A record breaking campaign near you!

By Maddy Blay, Victorian Greens

Long gone are the days of council being just roads, rates and rubbish - don’t know if you’ve heard, but council is cool now!

The Victorian Greens are this week boasting our 115th preselection for our local council campaign. We’re proud to humbly brag about our candidate cohort of 46% women, 30% gender diverse people and 49 candidates under 35.

While our local neighbourhoods continue to be targeted by corporations, property developers and, well, bad people with too much time on their hands, our movement is busier than ever doorknocking, letterboxing, fundraising, organising and mobilising to revolutionise your local council.

The last council election in 2020 felt like a fever dream to a lot of us. Most of our campaign was done in lockdown - no doorknocking, no market stalls, no face-to-face conversations. Lots of uncertainty. Lots and lots of phone banking.
And yet, despite some of the most challenging campaigning conditions we’ve experienced, we elected 36 councillors in Victoria.

So, you can imagine our excitement and energy, when 3 months out from the election this year, we are bigger than ever, having more meaningful conversations than ever and are on track to smash that record.

Victoria’s first Greens MP was a councillor, and over half our Victorian State MPs were councillors. With this election revving up communities from the city to the bush, to the ocean to the hills, we know that local council continues to be a hotbed of Greens success.

And it wouldn’t be a campaign season without campaigning at two levels of government at once! 

While we keep one foot solidly in smashing our council campaign, we have an eye on the next federal election as well. A bit of campaigning Twister if you will.

It’s not an overstatement to declare that Victoria is already in the midst of record-breaking Greens campaigns. Most recently, we announced our candidate for Casey, covering the Dandenong Ranges where local champion Dr Merran Blair will challenge the Liberal incumbent to be the Victorian Greens’ first regional MP in the federal parliament.

To the west, Huong Truong, organiser extraordinaire, is our candidate for Fraser, where the local community is building momentum at unprecedented rates. We’re continuing to build our federal candidate cohort, with exciting campaigns launching in Higgins, Gellibrand, Jagajaga and, well, the seat of Melbourne!

Meanwhile, Macnamara and Wills are giving enormous girl boss energy where Sonya Semmens and Samantha Ratnam are campaigning to WIN and win big.

We’re not taking an educated guess when we say that thousands of people are telling us they want different next election - we know it for sure, because our 12,000 meaningful interactions with voters since 2022 tells us exactly that.

Goals, smashed - and we don’t even have an election date yet. If you haven’t gotten involved yet, it’s never too late. Get in touch with us, and we’ll connect you with a record-breaking campaign near you.