The Coalition government may be in high spirits after an election victory, but its penchant to shoot itself in the foot can’t be underestimated. That’s exactly what will happen if an ill-advised plan to counter the influence of progressive activist group GetUp by restricting polling booth campaigners and volunteers to only those attached to political parties and independent candidates goes ahead.

The move comes after a targeted GetUp campaign against a hit-list of conservative MPs including Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton at the federal election raised the ire of the Liberals, who now accuse GetUp of effectively being a front for the Greens and Labor party despite professing to be independent.

Loading

It will also impact other third-party groups including unions who pushed the change-the-rules campaign, as well as right-leaning advocacy groups like the Australian Taxpayers’ Alliance, who run issue and policy-based campaigns driven by the concerns of their members.

Restricting polling booth campaigners to party or candidate-attached individuals will undermine democracy and entrench the influence of well-resourced major parties by effectively limiting campaigning and voter information to generic how-to-vote cards. These offer little scope for substantive policy or stance information that’s possible through the usage of candidate ''scorecards''.