He was formerly one half of the crack team that hosted ‘Australian Idol‘ and briefly the man who was going to topple Australia’s least favourite onionvore from the electorate he’s held since 1994, now he’s a man about to receive a lot of beer money (note: conjecture) in election funding for his solid effort nicking votes from Tone: it’s James Mathison.
Mathison announced in May that he had decided to take the fight right to hyper-conservative beanpole Tony Abbott, hoping to unseat him from Warringah on a ticket of no-nonsense, youth oriented politics.
Much to all of our dismay, he was unsuccessful in this endeavour, but will be getting around a $25,000 payout from the AEC as something of a consolation prize for managing to get 11.5% of the vote.
We don’t know how much his campaign cost, but if it was anything less than $25,000 that’s some pretty OK money for meeting and greeting local strangers on going on the TV.
Thanks to how election funding works, anyone that gets over 4% of the primary vote is eligible for a sweet $2.62 per vote, which should go some ways towards covering your campaigning costs – but I mean if you’re frugal with your billboards and t-shirts and keep working some hours at your day job you could probably come off pretty OK with the right failed election campaign.
Other people did pretty alright as well: former independent MP Rob Oakeshott managed to cop a whopping $70,000 for his 3 week campaign, which he says will go towards covering the cost of this past campaign and his campaign at the next election, and also beer money (note: the last part is conjecture).
Disappointingly, One Nation has managed to get their grubby mitts on $1.6 million all up, which I’m pretty certain will be spent entirely on Australian flag capes.
Source: The Age.
Photo: Getty Images / Seshanka Samarajiwa.
