Australia's new Far Right lobby groups: Why you can't see the books

Far-Right lobbyists are raising public money through private companies with no published accounts and no accountability. Wayne Hawkins reports.

“The thing you’re not allowed to say”

Sitting in her car, in a red top, Joanna Howe looks into her phone. “I’m gonna say the thing about the Cornell 7 that you’re not allowed to say,” she tells her followers.

The Cornell case is an alleged gang rape at a U.S. university fraternity house. Last month, a former student, known as Jane Doe, sued Cornell University and seven former members of the Chi Phi fraternity. The allegations are disputed, and a special prosecutor is now investigating.

Howe’s verdict takes under 90 seconds:

The whole Cornell 7 thing could have been avoided if these men and this woman had just saved sex for marriage.

 

We wouldn’t have her trauma and shame, and this court case and all of this.

Her sign-off:

“Consent ideology hurts everyone.”

She knew how it would land:

“I know it’s controversial and I know what people are gonna say...”

Howe is not a fringe influencer. She is a Rhodes Scholar, a professor of law at Adelaide University and one of the three panel members behind the Federal Government’s 2023 Review of the Migration System. She is also, on the public record, one of the biggest-spending political campaigners in the country. Who funds that campaigning and who checks how it is spent is far harder to see.

The playbook

Company records obtained for this story show a pattern across Australia’s new grievance movement. Its leading figures raise money from the public through private companies that each one solely owns and controls.

These are not charities, associations or political parties. They publish no accounts, have no members with a say and can't offer tax-deductible receipts. Supporters giving $10 or $100 at a time have no way of seeing where it goes.

None of this is illegal. But it means a campaign can buy national-scale advertising, sway preference flows and pressure MPs, all while disclosing less than a local footy club. Disclosure laws built for parties and newspapers barely touch this area.

One woman, one share

Howe’s campaigning runs through Australia Life Pty Ltd, registered in South Australia on 20 November 2023. Its ASIC extract lists one director and one shareholder: Joanna Howe, holding the company’s single $1 share.

The company is registered for GST and can’t receive tax-deductible gifts. Since August 2025, its registered office and business address have been a corporate-services firm in Parramatta.

Howe’s website’s donate page carries the Australia Life name but no company name or ABN. It tells donors ‘contributions are not tax deductible’ and lists what the money supports, including her aim to ‘influence policy and challenge pro-abortion laws’.

What	Amount	Source
Meta advertising in the month before SA’s November 2025 abortion vote	$95,976 (third-highest spender nationally)	InDaily
Spent across her campaigns, as reported in July 2026	More than $219,000	ABC
Of that, aimed at SA 2026 election voters and MPs	Nearly $34,000	ABC
Political expenditure declared to the Electoral Commission of SA	None above the disclosure threshold	ECSA

Australia Life registered as a third party with the Electoral Commission of SA (ECSA) on 31 December 2025, with Howe as agent. Its return for the capped expenditure period, 1 July 2025 to 20 April 2026, shows ‘no political expenditure above the relevant disclosure threshold’, according to ECSA.

The Centre for Public Integrity’s chair, Anthony Whealy, told the ABC that Howe appeared to have broken the law and should be investigated. Whether issue advertising about abortion counts as “political expenditure” under SA law is the question at the heart of that gap. ECSA says it will audit returns once it finalises post-election funding payments. Howe did not respond to questions sent for this story.

It is not the first time Howe's fundraising has drawn official attention. In November 2025, SA’s Attorney-General referred a donation “game” on her website to Consumer and Business Services over lottery rules. Consumer and Business Services did not respond to questions about the outcome.

Buy a kilometre

The same model, at a smaller scale, is driving across the country right now. The Australia Marches national tour, a liveried truck lapping every capital to rally against mass immigration, is funded by supporters who “buy a kilometre” at $10 each. It finishes in Canberra on 14 November.

