So what does your policy brief propose?

The expenditure caps, what they need to be is high enough to enable political parties and candidates to communicate with voters, but still low enough to actually reduce the influence of money in politics and reduce the volume of money in politics.

So under the legislation, the total cap on a political party's electoral expenditure has been set at $90 million per year.

And to put that 90 million in context, our listeners might recall the wall-to-wall yellow advertising of Clive Palmer's United Australia Party in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election.

I just remember those yellow ads everywhere.

That campaign cost 89 million.

That's how much Palmer spent on that campaign.

What do you think about those caps, and do they need adjustments as well?

So how can you compare those two kinds of campaigns?

Yeah, so we've taken the best sort of publicly available data on what costs to communicate with voters nationally.

And we certainly draw the comparisons to the Australian Electoral Commission campaigns, to the ABS census campaigns, big national campaigns.

And those campaigns are averaging about 30 million over time.

You're right that political parties have a much more kind of nuanced set of messages and we certainly factor in a bit more than what those campaigns allow for but even so we just think that this gap is way higher than needed and it's important to remember that there are so many free ways of communicating with voters too advertising is just the most expensive option the media and parliament are major platforms for sharing messages with voters they're free and there's other uncapped grassroots platforms public platforms local events social media available to politicians to share their views, set an agenda and explain their policies.

What do you think that case could lead to?

So that case could well lead to an opportunity for reform.

Whether the constitutional challenge holds up or not is absolutely a matter for the courts.

So how can you compare those two kinds of campaigns?

Yeah, so we've taken the best sort of publicly available data on what costs to communicate with voters nationally.

And we certainly draw the comparisons to the Australian Electoral Commission campaigns, to the ABS census campaigns, big national campaigns.

And those campaigns are averaging about 30 million over time.

You're right that political parties have a much more kind of nuanced set of messages and we certainly factor in a bit more than what those campaigns allow for but even so we just think that this gap is way higher than needed and it's important to remember that there are so many free ways of communicating with voters too advertising is just the most expensive option the media and parliament are major platforms for sharing messages with voters they're free and there's other uncapped grassroots platforms public platforms local events social media available to politicians to share their views, set an agenda and explain their policies.

What do you think that case could lead to?

So that case could well lead to an opportunity for reform.

Whether the constitutional challenge holds up or not is absolutely a matter for the courts.