Wall of Advantage: Brick by Brick.

Generous handouts for some, financial handcuffs for others.

Nomi Kaltmann ran as the community independent for Caulfield in 2022.

Early in the campaign a family friend called to offer her the free use of an empty pharmacy site on a high-visibility corner in Caulfield. She had to turn it down: the market value of a lease for the site was worth more than the state’s then $4,320 donation cap, so accepting it would have meant accepting a donation in breach of Victoria’s tight donation cap [1].

Kaltmann didn’t have the funds to rent an office, nor the funds to employ a fundraiser to rattle the tin for her. A local businessman offered her a $50,000 donation to help her bring on a paid staffer and print t-shirts and campaign signage, but accepting that would have breached Victoria’s strict donation laws enacted in 2018.

Faced with the choice between fundraising and meeting with potential voters, Kaltmann chose the latter and had no choice but to run her campaign on a shoestring.

Meanwhile, her opponent, well known to all thanks to the profile gained from years in the job, enjoyed a state-funded political campaign. More than a year out, Victorian taxpayers had footed the bill for most of his campaign.

Every four years, before a single new vote is cast, Victoria’s two major parties begin the cycle with a public-money head start measured well in excess of $2.5 million in public-money advantages [2] — advantages that outsiders cannot access.

The 2018 laws cut in two ways — first they built a very high wall around incumbency, and then they made it almost impossible for challengers to build a ladder up that wall.

The architecture underneath the state’s campaign finance laws is a stack of streams, each one legal and with some justification in isolation.

After the 2022 state election, independents sounded the alarm. They appeared at parliamentary inquiries, wrote to Premier Jacinta Allan and were largely ignored. They wrote a second time to the Premier, warning her that the laws were likely to be found constitutionally invalid.

Having been ignored, and then blown off by the Premier, in 2025 Melissa Lowe, the community independent candidate for the seat of Hawthorn at the 2022 state election, and Paul Hopper, founder of the fledgling West Party, filed a complaint in the High Court about the most egregious of the law’s provisions, the so-called ‘nominated-entity’ exception.

In April 2026, in Hopper v Victoria, the High Court determined that the donation cap “indirectly and not insubstantially” burdens the implied freedom of political communication, and that the nominated-entity exception made the burden act differentially — in a unanimous judgment, the Court found significant parts of the Act to be constitutionally invalid and struck down Victoria’s campaign finance laws, sending the state back to the legislative drawing board.

That ruling is the catalyst for this piece.

Victoria must legislate a new set of laws. The major parties cannot afford to run their campaigns without the millions they were expecting from the public purse. Will they build back the wall with a sense of fairness, or will they perpetuate a cosy political duopoly?

About this article

This article walks through the public funding and resources flowing to candidates at a Victorian state election, and the gap that opens up between a major-party incumbent and an independent challenger under the laws the High Court has just struck down.

Each section introduces a new stream — public money, staff, allowances, loopholes — and adds a brick to the wall on the left. Many of those numbers genuinely depend on judgement; good people, in good faith, will land in different places. As you scroll, you’ll be asked for yours, and the wall responds in real time.

Default values produce a defensible baseline, but where they land is your call. At the end, you can compare your judgements against everyone else’s.

Let’s build the wall.

The first brick: cash for votes already won.

Under the regime in force from 2018 until Hopper, Victoria paid parties (and qualifying independents) public money calibrated to performance at the previous election — $6.49 for every lower-house first-preference vote in 2022, $3.24 for every upper-house vote, indexed annually… and paid before the election.

For the cycle running from 2022 to 2026 the ALP was entitled to $12.66 million. The Coalition was entitled to $11.6 million.

One recontesting independent who polled 21% in their seat last election — without winning — was entitled to $59,708.

A first-time candidate would have received nothing. Zero.

Spread across the lower-house seats each entity contested (parties contesting every seat don’t incur significant costs to contest the upper house), that came out to ~$159,000 per seat for the ALP, ~$141,000 per seat for the Coalition, $59k for the recontesting indie, and not a cent for a first-time independent. Those are the four columns rising on the chart.

Payments are made in instalments. Hopper [4] stopped the final one dead, comprising the bulk of the $7.2 million [5] due to be paid until the High Court ruled on 15 April 2026 [6].

A per-seat average hides where the money actually goes.

Of the 88 lower-house seats in Victoria, perhaps 60 are effectively decided before the campaign starts — safe for one side or the other. Another dozen the major parties write off as unwinnable. The election is fought, in any meaningful sense, in around 15–20 priority seats: marginals, sandbelt swingers, the seats teal independents now contest.

