News update for Tue 4 Feb 2025

Your trusted guide to the top independent news and views of the day...

Feb 04, 2025

Welcome to your TrueNorth news update where every weekday afternoon we share curated articles from Australia’s independent news media sector.

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TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS UPDATES: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here | Also follow The Australia Institute's new Live Blog with Amy Remeikis

Political donations data show who’s funding whom in Australia – but they are coming out far too late - The Conversation

As federal parliament reconvenes this week, the pre-election buzz is palpable. When will the election be called? Which policies are on the table? And who’s backing whom in this election campaign?

While the first two questions are yet to be answered, we ought to have a better sense of the third with the release of the annual political donations data.

There’s plenty to unpick in the new data but there’s one glaring problem: we are only just now learning about donations made in 2023–24. Australians are left in the dark about who is donating right now.

Dark Money. Hard-right Advance targets Greens, Teals with $14m war chest - Michael West Media

Hard-right lobby group Advance Australia has amassed a $14m warchest to target Greens and Teals at the Federal Election.

The latest political donations data released by the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) reveal that right-wing lobby group Advance Australia has tripled its receipts since 22/23, now holding over $15 million for the 23/24 period.

Advance Australia lobbies against renewable energy and for Israel. It has been outed for ‘astroturfing’, running fake grassroots campaigns.

Only $1.1 million of this amount has disclosed donor details, leaving a substantial $14 million in “dark money” — that is, funds from anonymous sources.

Who’s looking to sway policy and votes this election? And who’s funding them? - Crikey

Crikey gives a rundown of some of the biggest groups looking to influence 2025 from behind the scenes.

Lobby groups

Advance

Right-wing campaigners Advance have had a mixed couple of years. Thanks to its stupendously rich financial backers and some impressively vile messaging, it had great success in opposing an Indigenous Voice to Parliament in the October 2023 referendum.

Since then, Advance went hard in the Dunkley by-election in early 2024, centring a campaign on a 2023 High Court decision that found indefinite immigration detention was unlawful, leading to the subsequent release of asylum seekers. Advance focused on the criminal records of some of the released individuals — people who had already served their jail sentences — calling them “rapists, paedophiles and murderers”.

PM in secretive push for mass “donations” censorship - The Klaxon

The Albanese Government is attempting to enshrine in law the biggest censorship of political “donations” information in the nation’s history, citing “privacy”.

The Australian Electoral Commission — with no public consultation — has pulled tens of thousands of “donor returns” from public access, despite being legally required to publish them under law that has been in place for over a century.

The Klaxon’s revelations of the mass censorship have drawn widespread community outrage.

It can now be revealed the Federal Government is seeking to enshrine the AEC’s historic censorship into law, by permanently banning the public from accessing the transparency documents.

Also read > Donations deal will deny teals and micro parties seed funding - Jenna Price for The SMH/Age

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Voting Is a Bargain—So What Are You Getting? Changing Your Vote Isn’t Betrayal—It’s Adapting to Reality - Sue Barrett

Australians are increasingly disillusioned with party politics. Many feel politicians serve their own interests, donors, and party agendas rather than the people they were elected to represent.

Voting has always been a bargain—you choose the party that best aligns with your values, even if you don’t agree with everything. But what if your party no longer represents you? What if it has changed beyond recognition? In the past, major parties were the only option. Now, community independents offer a practical, growing alternative.

Jack Waterford: Who’s tough enough not to pull the AUKUS trigger? - Pearls and Irritations

A time may come when someone must write the history of Labor’s 2025 historic electoral triumph over the Coalition, and the “rope a dope” strategies and tactics which took Opposition leader Peter Dutton in, then spat him out. If it all comes to pass, students of Labor history will note that it was two key figures of the left, Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese himself, who rode AUKUS to victory in the successive AUKUS Cups.

When the word was first heard, in 2021, Albanese was not supposed to be the jockey.

Today’s cartoon by First Dog on the Moon for The Guardian

TODAY’S BREAKING NEWS: See all the breaking news of the day through The Guardian here - and through 6 News here | Also follow The Australia Institute's new Live Blog with Amy Remeikis

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Adam Morton: Australian nature: if our laws don’t radically change, environmental degradation will continue - The Guardian

There is something significant missing from most of the political and media discussion about the Australian government’s promised, and now abandoned, nature protection laws: the environment. Logically, it should be a focus of the debate. In practice, it barely gets a look in.

This would be an extraordinary state of affairs were it not so familiar. Australia has a long history of taking its unique wildlife and landscapes for granted, stretching back to European colonisation. But what has happened in this term of parliament is a pretty remarkable extension of that.

Marginal seats are causing concern for both major parties but it's the 'insurgents' they need to watch out for - The ABC

While Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is struggling to hold Labor's traditional base in the outer suburbs, Dutton is fighting to retain seats once considered unlosable.

In these electorates, the Liberals are facing community independents who are better funded and better organised than ever before.

Climate 200 is backing candidates in 30 electorates across the country and is expected to hand out $15 million. That's still far less than the major parties throw at elections, but it has forced the Coalition to fight on two fronts.

Michael Bradley: Lattouf trial exposes ABC to even more ridicule than it’s already self-inflicted - Crikey

Day one of the trial of Antoinette Lattouf’s case against the ABC immediately laid bare the organisation's conundrum: win or lose, it’s going to lose.

Prescience is a writer’s best friend, but when I wrote last June that “the ABC stumbles around, punching itself in the head”, I didn’t know the half of it.

The trial for Antoinette Lattouf’s case against the ABC, for sacking her mid-contract in December 2023, has begun in the Federal Court. The big question — why the ABC is choosing to die on this particular hill — looms ever larger.

It was already known that the ABC has changed its position on why it sacked Lattouf more times than she had days on air.

Also read > According to the ABC, I’m raceless. Or white. Thank goodness! - Jan Fran for Crikey (paywall)

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Lies, damned lies and Coalition energy economics: Dutton's latest nuclear claim slammed - Renew Economy

Blink and you might have missed it, but Peter Dutton delivered another toe-curling example of energy policy hokum on Sunday morning, as the first guest of the first episode of the ABC’s Insiders program for 2025.

In amongst other well-spun lies – such as the claim Labor’s energy policy requires 28,000km of new transmission to be built – the leader of the federal opposition appeared to say that electricity bills would be 44 per cent cheaper under a Coalition government than under Labor.

How so?

The fight Peter Dutton and others like him want to have about diversity is a distraction - The Guardian

Peter Dutton announced on Friday that if elected, the Coalition will shutter government-funded diversity, equity and inclusion programs and fire the people who work in those roles, arguing that DEI does “nothing to improve the lives of everyday Australians”.

There’s good reason to ignore this latest salvo. Dutton is a master divider when it comes to First Nations peoples and migrants, and his remarks at the Menzies Foundation did not depart from his typical fare. In addition to his comments about DEI, Dutton took aim at new migrants, suggesting that Labor has created a housing crisis since it “opened the migration floodgates”, and said the voice referendum was “a standout example of Labor’s indulgent spending”.

As we head into an election season we are likely to hear more of these sorts of attacks from the opposition leader and his colleagues.