What civil society organisations (CSOs) do during election campaigns depends on a lot of different factors. CSOs are typically not-for-profit, for-purpose, non-government organisations – basically we’re talking about non-market and non-state organisations (though of course those lines can get blurry, as can any theoretical categorisation).
In this article, I’m going to explore some of the more prominent types of CSO (political parties, associated entities, interest groups and charities) that we might observe in action during an election campaign. And I’ll examine a few of the factors that might explain why they do what they do and why they might not things that we think they should do.
In the end, a lot of it comes down to money, where it comes from and what you do with it.
Political Parties
Political parties themselves are CSOs – they’re not instruments of the state, even though they are trying to influence it, or in some cases take control of it; and they’re not market institutions, even though their actions may benefit profit-seeking individuals organisations. They’re expressions of civil society – people coming together voluntarily around common goals.
Like charities, which we might think of more readily when we think of CSOs, political parties can vary in governance and structure. This ranges from professionalised and corporatised entities like Australia’s major parties, to more decentralised and volunteer oriented parties like the Australian Greens or the Animal Justice Party, to those that are completely centred around (and often struggling to grow beyond) an individual who has almost total control of the entity – like Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, Jacqui Lambie and whatever vehicle Clive Palmer is driving this time around.
Anyway, we know what political parties do in campaigns – they run candidates and try and influence the outcome of the election (though this isn’t necessarily through electing their candidate). Much of the public attention on election campaigns centres around what political parties and candidates do – even the teams around independent candidates are arguably nascent little CSOs themselves.
Political parties do plenty of stuff during election campaigns – like driving their advertising rent-a-vans into polling booths.
Associated Entities
According to the Australian Electoral Commission, an associated entity is an organisation which has different kinds of formal connection to a political entity (i.e. to a political party or an elected independent). These formal connections are largely governance related – if the organisation is controlled by, is a member of, has voting rights in, or exists entirely “wholly or to a significant extent for the benefit of one or more registered political parties,” then it’s an associated entity.
This includes trade unions that are officially affiliated with the Australian Labor Party (ALP) (i.e. not just ones that would prefer an Albanese government over a Dutton one). These trade unions and, in particular, their professionalised leadership, have voting rights over who the leader of the ALP is, they control preselections in certain electorates, and they control who get placed into winnable spots on an upper house ticket.
It also includes some think tanks. The Chifley Research Centre and McKell institute are officially Labor-party-aligned, just as the Menzies Research Centre is Liberal-party-aligned. This contrasts with the Institute of Public Affairs or the Australia Institute, which are both blatantly conservative or progressive, respectively, without being AEC-defined associated entities. Basically, we can think of these CSOs as formal extensions of political parties themselves – there is going to be little nuance in who they support in the election.
(The “latest” from the Chifley Research Centre seems to largely involve writing about deceased Labor Party politicians)
The lines can get a little blurry, of course. Four of the most senior people at the Australia Institute (Ben Oquist, Richard Denniss, Ebony Bennett and Anna Chang) have deep past connections to the Australian Greens, including having run Federal election campaigns (Bennett) or been Chief of Staff to a Greens parliamentary leader (Oquist – Bob Brown, Denniss – Christine Milne). Oquist is married to long-time Australian Greens Senator for South Australia Sarah Hanson-Young. None of these affiliations are mentioned on the Australia Institute’s website.
(To be fair, I have also worked for the Greens in the past – primarily for now-Senator for NSW David Shoebridge (2010-2013) when he was in the NSW Upper House. This is on my CV but only alluded to in my website bio as “progressive politics”. Having talked to other former Greens staffers, there can be a necessary “de-Greening” of your CV. But that’s a story for another time).
And then what exactly is Climate 200? Technically they aren’t an associated entity. The connections between them and the independent candidates they support are not as formal into terms of governance and direct affiliation. But they do provide “party-like” support to these candidates (as I have argued here with my colleagues Phoebe Hayman and Ben Spies-Butcher). And that’s pretty much all they do – try to get pro-climate independent candidates elected. I can envisage a future definition of associated entity that includes Climate 200-like behaviour.
So: Orientation ≠ Association
As I’ve been saying, political orientation doesn’t necessarily an associated entity make, and this can impact what organisations do. For example, trade unions that are formally affiliated to the ALP can be expected to basically focus on getting Labor candidates elected (regardless of whether another party or candidate has better policies for that union’s members).
