Someone’s left me in charge of this newsletter today, which means I’m using any opportunity possible to shoehorn politics explainers into non-politics newsletters. In today’s edition, we’ll unpack those persistent headlines about tax cuts and how much it really costs to run a campaign.

Without further ado, let’s get started!

Great question! I feel like the topic of tax cuts is always in the news, and very rarely do we step back to actually explain what we’re talking about.

To start with, personal income tax is the tax you pay on any income you earn.

The more you earn, the more tax you pay. If you earn less than $18,200 you don’t pay tax. After that, the amount you pay steadily increases, starting at 16c for every dollar and ending with 45c of every dollar you earn above $190,000. Aussies are taxed on a progressive scale, meaning tax rates increase with income.

How you pay this tax? Well, if you’re on a payroll, the tax is usually taken out of your salary automatically. If you’re self-employed, you need to set aside enough to pay what you owe the Australian Tax Office (ATO) at the end of each financial year. This is ‘tax time’ - you’ll have to fill out a form called a tax return to make sure you’ve paid the right amount.

Your tax return is where you can claim back some of that tax you’ve paid if you bought anything that was tax exempt during the year.

Now looping back to the original headline that you’ve seen, the topic of tax cuts is a very big one in politics. Before the last election, Labor passed tax cuts in Parliament in a move that was dubbed an “election bribe” by the Coalition. However, in recent days, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley said she’s making a “commitment to lower taxes” if the Coalition is re-elected (although, the next election isn’t due until 2028).

Under Ley’s plan, tax cuts would start with “low and middle income earners who are feeling the squeeze from higher prices and rising living costs”. There was no further information on how these cuts would work, except that the Coalition would determine the “scale and scope of our eventual package as the final budget position becomes clearer over the next two and a half years”.

We’ll loop back to this one in the Finance Newsletter of 2028 😉

Have you ever wondered how much it costs to run a political campaign?

If yes, this is for you. If no, it’s wonderful that this newsletter is a medium where there is no real-time way to hear your response, so I’ll just presume you’ve said yes.

Earlier this week, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) published the financial disclosures from the 2025 Federal Election. This disclosure register is basically a way for us to see who donated to which political campaigns at the last election, and assess how much money was actually spent by those campaigns.

An important caveat to remember when reading this is that this disclosure register only pertains to candidates who ran without a registered political party (so we’re talking here about independents and candidates of parties that weren’t properly registered).

The AEC will publish that information on the political parties (think: Liberal, Labor, Nationals, Greens etc) on 2 February next year.

In the absence of data on the political parties, let’s dive into what we learnt about the amount that some independent political campaigns raised in donations.

Interestingly, the top two candidates who received the most money from donors were both unsuccessful in winning their seats.

The first, Alex Dyson, raised $2,186,936 to try to win the seat of Wannon from the Liberal Party. Ultimately, Liberal incumbent Dan Tehan beat Dyson, who ended up spending $1,086,054 on the campaign. Of course, it’s important to highlight again that we don’t know how much Tehan’s Liberal Party spent on that seat because that data will only be made public next year.

Elsewhere in Victoria, successful independent Dr Monique Ryan raised $1,905,102 to retain the seat of Kooyong. 

Those dollar amounts were absolutely the top end of things, with other candidates around the country raising as little as $1,000.

So we have some independent campaigns raising millions of dollars to spend on political advertising, campaign staff, events and much, much more. But where is this money coming from?

Well, if we look at the data, there is a big chunk coming from a group called Climate 200. The group, which describes itself as a "community crowdfunding initiative", donated $10.8 million to candidates at the last election. That was up from $6 million at the previous election. You might be familiar with Climate 200 because the group funds many of the “teal” candidates.

The donors who funded Climate 200 at the last election include Canva founders Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, as well as Atlassian founder Mike Cannon Brookes. 

Before we finish, I wanted to tell you about a fun quirk of Australia’s political system, which is that even if you lose an election, you might still get paid by the AEC. 

That’s right, if at least 4% of voters in an electorate put a ‘1’ next to your name, the AEC will automatically reimburse you $12,379 for your campaign costs. Additional payments are then based on how much you or your party spent on the campaign, or how many votes you received overall.

The first tranche of payments for the election was made earlier this year, with the AEC making payments to a range of candidates totalling $1,052,215.

The second tranche of payments will be made later this year, with claims from candidates and parties due by 3 November. 

In 2022, the AEC spent more than $75 million reimbursing parties and candidates.

You didn’t think I was going to talk about anything except the Louvre, did you?

In case you missed it, a real-life Netflix scene played out in France this week, when Crown jewels displayed at the museum were stolen in a four-minute broad daylight heist.

The thieves broke in through a window, using a mechanical ladder to reach an upper-floor gallery. Keep in mind this was DURING THE DAY and the gallery was OPEN TO THE PUBLIC (sorry to yell, it’s just too hard to believe).

It’s reported they stole nine items from the French Crown Jewels display, including a necklace given by Napoleon to his wife. A crown containing more than 1,300 diamonds was found broken outside the museum, so hey, not everything went to plan.

Completely wild.