The fundraising page sits on the website of the Australian Lobby Group (ALG), which describes itself as ‘a professional lobbying operation’. Its tour tracker showed $49,850 raised against a $150,000 goal on 11 October. The visible donations were mostly $10 to $100, many from regional Queensland and Western Australia.

ALG runs through two companies, set up in December 2025 and February 2026. ASIC records show one man is sole director, secretary and owner of both: Brisbane builder Scott Challen, who holds all 120 shares in each “beneficially”. He is also the public face of Australia Marches.

The tracker’s headline counter showed 10,435 kilometres “bought”, about 70 per cent of the target. At $10 a kilometre, the money raised covers about 4,985. The fine print explains the gap: sponsors of a whole leg are ‘credited the leg’s real distance’, not its dollar value. Challen confirmed both figures were correct on 11 October. Four days later, both had gone down: on the morning of 15 October the tracker showed $48,210 raised and 9,221 kilometres. Asked why both figures had fallen, Challen did not respond.

ALG’s website presents Challen alongside two other founding figures, podcaster Sam Bamford and Lachlan Lade. Neither appears on either company’s records. Challen says Bamford is a co-founder and ALG’s ‘public voice via the 2 Worlds Collide podcast’ and that Lade is its lobbyist, on the federal Lobbyists Register since 7 December 2025 with ALG’s membership company as his client. ‘Everyone is volunteering their time,’ Challen said.

Challen, a former RAAF airfield defence guard by his own account, holds a Queensland builder’s licence with a clean record. In a written response, Challen said the ‘$150,000 covers the rig, fuel, logistics’ and volunteers’ airfares, meals and accommodation, and that any shortfall ‘will be funded by me personally’. He said no salaries are drawn and no tour or membership money goes to businesses owned by the founders.

Challen described who owns or leases the truck as ‘operational details’. Asked whether ALG would publish accounts, he pointed to the live tracker and said average revenue per member is under $40 a month. ‘Our supporters know exactly what they are funding because it is them.’

In a clip posted on 13 October, Challen told an audience the aim is a “million-member lobby group” that walks into a politician’s office and says “we think you suck”.

The causes the money serves are spelt out on ALG’s policy page. It proposes capping migration at 80,000 people a year, with ‘cancellation and remigration of visa abuse candidates’. It targets migrants ‘from countries with dissimilar values, customs, or democratic systems’ and proposes a ‘UAE-style no-citizenship model’.

Challen said “remigration” means removing visa abusers, plus ‘a full stop on new immigration from countries with dissimilar values, customs or democratic systems’. Lade’s biography on the same site lists ‘demographic replacement’ among the things he openly challenges. Lade did not respond to questions.

The circuit

Howe and Challen share no companies, directors or addresses. What connects them is a podcast circuit in which the same figures host one another and which keeps returning to One Nation.

In May, Howe hosted Challen on her own podcast, The Dr Jo Show, introducing him as being from Australia Marches. The episode’s own description says the immigration discussion turned into a ‘heated debate’ about abortion and feminism. They don’t agree on everything; they amplify each other anyway. Challen says ALG has no financial or other relationship with Howe’s company.

The hub is Bamford’s 2 Worlds Collide, which he calls ‘one of Australia’s most recognised independent podcasts’. Bamford, a former army paratrooper, helped establish ALG.

Bamford's show has hosted:

• Challen three times (episodes 59, 74 and 122);
• Howe, and later Howe with her husband, James (episodes 87 and 102 — Bamford noted he removed two short clips from episode 102 at the couple’s request); and
• Mark Nicholson, One Nation’s lead candidate for Northern Metropolitan at the Victorian Election (episode 124).

Bamford’s solo episodes include ‘Labor’s War On One Nation Is Getting Dangerous’. In July, he spoke at a Millicent event alongside Liberal Senator Alex Antic. Bamford did not respond to questions.

