The Auditor-General has released a “performance audit” for the last three years of government advertising. This is taxpayer-funded advertising – and could be anything from life-saving public health and natural disaster awareness campaigns to barely-disguised boasting and self-promotion.

Government advertising is distinct from the party-political advertising that political parties and candidates pay for, which you’ll be seeing a lot more of during the election campaign.

Over the three years July 2021 to June 2024 (around one year of the Morrison Coalition Government and around two years of the Albanese Government), government advertising cost $769 million. That makes the government a major advertiser, on the scale of companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Amazon, Pepsi and Qantas.

And as you can see from the Auditor-General’s graph, some election years (2015–2016 and 2021–22) see high spending on government ad campaigns. Some of this spending is to make the government of the day look good, not to genuinely inform the public.

So how did governments do? The Auditor-General looked in detail at three advertising campaigns and concluded they were “largely compliant” with the rules that government advertising must follow. Unfortunately, the rules are pretty limited. When The Australia Institute looked at this topic in 2022, we wrote:

“The current regulatory model for government advertising is clearly insufficient. A box-ticking exercise by chief executives and sign-off from an independent committee that does not see the actual materials (just the overall strategy) has failed to prevent controversial campaigns from proceeding.”

We recommended a greater role for the Auditor-General in reviewing government advertising – and polling research at the time showed three in four Australians agreed.