While Liberals squabble over money, Labor and Greens begin campaigning for 2018 state election
AS state Liberals squabble over money, their opponents are on the phones and on the road with the next election in mind, writes Matt Johnston.
Opinion
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EVERYONE expects the state election next year to be tight. Labor currently holds government by a handful of seats that they won by a few thousand votes.
So it wasn’t surprising that this month, about 500 days until that next election, the ALP was sending out operatives in red shirts to target swinging voters in key seats.
This week, Greens campaigning also hit the headlines when a couple of young ALP members were caught “infiltrating” a Greens team to steal voter data.
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So, where are the Liberals campaigning? Some in the party don’t want to answer that question, particularly while some MPs are, to quote one who has remained in Australia, “gallivanting around the world”. But the other reason some avoid the conversation is because they don’t want to talk about money.
The latest episode in this saga saw bankers rebuff the party when it tried to borrow more money against its Melbourne HQ.
This issue erupted when party president Michael Kroger and fundraising body the Cormack Foundation started brawling over donations and came after former state director Damien Mantach was jailed for stealing party money.
One MP said the longer the issue dragged on, the harder it would be to win back government.
“The bottom line is modern-day campaigning requires substantial amounts of cash to run,” the MP said. Labor was “further advanced than us”, the MP said, and expanding its campaigning to seats such as Morwell and Bass.
Labor’s field campaign at the last election was lauded for its ability to target swinging voters and talk to them in person, rather than spamming everyone and hoping for the best.
It was smart campaigning that Abraham Lincoln advocated in 1840 when urging allies to “keep a constant watch on the doubtful voters and have them talked to by those in whom they have the most confidence”.
While the field campaign used money from Labor MP electorate offices, which is now being probed by Ombudsman Deborah Glass, it was effective.
The Greens have used an army of volunteers in the past and are gearing up for an assault on five Lower House seats — including two they hold — on issues they believe can help them win votes.
“It’s literally about listening to people; they often care about issues but don’t feel like there’s a way to feed that back in,” one Green said.
A Liberal Party source said one-on-one communication with undecided voters is “game-changing” for parties these days — particularly as more people turn against politicians themselves.
Despite the scrutiny of the Ombudsman and the public over the funding of the red shirts before the last election, Labor has effectively continued to run this at a lower level since the election, mostly under the radar.
One member of the Greens puts it this way: “This campaign started the day after the election. Daniel Andrews woke up and realised he was a few thousand votes away from losing or having to share power with the Greens.”
Liberals are now gearing up to use a platform called i360, with the party’s state director, Simon Frost, finalising details in Washington this week. This product, devised by the Koch brothers, is billed as something that creates a huge amount of information on individuals based on surveys, publicly available information and other data points.
Some Liberal sources are upfront about copying some Labor tactics.
“We studied what they did after a lot of them left a digital footprint and some of them briefed out what they did,” one said.
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“They had nurses talk to swinging voters who are nurses. It works.”
Public sector volunteers are a strong tool for Labor and the Andrews Government has thrown money at wage deals that have made a lot of people happy.
One Liberal MP said unions have also been pouring money into its coffers for campaigning, meaning the Coalition was already up against it in an environment in which every dollar counts.
The i360 is one tool, but it needs a lot of resources behind it to make calls, doorknock and spread the message.
While the argument over money drags on, political opponents are hitting the phones and knocking on doors, and will be for every one of the 500 days until the election.
At the moment, red and green shirts are flooding key seats while a lot of Liberals are still trying on their blue shirts for size.
Matt Johnston is state politics editor
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