Party central offices know this. They don’t post equal billboards in every electorate, or send the leader to events in a 70/30 safe seat. Public funding is pooled centrally and concentrated where it can change the result.

The math works because per-vote funding pays more than a flag-flying campaign costs in most seats. A safe or unwinnable seat might set the party back $10,000–$20,000 going through the motions; the same seat, polling around 35% in each chamber, returns about $94,000 from lower-house per-vote funding and another $47,000 from the upper house — call it $141,000 — paid to party central. Four-fifths of the map subsidises one fifth [1].

For an independent there isn’t a choice. Their one seat is the only seat that exists. Every dollar they raise is, by construction, spent in the seat they’re contesting — the indie columns already represent 100% concentration.

For the major parties, the question is concentration.

Of every dollar of pooled, party-central money, how much actually landed in the 20% of seats in play? 20% would be a perfectly even spread — the same number of ‘bricks’ per seat. 80% is somewhere near the upper bound of plausible concentration, once you account for the floor of fixed costs running candidates in every other electorate. The truth lies between the extremes.

Push the slider right and the major-party columns grow — the chart redraws to show what one of those priority seats actually looks like. The independent columns don’t move: their seat already is the priority seat.

The next brick: a separate stream for “running the party”.

On top of advance public funding sat a second stream from the VEC: administrative funding — paid quarterly in advance, on a sliding scale that paid the party more for each MP it returned.

At the start of the cycle (FY 2022-23) that meant $216,210 for the first MP a party elected, $75,660 for the second, $37,850 for each MP from the third onward — capped at 45 members. CPI indexation nudges each tier up every July; by FY 2025-26 the first-MP rate had grown to $248,460.

For a major party that hits the 45-member cap, that adds up to about $8.3m across the four-year cycle — roughly $43k per MP per year at cycle-start rates, or $186k per MP across the cycle with indexation factored in.

Unlike the marquee public-funding brick, this stream has only an indirect connection to marginal seats. It paid for the party’s administrative apparatus — staff, premises, compliance. One could argue that the party apparatus never gives equal attention to every seat, but let’s keep things simple and divide Administrative Funding evenly across the seats each party contested. Adjusting the concentration slider won’t move these bricks.

The old laws paid administrative expenses of incumbent Independents, and recognised their lack of economies of scale.

Independent challengers also incur significant administrative expenses, but under the laws recently struck down, they received nothing.

Then there’s a parallel channel only parties can could use.

Under the old rules, the legacy parties could each nominate one entity — imaginatively named “Nominated Entity” — from which they could receive unlimited funding. No cap. No real-time disclosure.

For the Liberal Party that vehicle was the Cormack Foundation — a $120m+ nest-egg built up from the well-invested proceeds from the sale of 3XY, a Melbourne radio station the party owned until 1986. The Nationals had their own: Pilliwinks, named, with characteristic candour, after a medieval torture device. For the ALP it was Labor Services & Holdings.

The details of Labor Services & Holdings are murky, and Browne doesn’t find a definitive figure. [2] For the last four reported years, FY2022→2025 cycle, LSH disclosed $6.0m of receipts, $2.0m of which was used for federal purposes. Details of the $4.0m remainder are not known. [7]

For the Coalition, Browne flags a documented gap: the Vic Liberals’ annual returns book only $272,000 from the Cormack Foundation across the 2018–2022 cycle, but contemporaneous reporting put Cormack’s contribution at $2.5m to the 2018 Victorian campaign and $3.0m to the 2022 Victorian campaign [8], an order of magnitude above the disclosed figure.

The current cycle is more visible. The Cormack Foundation disclosed donations of $8.1m to the Victorian Liberal Party between FY2022–FY2025.

One caveat on these figures: State branches also fund federal election campaigns. So while such expenditure helps build the party, not every dollar’s primary purpose is to win state elections — how much belongs in the wall is a judgement call.

An independent has no equivalent vehicle. The Act ties the privilege to a registered political party with a federally-disclosed structure: candidates running outside that frame cannot register a nominated entity, and cannot accept transfers from one.

Each party has its own uncapped weapon.

Both major parties draw on a multi-million-dollar revenue stream the donation cap can’t touch — they just look nothing alike.

Over the 2018–2022 cycle, the Victorian ALP collected roughly $5 million from affiliated trade unions — annual fees calculated on each union’s membership and explicitly exempted from the donor cap by the Act [2]. The Coalition has no equivalent: no affiliated unions, no §206 carve-out drafted around its structure.

