Contest Lens tracks paid political advertising and disclosed political contributions in one electoral contest — the Secret Harbour by-election of 29 August 2026 — and publishes what it finds each day. It exists because the money spent trying to influence a single seat is scattered across separate public registers, in formats that make it invisible in practice even though it is public in principle.
Contest Lens is built and run by Sean Clarke, independently, from Perth, Western Australia.
No political affiliation. This project is not affiliated with, funded by, endorsed by, or run on behalf of any political party, candidate, campaign, lobby group or media organisation. Nobody has been given advance access, editorial input, or the ability to have anything removed.
How it is funded. It is self-funded and costs very little to run. It carries no advertising and no sponsorship, and it sells nothing. If that ever changes, this page will say so before the change takes effect.
There is no editorial layer anywhere in this system. Every advertiser — party, candidate, union, lobby group, media outlet or neutrally-named page — passes through the same schema, the same thresholds and the same wording. Spending is grouped by the funder named in each ad's own "Paid for by" disclosure, which is a fact printed on the ad, rather than by any judgement about whom an ad appears to help. Candidates who are not advertising are listed alongside those who are, because their absence is a finding too.
All four are public records. Nothing here is scraped from private sources, and no personal data about individual voters is collected — see the methodology page for what that excludes and why.
If something here is wrong, please tell me and I will fix it.
Email Contest Lens with the page, the figure, and what you believe it should say.
Corrections are made visibly. When a published figure or claim turns out to be wrong, the correction is noted on the methodology page rather than edited in silently — this has already happened once, when an early version of this site described the disclosure timetable using federal rules that do not apply in Western Australia. A silent edit costs more credibility than the original error.
Candidates, parties and advertisers are welcome to contact me about how they are represented. To be clear about what that does and does not mean: factual errors will be corrected promptly, and accurately reported public information will not be removed on request.
This site covers paid advertising on Meta platforms only. Letterboxing, signage, local press, radio, door-knocking and advertising on other platforms are all invisible to it. Spend figures are ranges rather than exact amounts, and daily activity is inferred rather than reported. A candidate showing no advertising here may be campaigning hard by other means. The methodology page sets out every limitation in detail, and reading it is the honest way to use this site.