2015-05-13
Josh Wyndham-Kidd (International Secretary)
One of the strengths of the Greens has always been that we're both a global movement and a global party. We're linked to people making waves in their own societies. That means that from election to election, there are people around the world looking to help us reach eligible voters that we'd otherwise struggle to reach — people travelling or living overseas, or people who don't know they can vote.
For the NSW state election, we knew that a small but crucial number of voters in our target seats would be voting from overseas. We knew that those seats could come down to a handful of votes, but in the usual Green fashion we didn't have much time or money to contact them.
Amazingly, Greens volunteers in eight countries — Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand and Sweden — stepped up to run mailing bees to those overseas undecideds. For the cost to the party of a few postage stamps and envelopes, and with the goodwill of Greens on three continents, those people heard from our most important candidates before election day and had all the information they needed to vote from overseas. As it turns out, our NSW crew got such amazing results that it's hard to say that overseas votes got our great MPs over the line, but I like to think that they helped.
Fast forward by a month and it was already time to start paying forward the favour. The U.K. has just gone through one of the most interesting election campaigns in decades, with a Green surge in membership and polling changing the game for us. We're now bigger in membership terms than the Liberal Democrats or UKIP, the Greens leader Natalie Bennett was in the election debates, and it was coming down to the wire for the current Green MP in Brighton, Caroline Lucas. We asked what we could do to help.
Early on I gave persuasion phone calling a go, as an experiment. The U.K. is my second home, so it didn't feel too bizarre to be sitting at my computer before 7am with a cuppa, wearing my Wales rugby jersey, speaking to undecided folk in Brighton. It was still fairly surreal. One of my first calls ended up being a detailed conversation about local and national politics in the U.K., and there might be a lesson in that: anyone who's really excited to do persuasion calls could probably do with being a local.
It turns out, though, that as Australian Greens we were uniquely placed to reach U.K. voters who didn't even know they could vote yet. Australian citizens are eligible to vote while in the U.K., but it's very rare that they do — even when they've been living there for years. We sent an email from Natalie Bennett to our supporter lists, asking them to register to vote Green and to forward information on to anyone they knew living in the U.K. — or British citizens in Australia who wanted a postal vote. Again, it's hard to measure this one, but from the flurry of responses thanking Natalie for the information and saying that they'd registered to vote Green — we know we made a difference.
Coming into the final days of the campaign, the key for Brighton was making sure that the thousands upon thousands of people who'd pledged to vote Green actually went to the polls. The British voting system has many quirks, and voluntary voting has to be one of the strangest — but here was something we could really help with at last. Around 20 volunteers assembled in four cities in Australia on polling day (or polling night, for us), to call Green supporters in Brighton and let them know where to vote. The excitement at what we were doing was amazing.
The election results were huge: a quadrupling of the Greens vote across the U.K., beating the Lib Dems in more than 100 seats, coming second in seats in Bristol, Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield — and retaining Caroline Lucas in Brighton with an 11% swing towards her. The results are a credit to the Greens in the U.K., who have been holding the line against austerity and for a just society for decades. They'll need that kind of active, mobilised base for the next five years of a Tory government bent on the kind of neoliberal agenda we're experiencing here. But I like to think that the results in Brighton are, in some small way, also a credit to people in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Canberra who spent an evening of their time reminding Brits to go and do their democratic duty.
I'd call that a successful experiment. A huge thanks to everyone on the team who made it happen, from our phonebank organisers and volunteers to the communications coordinators who got Natalie's email to thousands of people.
Canada has an election in October, of course. And the Greens are poised to do very well. So if you're keen to make history again — or you're an Australian Green living overseas who'd like to help campaign — please, get in touch.