The No campaign against the Voice to Parliament is now outspending and outperforming the Yes sides on social media in a shocking turnaround from earlier this year, as both sides drastically increase their efforts to reach voters.
While both sides have been campaigning for months now, the federal Parliament’s passing of the Voice to Parliament legislation today is a milestone that marks a new phase of the campaign.
Crikey analysis shows the official No campaign run by Advance (formerly known as Advance Australia) is now outmuscling its opponent Yes23 on Meta’s platforms Facebook and Instagram in both organic and paid posts, in a reversal of what was happening in the period prior.
While the performance of organic posts (normal, unpaid Facebook posts, that is) is a rough indication of how messages are broadly resonating with supporters, paid advertising is used by political campaigns to send targeted messages to specific voters like undecided voters.
Between April 18 and June 18, Advance spent up to $147,750 on Facebook and Instagram advertisements that were shown more than 14.7 million times, according to Meta’s advertising library. More than 8.4 million views were from the No campaign’s main page Fair Australia. The remaining views were on the Facebook pages of the progressive-framed campaign Not Enough (3.9 million) and the anti-Voice “news” Referendum News, two campaigns that Crikey first reported were being run by Advance. It’s a dramatic increase from the $18,000 that Advance spent in the three months prior.
Yes23 has spent up to $136,000 to show its advertisements more than 17.4 million times during that same period. This is up from the $26,000 spent to show its posts 2.8 million times in the three months prior.
On Facebook, Advance’s Fair Australia page is outgunning Yes23’s account. Over the two-month period, the No campaign’s main social media presence received twice as many likes, comments and shares (103,900 versus 50,000) and more than three times the amount of shares alone (18,700 compared with 6400).
Advance’s two other pages received a negligible amount of organic engagement. Even when including Yes23’s superior Instagram presence, which has accrued 37,600 interactions over the two-month period, with Fair Australia’s negligible presence, the No campaign still has the upper hand.
Meanwhile, Advance has spent $19,400 on YouTube, Google Search and display advertisements over the past two months, according to Google’s political ad transparency centre. The Yes campaign’s side has also been running ads but Google has not marked them as political (despite changing its own rules to explicitly ensure they were included), meaning Crikey is unable to get further information on the advertisements.
Google has been contacted about the Yes campaign’s ad categorisation.
… Nothing sells like fear?
When you look at those supporting the No campaign, the vast majority (not all) are on the right of politics. And given the LNP’s (among others) track record alone for treating people (women, refugees, first nations people, LGBTQI+, centrelink recipients, people with disabilities) with decency and respect, that should be reason enough to ring warning bells and ignore their fallacies. A lot of us fall into at least one, if not several, of those categories through no fault of our own.
I can see that a succesful YES campaign is a win for the indigenous Australians and all those who want the best for them but I am struggling to see who the winners are for the NO campaign and exactly what they win. In other words if the NO campaign wins what is it that the winners get to take away and is it worth having?
Ideas anyone?
Better to ask that dog in the manger…. why ‘winning’ is everything.
Sometimes a culture war is picked by the Right for no apparent reason, kind of like when a large, aggressive drunk decides he doesn’t like your freckles, or your voice, or the choice of music you put on the jukebox. Look at who is on the No campaign. They want the fight because if they win, it humiliates the other side, and that’s what they’re into. There would be a few racists among them, but by and large Blak Australia is no more relevant to the Right than an individual ball at a tennis match; it’s something to hit around a bit, but it’s easily replaced.
That’s what I reckon – should be a 90% plus yes, and it would have been hadn’t the stupid LNP fight-pickers done their best to derail it.
Thanks everyone. It seems they consider it a win if someone else doesn’t get what they want. They are sad people.
I reckon they see ‘winning’ even/especially(?) a pyrrhic victory (=> martyrdom?) = ‘a-moral’ victory = a denial of kudos for the opposition/’defeat of the left’.
Let’s face it, all they have to do is sew enough doubt that the requisite numbers to get up, is foiled – even abstentions count for their cause.
… A stitch-up.
Unless the yes campaign is stepping up and can silence the no campaign with good reasoning & arguments we will not see outcome we all hope for
I think a lot of people are confusing the issues. I support the voice in principle so that our first nations people move out of the disadvantage group. However I don’t agree with it being in the constitution. The constitution is for generations ahead not for the now. If in 4 generations (~140 years) our first nations are still disadvantaged, should it still be in the constitution? Then what. In 4 or 5 generations with intermarriage then who is considered first nations? The best way to tackle disadvantage is by education. Have first nations culture in all school curriculum so that when kids move into decision positions they know.
This is a case of history repeating itself. The referendum for a republic was defeated with exactly the same sort of reasoning – “well, while I am for the principle, I don’t agree with the detail”, and what happened there? The referendum was defeated, and nothing has been done about a republic since that time 24 years ago. If this referendum is defeated, you can bet your bottom dollar nothing will be done to recognise indigenous peoples at all. Not only that, but the rejection will seriously dishearten the many people who have worked so hard to achieve this very basic acknowledgement. We need to learn from experience, vote yes, and then sort out the details after that.
It doesn’t matter how far you go into the future, First Nations people will still be the people who were here for centuries before white settlement. They fought for their land and never ceded it. They have a right to be recognised in the constitution.
As far as I know we are the only comparable colonised nation that does not formally recognise its first people.
The Americans “recognised” theirs almost into oblivion…………………
………..signed any number of treaties then promptly ignored them.
This is the same “Advance” group of geriatric North Shore Sydney millionaires who torched millions trying to keep Abbott in Parliament………..
……………then torched a few more millions on trying to keep Frydenberg there.
I suspect that they will get the same result this time.