Meet the Baby Boomers answering the call of activist group GetUp!

Retired Baby Boomers flock to learn political interference from GetUp! activists, writes Sheradyn Holderhead.

The fervour in the room at the Manly Pavilion would be at home in a church as a crowd of more than 400 mostly elderly Warringah voters learns from GetUp! activists how they can help “turf” Tony Abbott.

The new recruits clap and cheer as they learn how the left wing activist group plans to overthrow the former prime minister from his blue ribbon Liberal seat on the affluent Northern Beaches.

GetUp volunteers gathered at Manly Pavilion with GetUp! to ramp up the campaign to oust Tony Abbott.

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They are told to tell personal stories about why they want Mr Abbott out of parliament while they perform some of the 64,000 doorknocks and scripts, even given examples of what to say.

“Tony Abbott said women would be happy with lower electricity prices because they have to iron their husbands’ shirts. I felt insulted.

“So did my husband, who irons his own shirts!”

GetUp volunteers gathered at Manly Pavilion with GetUp! to ramp up the campaign to oust Tony Abbott.

How do residents in Warringah know if the person banging on their door has a husband who irons his own shirt — or even has a husband at all, or if they are just regurgitating what one of the greatest political disrupters in Australia has convinced them to say? The means justify the end for GetUp! which has adopted a model of activism that isn’t dissimilar in format to religious observance and targeted, in recent years, only at conservative politicians.

Followers evangelise at doors and on phones and they will be encouraged to gather at fellow activist’s homes for pizza in the same way a Bible study group might meet.

About once a month GetUp! will conduct a phone blitz and members were encouraged to hold their own call “parties”.

“Like a Tupperware party hosts invite other members to their house or a local town hall to make calls,” GetUp! chief Paul Oosting said.

“We want it to be fun. Making calls can be daunting for anyone so people might make calls for an hour and then spend an hour debriefing over pizza.”

Balgowlah resident Libby Boyd, 66, said she was attracted to join GetUp! because now she had retired, her time was “freed up to devote energy to making the world a better place”.

The outfit claims it is acting in support of independents but its co-ordinated strike on Abbott and a raft of other conservative Liberals across the country appears to be an effort to encourage regime change and the ultimate winner of GetUp!’s activism will be Bill Shorten.

GetUp! and its status which keeps it free from many of the conditions that bind political parties has drawn the ire of the government.

At the Manly Pavilion those gathered on Wednesday night were not necessarily the kind of people that come to mind when thinking about left wing activists. Retired teacher Colleen O’Brien, of Manly Vale, who has been a member for about a year, described the GetUp! membership as generational “bookends” — people with time on their hands. Acclaimed author Tom Keneally was in the crowd.

Author Tom Keneally among GetUp volunteers at Manly Pavilion.

“There’s a lot of Baby Boomers. We were the protest generation and we see the effect of protests where a community steps in to make change,” the 65-year-old said.

While GetUp! appears to be an eclectic mix of retirees and university students, it is a highly professional and well-oiled machine complete with its own spin doctors.

Founded in 2005 to “keep the Howard Government accountable”, by July 2007 it had been handed more than
$1 million from its membership. Little more than a decade later GetUp! now boasts more than
1 million members and in the last financial year amassed a $9.8 million war chest.

Oosting, who is national director, says he understands that the founders’ decision to incorporate rather than take on charitable status was to remain free of constraint in its campaigning activities. They didn’t want to be banned from handing out how to vote cards or other rules imposed by the government of the day.

GetUp! is regularly accused of links to Labor and the Greens, having in the past received large union donations, but Oosting says the organisation is “fiercely independent”.

It was the subject of an Australian Electoral Commission review after complaints from Coalition MPs that it should be classified as an “associated entity” like trade unions and some think tanks, which would require stricter financial disclosures. But the AEC concluded there was “no information or available evidence to show that GetUp! meets any of the six grounds” to find that it that operates “wholly, or to a significant extent, for the benefit of one or more registered political parties”.

GetUp! shared their cheatsheet for doorknocking.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who has been organisation’s enemy number one, said the public needed to understand who GetUp! really were.

