January 21, 2025
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is urging Coalition MPs and candidates to ramp up their production of viral videos for sharing on TikTok in a bid to capture hard-to-reach voters, as the major parties prepare to spend heavily with Google and Meta in a high-stakes digital election campaign.
The Liberal leader will adopt the successful political playbooks of conservative New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and US President Donald Trump, who surfed to victory after targeting key demographics with slick content on popular social media platforms.
Both the Coalition and Labor are intensifying their social media activity amid an increasingly fragmented media landscape, according to party sources granted anonymity to speak candidly about campaign plans, even after they teamed up to implement a world-first ban on under-16s accessing online platforms and have both warned of social media’s ills.
“It will be the major battleground,” a senior Coalition source told The Australian Financial Review, stressing high-quality and original content was needed to engage younger Australians.
Chinese-owned TikTok was shut down for American users momentarily on the weekend after a ban enacted by President Joe Biden came into effect. The app returned on Monday after President Trump said he would give owner ByteDance 90 days to strike a deal to sell 50 per cent of the United States operations to American investors.
Labor will also heavily use TikTok, in addition to other social media platforms, to get its campaign message across, although a Labor source cast doubt on the effectiveness of the platform compared to Facebook.
“You just have to weigh up how much time and resources you’re putting into something where the people following you are probably voting for you anyway,” the source said.
Like LinkedIn, politicians cannot pay to ensure their videos are promoted on TikTok, so the content needs to organically reach a wide audience to be effective.
The Labor source said Facebook would remain the dominant avenue for major party spending on digital advertising given the platform allowed for the targeting of specific postcodes and demographics. This makes it easier to get content in front of swinging voters.
Both major parties said they would spend heavily with Alphabet to run ads that appear alongside Google search results and across YouTube.
As well as the bipartisan ban on children accessing social media, which is popular with Australian parents, the Albanese government has broader plans to regulate digital giants more heavily including forcing them to pay local media companies for their news content.
Despite the prospect that these plans could anger Mr Trump’s allies, such as X owner Elon Musk and Meta founder and chairman Mark Zuckerberg, Labor has stood by its effort to tighten the screws on the social media giants.
The latest The Australian Financial Review/Freshwater Strategy poll of just over 1000 respondents found just 28 per cent of Australians had a positive view of Facebook, less than major businesses such as Qantas, Coles and Woolworths, which have been under scrutiny amid a period of high inflation.
The Coalition’s embrace of TikTok represents a sharp about-face compared to just one year ago when Mr Dutton in March 2024 called on the prime minister to emulate the Biden administration’s TikTok ban.
The opposition leader cited the “exploitative nature” of the platform and his home affairs spokesman James Paterson warned the app posed a “serious threat” to Australia’s national security. Mr Paterson called for it to be removed from government devices and the phones of public servants. “If it’s not safe to be on the phone of a bureaucrat, why should 8 million Australians have it on their devices without any protection at all,” he said at the time.
TikTok was also accused of harbouring anti-Israel content after the October 7 attack, an accusation the platform rejected.
But with polls showing the Coalition is an outside chance of forming minority government, and more than 8.5 million Australians using TikTok the opposition’s objections have given way to pragmatism.
The Coalition led Labor 51 per cent to 49 per cent on a two-party preferred basis, and Mr Dutton drew level with Mr Albanese as preferred prime minister in January’s Freshwater poll, released on Monday.
Opposition staffers are already receiving training on how to make engaging and creative video content for platforms including TikTok and Instagram, and Mr Dutton has established a team to coordinate messaging and distribution.
The New Zealand National Party template, which focused on hard-to-reach voters, was designed by consulting firm Topham Guerin and prioritised tapping into online trends and making one-to-one connections with other social media users.
Coalition MPs and candidates are being encouraged to use informal, personal messages, in part to try and avoid inauthentic content that would turn off potential voters. High-quality production standards and strategies to maximise engagement and take advantage of algorithms are part of the plan.
A second Liberal source said the party would continue to put a lot of effort into TikTok in the upcoming campaign, particularly to reach younger voters.
Political posts that generated high levels of engagement on TikTok were often funny posts that engaged with a trend, rather than the negative messaging the major parties favoured on other platforms.
“The view is so long as it’s a platform that exists and that political participants are engaging on, then it would be a mistake to just vacate the field,” the source said.
Mr Luxon’s success engaging younger audiences on TikTok to defeat New Zealand Labour’s Chris Hipkins in the country’s 2023 election served as an example of the app’s potential, the source said.
In the past month, the federal government spent $113,382 on Facebook, which was largely ads promoting Labor’s Future Made in Australia industrial policy, according to the Meta ad library.
Simon Holmes à Court-backed Climate 200 spent $64,352 on Facebook ads across both its “Climate 200” and “Independent News” pages, while right-wing campaign group Australians for Prosperity spent $28,975. Australian Unions outlaid $79,861 on Facebook, largely on negative ads warning a Dutton-led Coalition government would cut their pay and conditions.
While Instagram used to have incredibly low engagement, it was becoming increasingly effective, a Labor source said. Twitter, however, remained an outlet favoured by partisans rather than swinging voters.
“Nowadays the only reason you would use Twitter was to shape a media story because all the journalists are on there,” they said.
Up to 2019, the major parties used to allocate about 70 to 80 per cent of their ad budgets to television and radio, a second Labor source said.
However, there was now no single dominant channel, and parties had to be present across Facebook, Instagram, Google search, YouTube, streaming services and traditional platforms like television and radio.
Podcasts have become an increasingly important outlet for parties to establish a presence, by building relationships with content creators and new media outlets with strong followings.
Mr Trump appeared on multiple podcasts during the recent election campaign to shore up his support with young male voters, who can be difficult to reach through traditional media. Trump appeared for three hours on The Joe Rogan Experience, the country’s top-rated podcast.
While there is no Joe Rogan equivalent in Australia, there is still a bevy of popular local podcasts with small but dedicated audiences.
Mr Dutton in December appeared on the Diving Deep podcast for an hour-long interview with Sam Fricker, an Olympic diver with 5.8 million YouTube subscribers and 2 million TikTok followers.
The content required in each platform was different. What worked on TikTok, for example, was not fit for purpose on LinkedIn. The landscape had shifted so quickly that a political party could not simply re-run their strategy from the previous election.
“In the 2013 and 2016 federal elections, both major parties had a digital strategy that was basically about taking their broadcast campaign and rolling it out on Facebook. You can’t do that any more,” the source said.
Climate 200 is expected to support independents in at least 22 seats, and possibly up to 30, in the upcoming election.
The group provides funding to independents, who pay for their own ads and also conduct separate fundraising. It also runs its own national advertising campaign across multiple social media platforms.
While the ads are largely aimed at a broad audience, occasionally the group delves into electorate-specific advertising. Climate 200 has recently run fundraising ads on Facebook, capitalising on attack ads on teal MPs Allegra Spender and Monique Ryan by right-wing campaign outfit Australians for Prosperity.
A spokesman for the Greens said the party would make sure to connect with voters online.
“As we stare down the barrel of a Trump-style campaign from Dutton, it’s more important than ever we use social media as a channel to cut through any misinformation and put our positive vision for the future forward,” they said.
