Liberal backbencher Andrew Hastie has crowdfunded $260,000 to launch his own multimedia advertising blitz on immigration in the new year, promising a relentless ad campaign to force the issue onto the national agenda as the Coalition fine-tunes its official policies after the Bondi attack.
Conservative campaign group Advance is also preparing to roll out a new campaign against immigration, and Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price crowdfunded at the end of the year for her own efforts. Each sent emails to their supporter mailing lists within two hours of one another on New Year’s Eve morning, saying it was the last day to make donations.
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie is launching his own immigration campaign. The Coalition is yet to unveil its official policies.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Hastie and Price moved to the Coalition backbench last year in part over their hardline approach to the immigration debate, but the fundraising blitz signals they are preparing to step up their push for tougher migration settings after winning the fight within the Liberal Party to ditch net zero.
Ley on Friday said the Coalition’s policy “will be coming forward in due course” but that it would need to get tougher. “[It] clearly requires additional consideration following the evident failures of this government.”
She said Labor had not acted “in the strongest possible way to ensure that people who come to this country are properly assessed and screened for the values, the ideals and the contribution to Australia, that must be front and centre of any immigrant to this country”.
The Bondi shooting was allegedly committed by two men motivated by Islamic State ideology, one of whom migrated to Australia from India under the Howard Coalition government in the late 1990s, and one of whom is an Australian citizen.
Australia’s Muslim community say they are experiencing a backlash after Bondi, and 10 mosques and Islamic centres from across the country have reported harassment, vandalism, break-ins or threats of harm.
Northern Territory senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Hastie’s fundraising suggests he will keep campaigning on his own terms. He has described last month’s Bondi attack as a wake-up call on “radical Islamic theology” in Instagram posts. One is captioned “time to reach for the deport button” and includes calls to “narrow the gate for entry to our country”.
The Liberal leadership aspirant, who quit Ley’s frontbench to speak his mind on migration last October, started asking supporters at the beginning of December to raise $275,000 by the end of 2025 to “supercharge a massive campaign against Labor’s immigration regime”.
“That means hard-hitting digital TV and social media ads, direct mail and flyers,” he said.
Hastie this week told this masthead he had raised almost $260,000 from 2297 supporters.
“Liberals will win when we demonstrate to mainstream Australians that we are prepared to take their concerns about immigration seriously. It’s also what Liberal supporters demand, based on the response to my recent emails,” he said.
Hastie said his campaign was not affiliated with conservative campaign group Advance, which boosted its public profile championing the No campaign during the Voice referendum, with Price at the helm.
Advance also made an end-of-year appeal for a $1 million war chest to fund an immigration-focused digital TV, YouTube, and social media blitz during the start of 2026.
In its email communications from executive director Matthew Sheahan, Advance references the Bondi attack as it claims the country is being pulled apart by immigration and accuses Labor of “opening the doors to countless immigrants who do not share our values”.
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“You and I cannot sit around after Bondi and pretend that doing nothing is an option. Now matters more than ever.”
Sheahan’s email said digital TV slots, YouTube placements and social media ads had been scheduled and purchased to ensure that 2026 started with “clarity and strength in this fight for our country”. The campaign will then move to billboards, direct mail, television, phone calls and text messages.
Advance’s social media posts have previously featured AI-generated images of people with dark hair and brown skin massing in queues at the airport or outside a rental property. Some of its material has directly targeted sitting Liberals, including current immigration spokesman Paul Scarr.
Scarr has been a staunch defender of multiculturalism in his speeches. In October, he took a veiled swipe at Hastie for borrowing the words of former British Conservative MP Enoch Powell, who told Britons in 1968 they risked becoming “strangers in their own country”.
He has also fought against the use of the term “mass migration” in political debate, which is regularly deployed by the likes of Advance and Price.
Price said her end-of-year fundraising drive, which aims to raise $125,850, would go towards her “Family, Community, Nation Fund”, with a focus on immigration, energy and education.
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The Northern Territory senator’s political star faded last year after she defected from the Nationals to make a failed run for the Liberal Party’s deputy leadership. She was then sacked from Ley’s frontbench for erroneous claims about Indian migrants. Price was the only politician to suffer a year-on-year fall in net likeability, according to this masthead’s end-of-year Resolve poll.
“After a challenging year of media attacks and constant scrutiny, I’m more determined than ever to keep speaking my mind on these issues,” she said in a fundraising email.
In an earlier fundraising email focused on immigration, she said: “It will take a while, because the media is all in on open borders and will attack anyone as racist for raising questions. But I’m not going to back down. With your support, I will take the time to make the case, change the conversation, and demand a change in policy.”
