Brisbane’s new Greens MPs talk about the moments they “flipped” voters – the driveway conversions of climate unbelievers or hostile folks who had only ever supported the major parties.
The party’s “social work” style doorknocking campaign – focused on building relationships and listening to voters’ material concerns rather than spruiking – proved wildly successful in Brisbane, culminating in the capture of three federal seats.
Now, the Greens are planning to vastly expand the strategy’s footprint, to take on political contests in the outer suburbs.
“Once you have that experience [of successfully engaging a voter], you realise that the only barrier to expanding our representation is our capacity to organise,” says Max Chandler-Mather, the architect of the strategy and the new federal MP for Griffith.
“What’s proven with our campaign methods is that where we’re able to do that sort of community organising and door-knocking, our vote surges.
“That organisational foundation we’ve built is going to allow us to project out across the state quickly.”
Bringing the Greens’ brand of environmental socialism to the aspirational suburbs might sound unrealistic – these are the “battlers” who backed John Howard, the “quiet Australians” who delivered Scott Morrison his 2019 election victory, the “working families” forever courted by Labor and the “forgotten” folks at the heart of Peter Dutton’s Liberal recalibration.
But potential Greens voters?
For the three Greens MPs who won Brisbane seats at the 2022 election – Chandler-Mather in Griffith, Elizabeth Watson-Brown in Ryan and Stephen Bates in Brisbane – the evidence they collected at people’s front doors has opened up all sorts of possibilities that might otherwise (like the idea of winning three Queensland seats) be dismissed as fantasy.
The Greens’ success was built partly on the political mobilisation of the renter class, but also service sector workers, people worried about the cost of living and families with concerns about their children’s financial future. Often climate was not the main topic of conversation.
“Socially, that suburban layer is crucial to us,” Chandler-Mather says. “This concept that we should be getting our fair share from mining corporations, that billionaires and corporations should pay their fair share in tax – when you speak to people in suburban areas and rural and regional communities – is broadly popular.
“The key component of all of our cost-of-living policies is abolishing means testing. This concept that you have a social right to dental care, you have a social right to free university education, allows us to build very broad-ranging class coalitions because you appeal to a politics that Labor used to represent but no longer does.”
Bates says middle-class voters – in areas of his seat that were considered Labor or Liberal strongholds – were mostly “excited” about the idea of universal social services.
“What I found people resented was paying their taxes for something that is so heavily means-tested they’ll never be able to access it. People feel that class resentment,” he says. “They feel like they’re paying into the system, but not getting out of the system what they need or what they want.”
‘People wanted hope’
Watson-Brown, an architect whose electorate stretches from Brisbane’s inner west to some semi-rural areas, says her interactions with voters became almost “like a counselling session”.
“Every time we spoke to someone at a door, we could draw a direct line to the challenges they were experiencing in their life to what the Greens could offer in terms of help and hope,” she says. “That was the absolute power of it. People wanted hope. People have been beaten around the head for quite a few years now.”
Central to the campaign was what Chandler-Mather describes as a “feedback loop” that attempted to take language from community conversations and embed it in the campaign.
“Volunteers often see words or phrases or ways of describing things they’ve used end up in our political advertising,” he says. “One of the reasons that it cuts through so much is that it’s language that people in the community use.
“The one slogan we used a lot in Griffith was ‘nothing changes if nothing changes’. That only emerged because some random person said it to me trying to describe what I was trying to say. It worked really well.”
Do they sometimes feel a bit like the Mormons, turning up on people’s doorsteps?
“No, because it’s never, it’s never superimposition,” says Watson-Brown.
“Our Labor dude was lurching towards people [at polling booths] saying things like, ‘help me deliver my comprehensive plan’.
“We’re asking what you care about, what’s going on in your life. It’s deeply meaningful.”
The true effectiveness of the strategy seems to be that the major parties haven’t yet worked out how to respond.
Attack lines have repeatedly proved ineffective. In Queensland state politics, Labor argued that the electorate of South Brisbane would be better served by a progressive voice in government – the former deputy premier Jackie Trad – than a rock-thrower from the outside.
During the Griffith campaign, Labor rolled out posters claiming that only it could rid the country of Scott Morrison.
“What was implicit in those sorts of messages was ceding the entire political ground on the platform,” says Chandler-Mather.
“There was an acceptance that our platform was better. We didn’t have to counter severe misrepresentations about how preferential voting works, we just had to say ‘dental into Medicare’ or ‘free uni and Tafe’. The relentless positivity of our campaign comes precisely because people are fighting for something they believe in.”
A template for further expansion
It’s tempting to view the Green wave in Queensland as something that will continue to grow, as it has since the 2016 election of Brisbane councillor Jonathan Sri, two state MPs and now three representatives in Canberra.
But there are risks, too. The Greens still cop criticism for the 2009 decision to vote against Labor’s carbon pollution reduction scheme; and some claim they bear responsibility for the subsequent 13 years of fraught climate politics.
The former member for Griffith, Labor’s Terri Butler, conceded last week by wishing her successor luck in “in delivering on all the promises he has made”.
The message was clear. Campaigning is one thing, especially when you have no chance of being in government. But once you’re in, people are going to want their problems solved.
In all three Brisbane electorates won by the Greens, airport noise was a significant issue. Do voters now expect them to achieve something?
“They expect us to drive that campaign,” Chandler-Mather says.
“People asked us all the time, ‘What happens if you don’t get into the balance of power?’. We were very open about the fact that political change takes time, but at the very least it starts with representatives who are committed to driving community campaign building.
“People are expecting us to fight for it. People understand that these things are difficult, they take time. But they also realise they’ll never happen if you elect representatives who are opposed to the things they want.”
The foothold of three federal MPs’ offices now gives the Greens a base from which to spread their campaigning. It acts as a sort of proof of concept for progressive Labor voters – that Greens can win contests and effectively shift the political debate. The fact the Queensland Labor party has responded by underlining its progressive and environmental credentials in some ways only proves the point that Greens’ wins can shift the dial.
“That foundation of wins builds confidence that the Greens are able to win,” Chandler-Mather says.
“There are two component parts I always feel to winning a vote, and that is relating on material concerns, but also confidence that you’re voting for a political movement that is capable of eventually building some form of power. Those wins begat wins, and they build confidence that that next layer will come to us.
“This can be a template model for what we can expand across the country. So for us, the wins are foundation stones upon which to move to the next stage of party organising.”
