Adelaide Airport removed several conservation group ads from its billboards just before the Labor Party's national conference, while initially keeping ads from the gas industry up.

The Murray-Darling Conservation Alliance (MDCA) had paid for a 'Save the Murray' ad to run on an electronic billboard at the airport. MDCA co-director Craig Wilkins confirmed the ad was supposed to run from 13 July to 26 July, but it was gone by the morning of 22 July. The advertising agency JCDecaux told MDCA that Adelaide Airport considered the ad 'too political' The Guardian.

The Bob Brown Foundation had the same thing happen. Its ads were running in four spots at the airport from 20 July to 26 July, and were due to be taken down from noon on 23 July. JCDecaux told the foundation that Adelaide Airport asked for the removal and, as the landowner, gets the final say on what appears on its property The Guardian.

A third group, the Adelaide Park Lands Association, had its 'Stop the Chop' billboard for the airport's main exit turned down entirely. The ad was meant to go up on a Tuesday, but the airport rejected it the Friday before. Association president Mat Monti is named on the campaign The Guardian.

A spokesperson for Adelaide Airport said the airport has rules about political advertising on its land, and ads that break those rules will be removed.

The timing is awkward. Labor politicians, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, were arriving at Adelaide Airport for the Labor Party's national conference that weekend. Conservation ads disappearing while party members walk past is not a good look for anyone, least of all the airport.

The selective use of the 'too political' rule is where this gets harder to swallow. After the conservation ads were pulled, ads from Santos, the Minerals Council of Australia, and Independent Schools Australia were still running at the airport. An 'Australia runs on natural gas' ad was also on display. That ad includes a political authorisation message from Samantha McCulloch, the boss of Australian Energy Producers. In Australia, electoral law requires political ads to carry an authorisation message, a formal tag saying who is behind the ad. So the gas industry's ad had a legal political tag on it, but it passed the airport's rules while 'Save the Murray' did not.

The Guardian understands the 'Australia runs on natural gas' ad has since been stopped too, but only after the inconsistency was first reported.

Bob Brown called Adelaide Airport's removal of the environmental ads 'Trump-lite behaviour' and urged Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to insist the ads be put back up immediately.

In my view, the core issue is not whether a private landowner can set its own advertising rules. It clearly can. The problem is applying them inconsistently. When a conservation ad gets pulled for being 'too political' but a gas industry ad with a formal political tag stays up, the rule looks less like a fair standard and more like the airport picking favourites. Taking the gas ad down later does not fix the gap; it just confirms the original decision was hard to justify on principle.

The broader context here is that Australia has no consistent national rule for what counts as 'political' advertising in places that are privately owned but open to the public, like airports, shopping centres, and train stations. Each operator sets its own rules and applies them however it sees fit, usually with very little transparency. That is exactly how this situation played out: a conservation group loses its paid advertising spot while an industry group's politically tagged ad stays up until the inconsistency becomes embarrassing.

The Labor Party conference makes the stakes sharper. When senior government figures walk through an airport concourse with no environmental ads but plenty of resources industry ads, the message writes itself, whether the airport meant it or not. Whether Albanese responds to Bob Brown's call is another question. Federal governments have generally stayed out of private airport advertising decisions, and there is no sign that will change here.

What this episode does is put the spotlight on JCDecaux and Adelaide Airport's process for deciding what ads can run. The rules exist, but how they are applied is unclear. Conservation groups paid for a set advertising period and had their ads pulled halfway through, at a time of maximum political traffic, with no real explanation beyond a vague reference to 'political' content. The gas industry ad, which also carried a political authorisation, was left alone until the gap was pointed out. If the rule is genuinely neutral, it should be applied that way. If it is not, the airport should say so plainly. Right now, it is doing neither.