However, the Victorian Liberals have their own counterweight. Over the same cycle they received about $4 million in dividends from Vapold Pty Ltd, a wholly-owned party subsidiary [2]. Vapold’s wealth dates to a 1976 purchase: Centenary Hall at 104 Exhibition Street, bought for roughly $576,000, sold to Rolex Australia in 2018 for $37.1 million [9] — after inflation, a ten-fold return. Dividends from a subsidiary aren’t ‘gifts’ under the Act, so they don’t need an exemption to sit outside the cap.

The two streams are structurally different — one is a §206 carve-out, the other is corporate dividends — but the effect is the same: a multi-million-dollar uncapped channel unique to one party.

One caveat on these figures: Again these income streams build the party, and help it fight state and federal elections. Again, how much of these income streams should be attributed to state elections is a judgement call.

Party membership fees — handy, and exempt.

Branch members of the major parties pay annual subscription fees on a tiered income scale. The totals are not the headline story on this wall — but they flow into the party’s central account, and the Act’s donor cap doesn’t touch them.

On a bottom-up estimate, branch dues from ordinary members total roughly $2.8m for Victorian Labor and $2.9m for the Liberal Party of Victoria over a four-year cycle [10].

On top of that, the Liberal Party runs Enterprise Victoria — a corporate-membership vehicle that sells tiered annual packages to businesses: access to briefings, the 500 Club, and budget breakfasts. Browne’s audit attributes a further $1.6m over the 2018–2022 cycle to “packageholders and function income” from this channel [2]. Like ordinary membership fees, these payments are exempt from the donor cap; unlike donations above $1,100, the payers are not publicly named. Combined, the two streams amounted to $4.5m for the Coalition over the cycle.

For an independent challenger, this is structurally inaccessible: there can be hordes of volunteers every bit as passionate about their chosen political cause — but without a party, an independent can’t qualify for this carve-out.

The biggest carve-out nobody’s ever heard of: Levies.

Labor-party MPs in Victoria (and some senior staffers) pay about 4% of their salary back to the party as a levy [12]. On a $211,972 salary that’s roughly $8,500 per MP per year, or $34,000 across a four-year cycle. Across 70 MPs and their staff, Browne (2023) puts the disclosed total at $3 million per cycle [2].

It is a closed loop. Public money pays the salary; the MP pays the party; the party spends it on the operation that wins the next campaign — staffing, infrastructure, the priority seats.

From a challenger’s side, this is structurally inaccessible: there are no MPs to levy. For one major-party, it is one of the largest income sources.

A candidate’s own cheque book.

Before we get to the donation cap that constrains every other donation in Victoria, there is one last loophole to discuss. Buried in s.217D(5) of the Electoral Act was a single carve-out: a candidate’s contribution to their own campaign. The cap regulated what donors can give a candidate, but it did not regulate what a candidate could give themselves.

In the 2018–2022 cycle the largest single political donation anywhere in Victoria came from Liberal Eltham candidate Jason McClintock — $110,000 to his own campaign, 24× what any other Victorian could legally give him [2].

The exemption was open in principle to all four actors on the wall, but in practice it was gated only by personal wealth.

The Coalition column below opens with McClintock’s $110,000 cheque already loaded — those grey bricks at the top are his — and the slider lets you push it further. There was no statutory ceiling on the carve-out — and a glance at the federal regime, where there was no donor cap until recently, shows where unconstrained self-funding could end up: Clive Palmer put $123 million of his own money into the UAP’s 2022 campaign.

The one stream open to everyone — and the only one open to most indies.

Everything to this point has been state money or party-side carve-outs from the donation cap. This last brick is the one stream that any candidate, party or independent, can receive: a private donation from a Victorian voter, capped under the old laws at $4,970 per donor across the four-year cycle.

Across the 2018–2022 cycle Victorian Labor disclosed $804k in capped donations and the Coalition $3.0m.

When it came to an independent candidate, the only structural public funding was a modest slice of advance public funding — and only for those who recontested after clearing the threshold last time. Every other brick above this one required either incumbency or a party machine to qualify for.

For most indie campaigns, donations aren’t a top-up; they are the only meaningful source of income. Without donations, they simply can’t compete.

So how much does an independent need to mount a serious campaign?

Parties rarely disclose what they spend in a single seat. When figures do surface, they are sobering: at the federal level, Labor’s national secretary Paul Erickson said the party put about $1m into the Dunkley (federal) by-election in 2024, with the Coalition having “easily matched” that. Labor reportedly spent $1m on Batman in 2018, and the Liberals about $1m on Wentworth in 2018 [13].