“I think there are lot of people who donate a few dollars to GetUp! because they think they’re a party or an organisation interested in environmental causes or save the whales,” he says. “They’ve never supported a Liberal or National candidate. The reality is they’re an extreme left wing organisation.”

In 2017/18 GetUp! members contributed 131,056 individual donations contributing to the total of $9.8 million — up 20 per cent from the year prior.

Based on past trends that show GetUp! enjoys a boost in donations around federal elections, the activist organisation may raise as much as $12 million this year.

Oosting argues GetUp! is extremely “transparent” because while only obliged to disclose donations of more than $13,800 to the Australian Electoral Commission, all donations greater than $10,000 were put up on the group’s website within 30 days.

Already a dozen “large” donors have thrown in more than $1 million in total to the group’s coffers.

Many volunteers were clearly targeting Tony Abbott.

The largest donation came from the Sunrise Project, which acts as a go-between collecting cash from donors and then handing it on to organisations “in line with our objectives”, to provide $495,000 for “climate justice”.

But exactly where that cash was raised from has not been publicly reported.

Just days before a January 1 cut-off under new federal laws banning foreign political donations to “political actors” which applies to GetUp!, it declared a $95,000 injection from the European Climate Foundation earmarked for “research”. It has also accepted more than $350,000 over the years from the Norman Rothfield Peace and Justice Fund, which advocates for the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories.

GetUp!, however, has not campaigned on the issue of Palestine.

University of Sydney political sociology professor Ariadne Vromen says the organisation pioneered digital campaigning in Australia with online petitions and targeting politicians through email.

GetUp! claims to have more than 1 million members who mostly are counted for signing online petitions or sending emails to MPs.

GetUp volunteers gathered at Manly Pavilion with GetUp! to ramp up the campaign to oust Tony Abbott.

But since Oosting took the reins as national director in 2015 he has shifted the focus to make direct contact with voters through phone canvassing and door knocking.

As Warringah campaign director Django Merope-Synge explained to members this week, talking to locals “on their doorsteps” and reading their body language was key to influencing their vote.

Volunteers were trained in how to phone canvass and doorknock, handed scripts with leading questions such as “do you think Tony Abbott is good or bad for the country?”, and suggested his Liberal colleagues would also want him out of parliament. Members also conduct mass phone surveys to collect data which forms part of the campaign strategy.

“They show you how to be an activist. I’ve learned the skills to telephone people and door knock,” O’Brien says.

“You end up ad libbing and you work out your own version (of the script). You have to adapt all the time because you never know just what the person on the other end of the phone will say.”

Oosting says that to boost the number of people phone canvassing, GetUp! had developed software that allowed people to do it from the comfort of their home.

He says it is a change from more centralised campaigning during the 2016 election, that was working well.

Vromen says there has also been a distinct change in target.

“Recently they have really focused on this idea of ‘hard right’ politicians and marginal seat campaigning. Before that they really focused on their core issues climate change, mental health refugees,” she says. “The shift appears to have attracted a lot of new supporters and new donors.”

GetUp volunteers gathered at Manly Pavilion with GetUp! to ramp up the campaign to oust Tony Abbott.

Oosting says the decision to target the “hard right” came about because they were the “road blocks to progress on our core issues. It was a shift I made. People are really frustrated with this guy Tony Abbott who is driving down investment in renewables.”

Oosting says GetUp! had a significant win at the last election when Liberal Andrew Nikolic was ousted from the seat of Bass in Tasmania. He also took credit for the swing against Dutton in his Queensland seat of Dickson.

“It was double the national average,” he says, adding that GetUp! also played a role in unseating Liberals in the SA seat of Mayo and had a significant impact in the Wentworth by-election.

But Vromen says a number of factors are usually at play, so it was hard to know which was the breakthrough. She says in Bass, Labor and the unions also ran hard.

“GetUp! is fortunate with this election that the opinion polls are not showing the government is much of a chance. It’s much harder for them to be successful in closer elections,” she suggests.