“I’m reasonably good with different fonts,” the failed United Australia Party candidate, Craig Kelly, told the federal court on Monday.
“But that had a special name I can’t recall,” he said, when asked to name the typeface used on the unmissable black and yellow advertisements his party used at the 2022 election.
The Australian Electoral Commission has taken Kelly to court over the authorisation lines on his corflutes and sandwich boards. Authorisation lines are the fine print at the bottom of election material, or the squeaky voice at the end of ads that says “authorised by Clive Palmer”, for example.
The AEC is arguing that size really matters.
An early print run used 8pt font, while a later print run upped it to 24pt. The AEC says the 8pt font was not prominent enough, and continued to be used up to the election.
For hours, the court heard detailed arguments about the importance of font size, where someone might have to stand to see said font, whether someone passing by in a car going 60km/h might be able to see it, and so on.
Christopher Tran, the AEC’s barrister, grilled Kelly on how much attention he paid to the size of the lettering on his corflutes as he battled to keep his Sydney seat of Hughes. Kelly said he’d left it to the “professional experience” of the designers, although he also said he regularly discussed authorisations with them, saying: “If in doubt, authorise it.”
That’s a lesson he learned from his stint at the Liberal party, he said.
Kelly’s barrister, Christopher Ward, said he would argue that all of the parts of the authorisations – including name and address – were complied with, that they were “reasonably prominent” and that the authorisation was the same font size that Kelly had used on Liberal corflutes, and that “exactly the same criticism” could be made of other corflutes put up for the 2022 election.
Kelly gave an insight into just how those posters were designed, saying he started out with a UAP template but made his own adjustments.
“I wanted the ‘Craig Kelly’ to be … more dominant on the sign than the ‘United Australia Party’,” he said.
“At that time the UAP font had ‘United Australia Party’ in very large letters. I had the advantage of being a sitting member of parliament, and I thought if I was going to get re-elected it would be on my own name rather than on the party’s brand.
“So I decreased the size of the party’s logo and increased the size of my name.
“Even though it was remarkably unsuccessful.”
Kelly, the self-proclaimed next prime minister of Australia, lost his seat at the election after picking up less than 8% of the primary vote.
It wasn’t just the font size that let him down.
The UAP founder, Clive Palmer, spent close to $100m at the election, the biggest spend in Australian history, but the party failed to get to even 5% of the vote – although it did nab a Senate spot.
The case is continuing.
