Between March 2010 and March 2011 there will be a federal election and four state elections in Australia, and various Greens state parties are beginning to gear up to preselect candidates for the Senate, Legislative Councils and the occasional winnable lower house seat*.
Among these, five winnable Senate seats, an MLC spot in South Australia, a number of possible MLC spots in Victoria, most of the NSW Legislative Council contingent and a few key seats in inner Sydney and Melbourne will be open preselection contests, with no incumbent running.
Hopefully this will mean that, in 2009, there will be spirited contests that will set much of the Greens direction for the next few years. Most of these races will be conducted as direct ballots of all Greens members in the electorate, giving candidates a first chance to show their campaign skills and begin the general election campaign early.
I have a few pieces of advice to offer to all candidates that should hopefully strengthen all of our candidates and help develop links with the lefty online community, which will be helpful come election time. Scott Ludlam’s excellent work on the internet filter has helped pull much of the online progressive movement away from Kevin07 towards the Greens. By genuinely engaging with twitterers and bloggers, we can then call on them when it comes to the crunch.
Join Twitter now. Follow some interesting political bloggers and opinion-setters, then settle in for the long haul. Its okay to occasionally just post media releases or link to Greens news stories, but its so much more. Just include interesting stories, your opinions on the news of the day (even of it has nothing to do with the election you are running for), and engaging in debates on Twitter.
Its amazing how often you hear progressive twitterers heap praise on Malcolm Turnbull, while Kevin Rudd has had scorn heaped on him. Turnbull uses a conversational style, talks about his day and engages with people around him. He takes photos and sends them straight to his followers. You feel like hes talking to you personally, while Rudd’s twitter feed looks like his daily official diary.
Dont wait for the campaign to start. Join now, develop a following and those people will listen to you with a more sympathetic ear come election time.
Blogging
Having a blog doesnt just mean posting your media responses on your website in reverse order. It doesnt even mean using blog software like Wordpress.
There’s a couple of key aspects of a blog that genuinely engages with the blogosphere:
- Don’t just regurgitate your media releases and speeches. Engage in debates going on on other blogs with posts written specifically for the medium.
- Don’t just talk about your agenda, whether it is the policies you’re campaigning on, or your specific electorate, or the preselection/election specifically. Spend maybe 10% of your time talking about that. Show you have an interest in broader political issues and engage in whatever is going on at the time.
- Link, link and link again. You can write brilliant articles and no-one will read them if you pretend that it is just any old pamphlet. Look for news articles and other bloggers talking about the same topic as you. Link to them, quote them, respond to them (either positively or negatively). In response, you’ll get linked to and draw an audience.
As far as some good examples, check out Andrew Bartlett, who was probably the only MP to become a full member of the blogosphere during his term in office, and the NZ Greens’ FrogBlog. Indeed, there’s no reason why state Green parties can’t set up their own blogs on the FrogBlog model. Pick a couple of active members and give them the freedom to do their own political blog.
The Australian Greens’ GreensBlog moved in that direction for the 2007 election, but has since been swallowed up by the GreensMPs website and no longer resembles an active blog. There’s no reason why state Green parties can’t move ahead on their own, starting active blogs on their own.
Youtube
While Youtube is in a different league to Twitter and blogging, posting your own Youtube videos on your blog tends to liven up your blog. Posting a Youtube video laying out your case for preselection, as long as it doesn’t slag off your opponents and is in a positive light, can demonstrate you understand new media.
On top of that, I reckon it would be useful to see meet-the-candidate forums recorded and posted on YouTube. At the moment many preselections maintain the illusion that it is a private process, with access to these forums limited to members. When you consider the large number of members having a vote in upper house preselections, anything controversial will leak out anyway, so candidates should expect anything critical or negative they might say to leak publicly and thus potentially damage the party.
Posting candidate debates on YouTube would grab a lot more attention, and I believe demonstrating the grassroots democratic method of preselecting our representatives can hopefully encourage more progressive people to join the party and pay attention, long before the election campaign proper.
