2016-06-12
Dan Loden
In 2008 progressive politics collectively punched the air with the successful Presidential campaign of a previously little known Senator from Illinois. President Barak Obama ran a remarkably successful campaign. But what many people do not know is the story of how this result was achieved. In both of his elections Obama received slightly more than 50% of the vote, but won the states that matter, easily winning as president, supported by a highly successful grass roots campaign. The Greens have the ability to replicate this campaign model, winning where it matters and converting our nationwide vote of ~10-15% into successful lower house results.
In 2010, Adam Bandt changed Australian politics forever by being the first Australian Greens Party MP to be elected to Australia's House of Representatives. Utilising Obama's campaign model, we deployed a small army of highly effective autonomous volunteers across the seat of Melbourne and won.
In 2013, in an effort to push out the Greens, the Liberal party preferenced Labor in Melbourne. This left Adam in a difficult position. He would need at least a 5% additional swing to the Greens in Melbourne to retain his seat. The Labor Party had more resources, more money and stronger media coverage across the electorate. All the political commentators expected the "Green experiment" to be short lived. However Adam prevailed, and despite the adverse Liberal preference flows, received 55% of the two party preferred vote. A huge grass roots election campaign saw volunteers door knock the whole electorate twice, enabling a ground swell of support behind Adam to counteract the preference deal.
The Australian Greens show integrity by continuing to be a community and member based organisation, by putting people before organisations and businesses. As a result we struggle to compete with the major parties in political donations, TV and radio air time or visibility in the general media. Our unique competitive advantage over the major parties is our volunteers, who have the passion and drive to get out there and engage in one-on-one conversations with their neighbours and friends. Conversation by conversation and vote by vote across our country we are turning key electorates Green.
In WA we used this campaigning model to great success in the Scott Ludlam by-election and created this campaign structure for our Curtin lower house campaign. Since December 2016 Curtin have built a team of leaders who now are operating autonomously engaging a passionate team of volunteers to run door knocks and phone banks throughout the election campaign. We ran 3-5 events every week enabling anyone who was interested to find a convenient opportunity to participate. Our 10 team leaders support roughly one event a fortnight and in between re-engage their volunteer team for future campaign activities. Our teams are autonomous but integrated, mutually supporting each other's activities. This campaign model turns one time Greens voters into reliable Greens voters and reliable Greens voters into volunteers. It is central to how we build our movement. We will use this energy, momentum and capacity to flow through to the state election in March 2017, where the electorates are one-fifth the size and there many winnable lower house seats.
In 2017 we will use our existing demographic information to maximise the effectiveness of our conversations, only engaging those people who should be voting Green and are open to persuasion. This means we walk past half the houses but make our engagement twice as effective. Labor needs 10 seats to form government, if the Greens are able to win one or two lower house seats we will have the potential to influence the new WA Government and start to implement our fantastic policies. This will be the first step of many towards our Greener future. Look forward to seeing you on the campaign trail.
Photo: Curtin Greens Judy Blyth, Stephanie Hayward and Chilla Bulbeck in action Niki MacLennon