Incoherent Get Up! just goes along for a disruptive ride

The next federal election campaign is under way. In the marginal Liberal-held seat of Banks in western Sydney, protesters have been lining the River Road, urging motorists to honk their opposition to the Adani coalmine.

The Liberal member for Dunkley is being pilloried on social media in a cruelly photoshopped picture. “Hey Adani,” reads the caption, “Is that Chris Crewther in your pocket?”

Lucy Wicks, who holds the seat of Robertson by the slenderest of margins, and Ross Vasta in the losable seat of Bonner, also have fallen foul of the faceless, unaccountable campaigners at Get Up!, an unsettling new political force.

Get Up! is to politics what Uber is to taxis. The old guard, particularly those on the centre-right, have been wrong-footed. They have underestimated its influence and miscalculated their response.

Twitter and Facebook were barely a year old when John Howard left office, and Get Up! not much older than that. He must thank his stars he governed in an era before social media. Malcolm Turnbull battles not just the political prejudices of the conventional media but the asymmetrical force of the new.

Jeremy Heimans, a smart University of Sydney graduate who ­co-founded Get Up! 12 years ago with University of NSW graduate Dave Madden, speaks of “new power” enabled by peer co-ordination and the agency of the crowd. “Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges,” Heimans wrote three years ago. “The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.”

And channel it does, beating back those who fail to adopt the correct position on fairness, gender and coal. In its 2015 annual report, Get Up! listed the failed 2014 budget measures: the Medicare GP co-payment, university fee deregulation, the welfare waiting period for young jobseekers, changes to family tax benefits and changes to the indexing of pensions. Each had been Get Up! targets, it boasted. Energy, dollars and creativity had been pooled “to hold power to ­account and amplify the voice of fairness and decency”. They had “sent a message about the kind of people Australians are, and the kind of nation we want to pass on to the next generation”.

In the election last year, Get Up! had a hit list of 33 MPs and senators it said was “holding back progress on our issues”. Liberals on the list suffered an average swing of 4.3 per cent compared with 3.3 per cent nationally. An on-the-ground campaign in Bass and Braddon in northern Tasmania had a spectacular impact. The swing of 9.2 per cent in Bass against ­Andrew Nikolic, a diligent and gregarious member, was way out the ordinary.

Nikolic’s defeat has had an educative effect on Liberal MPs with slender margins. The fear of becoming the next Nikolic must tempt them to pull punches, not that they would readily admit it.

The demonisation of Crewther, Wicks and Vasta is something new altogether. They are picked on not for anything they have said but simply for failing to speak out against a coalmine that is, in Crewther’s case, about 2000km from his electorate. The campaigners want the MPs to cave in and change the mood of the ­partyroom.

Two backbenchers have broken ranks to oppose a $900 million concessional loan to Adani, GetUp! says. The alleged rebels now are being projected as shining examples that Crewther, Wicks and Vasta should follow. This is how politics is played in the age of disruption.

Get Up! no more wants to run candidates than Airbnb wants to run hotels. It simply wants to ­occupy them. The organisation claims a million members, more than every political party combined. It operates on an eight-figure budget and receives more than 50,000 donations a year.

Yet, in an audacious submission to a parliamentary committee last year, it called for donations to political parties above $500 to be declared in real time and for foreign donations to be prohibited. The foreign donations to Get Up! we know about (its books are hardly transparent) amount to more than $300,000 in the past two years, including $95,633 from Avaaz, a US online progressive ­advocacy group Heimans helped found a decade ago.

Heimans these days describes himself as a “social movement entrepreneur”. He works in New York as the chief executive of Purpose, a business that seeks to derive a profit from creating “social values”. He speaks of the enormous potential unleashed by technology to create “lasting positive change in the way the world works”.

So what does Heimans mean by “positive change”? The new power movement is not driven by ideology or even an agenda. It has no coherent view about the organisation of civic affairs or the ­efficient collection of revenue. It has no settled view on the limits of public force, the deployment of ­armies or the security of property. It has a strange view about civil manners and is confused about morality and religion.

If digital activists seem hopelessly biased against Liberals, it is because it campaigns on causes. It demands simple answers to complex questions and favours answers that feel right, regardless of whether they are right. The classical Liberal mind simply doesn’t think like that.

Heimans himself says new power has its downside. “Crowd-funding puts on steroids the human tendency to favour the immediate, visceral and emotional rather than the strategic, impactful or long-term,” he wrote.

Edmund Burke, for one, would have been worried.

“Considerate people, before they declare themselves, will observe the use which is made of power,” he wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, “particularly of so trying a thing as new power in new persons, of whose principles, tempers, and dispositions they have little or no experience, and in situations, where those who appear the most stirring in the scene may possibly not be the real movers.”

Nick Cater is executive director of Menzies Research Centre.