During the federal campaign,Wentworth teal MP Allegra Spenderspent $2.1 million on her winning campaign,plastering Sydney’s eastern suburbs in advertisements,while Tink’s similarly signage-heavy campaign cost almost $1.4 million and Scamps’ $1.2 million.
There are also some more fiddly differences. In a state election,candidates must count “services in kind” – volunteer labour from professionals – towards their expenditure.
“The electorate knows they have an option beyond the two major parties.”
Alex Greenwich,independent member for Sydney
“If someone is a photographer,and they are in the area and they are interested in the campaign,they can’t volunteer their time to do that,we do have to pay them,” said Victoria Davidson,the teal candidate for Lane Cove.
While Tink’s campaign saw billboards and corflutes placed all over the electorate,Davidson said her team “just don’t have the money to do that”.
“I do think the rules are a good thing;it helps level the playing field. But,like everything,the incumbent is always advantaged,” she said.
Davidson said her campaign’s greatest asset was its community support,with volunteers and voters already mobilised from Tink’s victory. Its biggest hurdle,she said,would be the state’s optional stance on preferential voting.
In a federal election voters must number every box,but ballots in the state election are valid if they only contain a preference for a single candidate.
“It’s a challenge. I’m not going to tell anybody how to vote – I have never voted according to a ‘how to vote’,” Davidson said,adding she expected major parties would just tell their supporters to vote 1 and leave the rest of their ballot blank,as occurred during the Willoughby by-election.
Independent candidate for Manly Joeline Hackman,who is alsobacked by Climate 200,agreed “the system could be fairer” when it comes to campaign spending rules,adding the rules were “in many cases inexplicably different for the big parties”.
She was similarly concerned by optional preferential voting,but believed her community would not “underestimate the power in their number 2,3 and 4”.
“It would be most helpful for democracy for there to be more voter education around optional preferential voting,” she said.
Following regulation changes championed by independent member for Sydney Alex Greenwich,who wasfirst elected to state parliament 10 years ago,independents now have access to an additional $20,000 outside their spending cap to establish a campaign office.
While he agreed it was easier for a major party candidate to run a campaign,Greenwich said the impact of the spending cap for Climate 200-backed independents was likely being overstated.
“What we’ve really seen in those[teal] federal campaigns,and what we see in state campaigns like mine,is the impact of the thousands of volunteers that you have,” he said.
“You don’t have to spend money on mail-outs because you have people letter-boxing,and you can use social media to get your message across.”
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Greenwich was similarly dismissive of the impact of optional preferential voting may have on independents’ success,noting the electorates with teal candidates at a state level had elected independents at a federal level.
He predicted there would be “twice as many independents in the next parliament”.
“The electorate knows they have an option beyond the two major parties,” he said. “What I expect we will see in the seats where independents are running is what we see in the seat of Sydney:where you’ve got an independent running with a high primary vote,the main challenger is a Liberal,and then Labor and Green voters preferencing through at about a 50 per cent rate – that gets you across the line.”