*The Greens will be preselecting for open seats in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia and the ACT for the Senate in 2010. I’m not sure how South Australia preselects its Senate candidates, and the ACT is currently working on its processes, but the three big states all use direct ballots of the membership. There will also be one seat up for grabs in the South Australian Legislative Council, as well as Lee Rhiannon’s seat in the NSW Legislative Council and as many as three empty seats in the NSW upper house at the 2011 election. The Greens could also win seats in any of the five Victorian Legislative Council regions without an incumbent Greens MLC.
Im not as sure as you are about the advisability of political blogging for intending candidates. While youre right to some extent – especially with Twitter, where Ive seen a few good examples in action, blogging is a bit of a risky beast.
Theres a hell of a lot of examples of would-be candidates from most parties whove fallen on their arse because they said something vaguely controversial on their blog and got in the press. For every Andrew Bartlett whos managed to make blogging successful, theres a few like the Labor bloke in Gympie at the state election – and while the Greens are probably less trigger-happy with dumping candidates, its still an easy way to bad press.
A very large portion of the Australian population do not gather political information from the internet. Internet based communications should be applied to broad scale campaigns like the senate. HoR seats and state electorates need to be more targeted. If it turns out that a large proportion of the people in your particular electorate gather information that way, then great. But if not, then you will be wasting your time.
“If it turns out that a large proportion of the people in your particular electorate gather information that way, then great. But if not, then you will be wasting your time.”
When we’re talking about seats in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne then you’ll find that being online helps a lot.
Just dont publish (identifiable) photos of your genitals on the internet. Although this will not stop you being preselected for Family First.
Remember? Thats not my penis
http://www.smh.com.au/news/federalelection2007news/family-firsts-member-for-nowhere/2007/10/28/1193555533377.html
I cried with amusement at the time.
On the main page, the ‘Read more…’ link has a ’strong’ tag in front but is missing the ‘/strong’ tag after. Everything on the front page after this post is in bold text as a result.
@Oz I’m not sure about the ‘a lot’ part. Knowing the QLD Greens website stats from the state election, the number of so called unique visitors to the website over the whole campaign was less than 1/2 the number of enrolled voters in the smallest electorate. So I can imagine it having some effect, but not an earth-shattering one.
Rebecca, I think if you are aware that you plan to run for office some day soon, and bear that in mind when blogging and twittering, then you’ll be fine. The cases of people getting caught out are usually either idiots or people running for unwinnable seats who obviously weren’t planning to run. I remember in my first election in 2004, the Liberal candidate in my seat of Werriwa got caught out in some way (can’t remember the details). But he was a 25-year-old Liberal running against the Labor leader, he probably got drafted at the last minute.
GhostWhoVotes, thanks. Fixed it. That’s happened to me before and didn’t realise. I guess the “read more” thing got stuck in the middle of a section that was bolded.
Austin, I don’t see online organising, blogging, twittering etc, as primarily about convincing voters. It’s an organising tool. There’s a lot of non-aligned progressive tech-nerds out there in the blogosphere. If you can get them onside (and the net filter has certainly helped) then they can help you organise better and develop your strength on the ground.
Also, if we assume that our membership is now too large for members to know all the candidates personally in preselections, you need another method of campaigning to the voters in a preselection. The mainstream media is too expensive and too scattershot to be effective, but setting up a blog and twittering early can reach Greens members and help you in your preselection. If all the candidates do that, it will result in a more informed membership and a better process.
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stronga href=#comment-1336 rel=nofollowRebecca/a :/strong
Theres a hell of a lot of examples of would-be candidates from most parties whove fallen on their arse because they said something ..
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I reckon if would be candidates say something dumb and it costs them then thats great. After all who wants actual candidates or MPs who are prone to to mis-speaking?
Pre-selection processes that are accurate tests of the skills required to make a successful candidates yield good candidates. Politics is tough stuff and if you make a dumb enougn f***up it can cost bigtime. We dont want fools sitting in the big chairs.
On the other hand, you have to have a look at what they actually say.
The guy in QLD pretty much just defended the right to free speech, but he was dropped because they were worried his comments could be misconstrued as defending sexism.