Non-affiliated unions likely also prefer ALP to the Liberal National Party Coalition (LNP), but they’ll be less likely to explicitly say “vote Labor”. The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) is not an associated entity, and their primary election message is “Don’t Risk Dutton”, rather than “Aye, more Albo”. This message also creates space for non-ALP unionists (for example those active in the Greens or other left-wing parties) to engage with the ACTU’s campaign.
My union, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) is also using the “Don’t Risk Dutton” slogan, while simultaneously promoting issues like academic freedom and debt-relief for students. Given that the Albanese government’s tertiary education policy hasn’t been all that great (including blaming international students for the housing crisis and bullying Palestinian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah through exerting pressure on the Australian Research Council), the NTEU needs to be less blatantly pro-ALP, ostensibly to maintain legitimacy amongst their members. The organisation also has a history of supporting the Greens (whose higher education policy is a lot stronger than Labor’s).
(NTEU 2025 federal election campaign resources. Still kinda partisan, tbh. Could have said “say no to political interference”, e.g.)
We can make similar arguments here around digital campaigning groups Advance and GetUp! Both organisations have connections to political parties, including in key personnel, funding sources and who they’re campaigning against (GetUp! this election have been almost exclusively anti-Dutton while Advance are mixing it up with anti-Greens and anti-Albo messaging). Many colleagues of mine with a progressive political orientation think that Advance is just a front for the LNP – to do and say the things that they can’t say. I’m reasonably certain that many conservatives would have a similar opinion about GetUp!. Personally, I think this view oversimplifies politics into a binary contest between elites. I’m more in favour of a pluralist take on Australian politics, with multiple independent yet interconnected actors all vying for influence.
Significant Third Parties
The AEC also keeps track of organisations spending over $250,000 in a financial year on “electoral expenditure”, which boils down to activity that promotes or opposes political parties or candidates. This excludes news reporting, as well as predominantly satirical or artistic content, though when the activity is public, and the audience likely to be electors, the AEC guidelines observe that activities are “more likely to be electoral matter”. So there seems to be an onus towards regarding material as “electoral matter”.
In January of this year there were 43 registered Significant Third Parties (STPs). About a quarter of these were also associated entities – basically a handful of trade unions as well as the registered campaign entities for Climate-200-backed independent like Allegra Spender and Kylea Tink.
The remaining 32 included: non-ALP-affiliated unions like the ACTU, the Australian Education Union and the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation; large corporate interest groups, like the Minerals Council of Australia, Business Council of Australia and Master Builders Australia; explicitly political interest groups like Advance Australia, GetUp!, and Climate 200; and then some notable randoms like the Australian Christian Lobby, Animals Australia and Dick Smith.
(Dick Smith Energy – big funder of Nuclear for Australia, multi-millionaire, champion of the “fair go”, and someone I interviewed 20y ago for a piece for my MA in Creative Writing. He was a nice guy and very generous with his time).
The AEC requires STPs to declare their electoral spending in annual financial returns, so we won’t know the full extent of STP activity until well after the federal election. As I’ve been writing about recently, we can see what some STPs are doing by looking at their spending with new media entities like Meta (Facebook and Instagram) or Google (YouTube), by subscribing to their supporter elists or paying attention to media reports – but otherwise what a STP like the Minerals Council of Australia (who are reasonably inactive on social media) is spending election-related money on can appear a little opaque.
Interest Groups
As the name says on the tin, interest groups are CSOs that exist primarily to pursue some kind of ‘interest’. It’s a broad definition, and we’ve mentioned a bunch of them in the sections above, including trade unions, industry groups, and campaigning organisations like GetUp! and Advance.
There are also a variety of interest groups that are active in the election campaign that don’t show up on the STP register. In my analysis of Week 1 Meta spending in the campaign, the Climate Action Network Australia (CANA) spent over $11,000 a day on advertising within Meta’s “social issues, elections or politics categories”. CANA were the third highest CSO spender in that week after Advance (over $27,000) and Climate 200 (over $18,000 a day). We might see Climate 200 show up on the STP register post-election.
(CANA don’t have a flashy website or a sizzling social media presence, but there’s a LOT going on under the surface)
Various other climate-oriented interest groups have also been active, like the Climate Council, Greenpeace Asia Pacific and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF). Electoral campaigning for these organisations can be a little more difficult. Organisations like these, as well as CANA and the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), are also registered with the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission (ACNC), which affords them certain taxation benefits.
