Taxpayers will pay Pauline Hanson’s One Nation $2.98M for her not to win a single seat in the House of Representatives election. Rex Patrick reports on some fun and not so fun vote payment facts from the 2025 election.

Any party or independent that gets more that 4% of the primary votes in any of the 150 electorates in the House of Representatives (House) will receive $3.39 per vote from taxpayers to offset the cost of their election campaign.

Likewise, any party or independent that gets more than 4% in any of the six State or two territory Senate elections also gets $3.39 per vote.

Looking at the mostly settled results of the election draws out some interesting facts.

Harvesting taxpayers’ money in the House

To have any chance of winning a House seat you need to get about 35,000 votes, which is about 25% of the total votes in an electorate, and some good preference flows. There’s a huge difference between the 4% which triggers payment from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) and getting a seat-winning percentage.

Pauline Hanson will have been watching the polling in the lead up to the election. She would have known that she was getting numbers in and around 10% in those polls – enough to get a Senate seat (which takes 14%), but nowhere near enough to get a seat in the House.

But she ran 147 candidates for the House, and for her efforts she’ll scoop up $2.98M.

No chance of winning in any of those seats, but every chance of raising a quid to fund her campaign in the legally separate Senate elections.

One is left wondering if she told her House candidates they weren’t really electioneering, rather they were harvesting cash.

Green with envy 

One Nation was not alone. 

The Greens also ran in every House seat, even though they had real prospects in only a few. In the end, they got just one seat and will collect $6.43M in House funds to help pay for their successful Senate campaign.

Clive Palmer’s Trumpets of Patriots didn’t get more that 4% in many House seats and will collect only $263K off the taxpayer (and he will collect nothing from his national Senate run). The taxpayer hit is small. 

Sarcastic readers may be glad the duopoly parties completely upended out electoral donor laws to stop Clive’s ‘success’ in future elections … to spare us those annoying yellow ads … oh, and to entrench Labor and the LNP in the Parliament for eternity.

And we just can’t let you read on until you’re been made aware of the $621K that will be paid to the Legalise Cannabis Party. No seats for them, but It’ll buy a lot of ganga.

The big party take

Of course, the biggest payouts are to the old parties who set the rules on how much they are paid. Between the House and Senate, the Labor Party will take home $36.9M while the Liberal-National Party Coalition (LNP) will take home $32.5M.

The total Greens take across both houses will be $12.2M and, for One Nation, $6M.

The average taxpayer cost for a Labor member to get into the House was $196K, which seems a bit of a bargain when compared to the LNP at $387K.

For the Greens it’s a whopping $6.43M per seat ($6.43M ÷ 1 seat) and for One Nation – well, that involves a divide-by-zero error.

Moving to the Senate, the taxpayer cost per elected senator for Labor and the LNP was around $1.2M, a bargain $980K for the Greens and a million a-piece for each of the three One Nation Senators (although that doesn’t take into account the House harvested cash for the two minor parties).

David Pocock came as a great value-for-money Senator, only costing $389,102 in AEC funds. Jacqui Lambie takes the prize in the competition, getting a seat in the Senate for the grand sum of $91,608 in taxpayers’ money.

Independents and Teals

Minor parties (e.g. Legalise Cannabis Party, Gerard Rennick’s People First, Trumpets of Patriots, Family First etc) will share $1.1M for their unsuccessful House efforts.

Senator Payman’s One Voice, which ran in a number of states, will receive no AEC funding, so few were the votes the party attracted. There will be a lot of thinking going on in her office about what that means for the 2028 election.

Those House candidates that attracted support from Climate 200, which included Andrew Wilkie and Rebekha Sharkie, will collectively receive in their pockets $2.58M. Other independents that ran will collect $909K.

Individual performance

Star performers in collecting taxpayer funds for Labor don’t quite align with the party pecking order. The top earner was Amanda Rishworth ($202,304), then Anthony Albanese ($201,006), who had Tanya Plibersek ($200,292) hot on his tail.

Peter Dutton won’t be around to chat about his $124,022 AEC prize, although it’s nowhere near Susan Ley’s take of $151,499. A point of embarrassment for Ley might be that David Littleproud, her National Party counterpart, hauled $175,892 into the LNP kitty.

The increasing spend 

With the electoral law changes that were passed in the Parliament in the lead up to the election, thanks to a Labor-LNP deal, and to take effect at the next election, the amount of money paid by the taxpayer per vote will rise to $5.

That’s a 47.5% ‘pay rise’ in public funding (in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis).

Laying out how that would have affected the parties if it were in place this time around – the total winnings for the Labor Party would have gone from $36.9M to $54.5M and for the LNP from $32.5M to $47.9M.

Almost $94M of your money will be sent to the parties by the AEC over the coming months, once party and candidate returns are lodged.

Next time around, with the new payment level and further growth in the national electorate, it’ll be well over $140M.

The American way. Electoral reform bill to entrench major parties’ power

This post was originally published on Michael West.