure side, and in some cases ended up being counted twice. No one would tell us the exact figure, only that it was in the hundreds of thousands and forced the campaign to make huge cuts to its digital spend in the crucial last 24 hours during advertising blackout period. The rest of the overspend was absorbed into the big contingency at the bottom of the overall campaign budget.

One senior Labor figure insisted to Strewth that it wasn’t likely the last-minute adjustments had an impact on the outcome of the election because the “tighter targeting” (also known as cuts to digital ads) wasn’t made in any of the seats that changed hands. “It doesn’t surprise me that it could have happened,” said one of our spies, who was in the thick of the party’s Parramatta campaign headquarters. “It was a complete mess.”

So why did this discrepancy not appear in the official 2019 Labor election review by former South Australian premier Jay Weatherill and former Gillard minister Craig Emerson? That’s a question for the Labor’s national executive, which meets in Canberra on Friday to discuss the next steps.

China plays it straight

China wanted Bill Shorten to become prime minister last year but the red state didn’t put its Twitter influence campaign to work on his behalf. That’s according to analysis of more than 10,000 propaganda tweets by the University of Canberra.

Russia also didn’t make any clear attempt to influence our election result. Instead Moscow got its Twitter army to pressure the government to free WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange — whom Russian intelligence supplied with documents undermining Hillary Clinton’s 2016 US presidential bid.

Pick and stick footy

“I’m a lifetime South Sydney supporter because, you know, you can’t change teams,” Anthony Albanese told the crowd at Wednesday night’s gathering of Parliamentary Friends of Rugby League. No one in the room laughed, but we got the Labor leader’s joke.

It was reference to this paper’s own Greg Brown and his dogged pursuit of the Prime Minister’s league loyalty. Morrison portrays himself as a rusted-on Cronulla fan — at least since he was elected to the Sutherland Shire seat of Cook, where the Sharks are based — but not long ago he preferred the private-school game of rugby union to the more working-class rugby league. He declared in 2012 that union “will always be my game”. He also has called the AFL grand final the “greatest show in Oz” and tweeted about loving the Western Bulldogs, despite in the past two years claiming to have no AFL allegiances.

But back to the NRL event, which was hosted by Nine’s Erin Molan — or as she’s known in the Canberra bubble, NSW Liberal senator Jim Molan’s daughter. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg loudly told anyone who would listen that he was the Melbourne Storm’s No 1 ticket holder. The crowd included former NRL greats Cooper Cronk, Sam Burgess, Paul Gallen, Petero Civoniceva and Brett Kimmorley. Sports Minister and Tasmanian senator Richard Colbeck was spotted wearing a Gold Coast Titans scarf. And Manly Sea Eagles board member Julie Sibraa — who also happens to be the chief of staff for Labor frontbencher Tony Burke — got a talking to from some very vocal North Sydney Bears supporters, still unhappy about their treatment after the 1999 merge.

Keeping company

Spotted! Sitting in 4A and 4B on the 9am Qantas flight from Sydney to Canberra on Thursday — Tony Abbott and Hamish Macdonald. Strewth’s mile-high spies say the ABC’s man of the moment and the former prime minister started chatting from the moment they sat down next to each other. The Q+A host (the show has swapped the ampersand for a plus) was overheard expressing gratitude to the NSW Rural Fire Service volunteer for fighting the fires this summer in the Snowy Mountains, where Macdonald’s father lives.

Please be seated

Also spotted, former NSW premier Mike Baird watching question time from the public gallery. Was the NAB exec picking out his future federal seat? We heard senior Liberals whispering this week that they want the Manly local to be their next candidate for Warringah.

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