Victorian state numbers are hard to come by — but occasionally authoritative estimates make their way into the public domain. Ahead of the 2023 Warrandyte by-election, senior Labor sources told The Age that a “strong campaign” for the seat would cost “up to $500,000” — that figure omits, of course, the value of the party’s brand and its headquarters [1].

So $400,000–$500,000 is the right neighbourhood for a hotly contested state seat — and for an independent the real number is probably higher. They have no party infrastructure to lean on. Operationally, a serious independent campaign is effectively a single-member party: it has to replicate most of the functions of a party, and that costs money.

In contrast to independents, Parties are much less reliant on donations. That was one of the explicit aims of the 2018 electoral amendments — to push private money out of Victorian politics and replace it with public funding. As the rest of the wall shows, for the parties they succeeded.

With the last bricks placed in the wall, a budget emerges, and the asymmetry sharpens. For the major parties, donations are a thin layer on top of everything else — only around one per cent of an ALP or Coalition seat’s total resources comes through this channel, dwarfed by the structural funding the wall you build demonstrates.

For independents the picture inverts: a recontesting indie has to raise almost all of their budget through capped donations — call it $250k, for a modest campaign.

A first-time challenger has nothing else: 100% of their funding comes from capped donations.

Two asymmetries inside the regime sharpen the gap further. Advance public funding paid to a registered political party flows tax-free; paid to an independent candidate, the same dollars are taxable income. And a donation to a registered party is tax-deductible up to $1,500 per donor per year, year-round; a donation to an independent only becomes tax-deductible from the moment candidate nominations open — about 12 days before polling. Donors who hold back to claim the deduction hold back exactly when the campaign needs cash most [1].

Any reform that lowers the donation cap, or extends it, or tightens disclosure, lands almost entirely on the actors whose funding consists of nothing but donations. The structural side of the wall — APF, AEF, salary, Office & Comms, levies, nominated entities — sits outside the cap regime and continues unchanged. The cap regulates the channel that the major parties least need.

The next wall: can the parties build it again?

The morning after Hopper, the major parties were already drafting a replacement for Section 12 [6]. The urgency they speak of is foreign donations and dark money — bad actors pouring untraceable millions into a regime suddenly without disclosure. The urgency they do not speak of, and the one that is really motivating the parties, is the $7.2 million the VEC was about to pay them when the judgment landed [5].

The government’s position, according to sources close to the matter, is that the donation cap and the public-funding scheme can be lifted unchanged into a replacement bill — and only the nominated-entity carve-out needs surgery [14]. The reasoning of the plurality of the High Court justices does not support that reading.

On the question of whether public funding offsets the burden the cap places on the implied freedom of political communication, the plurality wrote:

Victoria submitted, and it may be accepted, that the burden imposed by the general cap is ameliorated to some extent by public funding, and that the 2018 Amendment Act increased the amount of public funding available at least partly in recognition of the effect of the general cap. However, and despite that increase, the public funding provided by the Electoral Act:

1. is not necessarily equivalent to the amount a registered political party or candidate might otherwise have raised by way of political donations prior to the imposition of the general cap;
2. is generally paid in arrears; and
3. has no impact on the burden in respect of regulated persons and entities other than registered political parties or independent candidates who satisfy the eligibility criteria.

It follows that the implied freedom remains effectively indirectly and not insubstantially burdened by the general cap.

Hopper v Victoria, joint judgment of Gageler CJ, Gordon, Jagot and Beech-Jones JJ at [33] [4]

Read against the wall this piece has spent twelve sections building, the court’s three sub-points are familiar. (i) the cap binds tighter than the public funding loosens — exactly the asymmetry the chart makes visible. (ii) the funding arrives in arrears, after the campaigns it might have helped have already been fought. (iii) if you are not a registered party, and not a recontesting independent above 4%, the public-funding side of the ledger does nothing for you at all.

The cap, in other words, was found to be a not-insubstantial burden on everyone the chart shows starting at zero — before you even reach the nominated-entity exemption that was the headline ground of decision. A reform that patches only the carve-out, leaves the cap in place, and pumps more public money into the same eligibility-gated channels, leaves the burden the court identified intact.

The lawyer who took Hopper to the High Court has already telegraphed the next case:

If the parliamentary response to losing $7.2 million is to legislate themselves a bigger one, the replacement Section 12 will look very much like the old one — and will likely arrive in the same courtroom.