Organisations like the Climate Council, Greenpeace and ACF also rely on tax-deductible donation status, a status which restricts how specifically political organisations can be. Basically, CSOs like this can campaign on issues, but not in relation to candidates. This includes CSOs that receive funding from the Sunrise Project, an organisation that aims to “scale social movements to drive the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy”, which disperses around $17 million a year to climate-oriented interest groups.
Perhaps due to these kinds of restrictions, neither GetUp!, Climate 200 nor Advance are registered with the ACNC, and the ACL have elected to remain not tax-deductible when it comes to donations. This affords these organisations more latitude to be expressly political in their electoral activities. For those that can’t be, about as politically explicit as they get is producing election policy scorecards, which show how political parties (and sometimes independent candidates) stack up against an interest group’s preferred policy platform.
When I was working in CSOs, I was always sceptical about the value of election scorecards. But they tended to piss off political parties who didn’t get the score they wanted, and a friend who used to run a CSO that produced one every election said that they got good feedback from their members and supporters about the practice. So I guess I don’t know everything.
Service Delivery Charities
The final group of CSOs that we might expect to see being active during election campaigns are service delivery charities. These range from particularly large CSOs like Mission Australia or Uniting Care, to small community-owned and run service providers like local community legal centres or youth shelters. You won’t see these organisations pop up on the Associated Entity or Significant Third Party lists, but you might see them around during the election.
Many of these organisations are ACNC-registered and have Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR) status, basically what allows donations to them to be tax-deductible. This means that these CSOs also have the same kind of restrictions on their political activity that commensurate interest groups have – that is, they can engage in issues-based activity but not candidate-based activities. If electors connect those two things in their minds, that’s on them.
Many, if not most, charitable service providers in Australia also have an extra restriction on what they do, which comes from their funding relationship with governments. This is not necessarily an explicit restriction, although Coalition governments have for decades attempted to restrict the advocacy activities of CSOs through legislation that connects their advocacy activities to their organisational status. These ‘attacks’ on the rights of CSOs to advocate have led many CSOs to be less forthright with their advocacy – i.e. less likely to publicly criticise governments.
Even ALP governments have performed a restrictive function in this regard, through their introduction of laws restricting the rights of protesters. These have ostensibly been aimed at climate crisis and Palestinian rights protestors, but the laws apply across the board and send a clear signal to other civil society organisations that there are certain forms of democratic expression that our democratically elected governments have somewhat of a glass jaw in relation to.
And if you’ve ever caught yourself wondering whether direct action like protests is an effective form of advocacy, consider the lengths that both ALP and LNP governments go to shut down and delegitimise non-violent direct action by groups that they don’t like.
Of course, the relationships that service delivery charities have with governments, essentially being in partnership with them to deliver public services, should place them in a strong position to advocate for policy outcomes. They have the relationships with policymakers and also legitimacy through their direct service provision – they should know what they’re talking about.
Whether they do this (effectively) or not is a different matter entirely. There’s a school of thought that government-funded service delivery charities, large ones in particular, are more interested in maintaining and growing their organisations than they are in changing the systemic conditions which cause people to need their services in the first place. Whatever the case, we can expect to see policy-oriented advocacy from service delivery charities to feature more prominently after the election, when the new government is forming its policy agenda.
So, it’s all to do with money?
Kinda, yeah. Arguably, the more explicitly political an organisation can be comes down to where it gets its money from and what it does with that money. Of the organisations we’ve looked at in this article, we’ve broadly distinguished between political parties, associated entities, significant third parties, interest groups and charitable service providers – each of which has a different status in relation to an election campaign.
While associated entities are regarded as extensions of a political parties or candidates, the lines start to blur when it comes to significant third parties and interest groups. Organisations like Advance and GetUp!, e.g., are expressly political, and advocate against or for particular candidates, but they are distinctly separate organisations. Climate 200 in particular blurs these lines
For ACNC registered interest groups and charitable service providers, particularly those with DGR status, what they do or don’t do during election campaigns is in part dictated by their tax status and in part by where their funding comes from. These organisations will be seen to engage in policy-oriented activity during election campaigns, rather than explicitly candidate or party-oriented activity. Or they may engage in non-partisan but pro-democracy activities like organising local candidates’ forums or helping run the local barbecue on election day.
As you’ve probably worked out by now, I’m a big fan of civil society organisations. All of my research relates to them in some way. This election has been my first time observing them closely during an election campaign, so hopefully it’s going to yield some interesting results! And thanks for reading if you get this far. I know it’s been a long one. I very much appreciate all the engagement and positive responses for my recent posts around all this.
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