Howe’s own path runs the same way. Ahead of South Australia’s March 2026 Election, she published a how-to-vote card putting One Nation first in the upper house. SA Labor then ended her membership. At this year’s Farrer by-election, she urged voters to preference Family First, One Nation and the Nationals 1-2-3. One Nation won the seat.

Senator Pauline Hanson has sat down with both hosts. Howe interviewed her on The Dr Jo Show in January (episode 161), covering sex-selective abortion and whether One Nation could hold the balance of power. Bamford hosted her for 85 minutes in February (episode 76), two months after ALG’s first company was registered.

Howe’s notes for a July episode describe Hanson arriving at her home ‘for spaghetti and meatballs’. In August, Howe congratulated Antic for his ‘bold, courageous work’ to ‘remake the Liberal Party’.

From abortion to consent

Howe’s methods have drawn as much attention as her money. After a late-term abortion bill she helped draft failed by one vote in October 2024, she posted images of seven women who opposed it under the label “baby-killers club”. The president of SA’s upper house then barred her from the chamber, citing MPs’ complaints of “threatening and intimidating tactics”. Howe denied the allegations and called the ban a ‘total abuse of power’.

The pattern has continued:

• May 2025: NSW Liberal Leader Mark Speakman told Parliament Howe had emailed promising a campaign for his removal if he backed an abortion bill.
• March 2026: Howe followed Labor MP Nat Cook around a Hurtle Vale polling booth after Cook declined an interview; staff locked the doors and police were called. Howe says she was exercising her right to question an elected official.
• May 2026: an image Howe posted as aborted “twin babies Emma and Ruth” was identified by experts as marsupial foetuses.

In September, Howe's campaign widened to sex education. On The Dr Jo Show, Howe and her husband discussed Chanel Contos’s Teach Us Consent program, which runs in Australian schools. “I just don’t do consent,” James Howe said. “I do marriage, man.”

The Howes say they were mocking consent lessons for young children and that critics have falsely accused James of advocating far worse. He has raised about $95,000 to sue media outlets and influencers for defamation.

A petition calling for Howe’s removal followed. Adelaide University’s vice-chancellor said it does not comment on individual staff, but that ‘consent must be freely and voluntarily given’. Within weeks, the same framework had been applied to an alleged gang rape at Cornell.

Simple answers, invisible books

The pressures this movement speaks to are real: rent, house prices, wages, the sense that politics isn’t listening. Population growth does add to housing demand and mainstream economists say so.

But the answers on offer are single-cause. Cap migration and housing gets cheaper. Save sex for marriage and the Cornell case never happens. Supply, tax settings, investor and short-stay demand, stagnant wages and decades of under-building rarely feature.

Those answers are sold with consumer marketing: ad buys that rival global brands, a live counter, supporters’ names scrolling on screen, a branded truck. They spread through podcast clips and algorithms that reward outrage, bypassing the newsrooms and party branches our disclosure laws were written for.

The leaders are successful people: a law professor, a business owner, a well-known podcaster. Much of the money comes, $10 at a time, from ordinary Australians, many in regional towns, acting in good faith on beliefs they hold.

Challen points instead to charities such as the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and the Australia Institute, which he says enjoy grants and tax concessions. Their revenues are public because, as registered charities, they report every year. Supporters of ALG and of Howe are entitled to the same visibility. So are voters whose ballots these campaigns set out to move.

Right now, with companies of one, neither can.

Dr Joanna Howe spent $61.8K on Meta ads in 90 days & $588,343 since 2020…that’s before other marketing. Who’s funding it? Anthony Whealy KC called for her SA election spending declarations to be investigated. Who’s paying to influence our elections? https://t.co/F3Znov2zwy

— Daisy. ️️ (@DaisyIsStarDust) September 30, 2026

Wayne Hawkins is the owner of Crisp N Sweet Bakery and Café in Claremont, Tasmania and an independent candidate for the Federal seat of Lyons.