Labor 2.0: Always on, always listening
While the coalition continues to declare Australia is “open for business,” their opponents have simply declared themselves open.
Through its process of democratisation – of which the rank-and-file leadership ballot last month was the “first step” – Labor is pushing through criticisms of “overexposure” during the Rudd-Gillard era to burrow even deeper into the electorate. Key to this is a concerted effort to supplement its already heavy traditional media schedule with a highly-touted foray into new technology.
Shadow Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese told Business Spectator transparency was going to be a benchmark of Labor in opposition, starting with the rebuilding of its membership base.
“I think new technology really will provide a significant potential for that increased direct participation and I think that’s the key, people want that direct participation,” he said.
That notion of direct engagement is one both major parties have grappled with in recent years, as politicians confuse tweeting with a two-way dialogue.
The Centre for Policy Development’s Executive Director Miriam Lyons points to the Voice for Indi campaign that catapulted Independent Cathy McGowan into the federal parliament, and in the process booted out Liberal frontbencher Sophie Mirabella as one key, albeit small scale, example of the power of modern grassroots campaigning – where door-knocking is of equal importance to Facebook-ing.
She said it was a reckoning of sorts in the political sense, where voters united to tell politicians what issues mattered, rather than having such issues dictated to them by the “on-message” bureaucracy.
“It was quite clear in that circumstance that the citizens thought that they deserved something different from what they were getting,” Lyons said.
In many ways Labor’s strategy is a hybrid of the Voice for Indi movement and the recent election campaigns of Barack Obama. The participation of two of the US President’s former digital strategists at events held by progressive think tanks in Australia in the last week alone – Buffy Wicks and Jeremy Bird – will certainly give Labor, and the plethora of its top brass that attended or took part in the events, plenty of food for thought.
The insights of Bird, founding partner of 270 Strategies, who took part in Per Capita’s Progress 2013 event will be particularly crucial. Addressing the Montreal Convention Of the New Democratic Party earlier this year, Bird said the key to Obama’s successful re-election campaign was meeting voters “where they were, online or offline” as well as finding a way to “make politics matter in their lives”.
“We built a 21st Century campaign using cutting edge digital technologies, we used social media to get our message out to voters we were trying to persuade, to raise money from grassroots donations so we could fund our ground game and our air game and most importantly so we could mobilise people to take part in their democracy.”
Being leaders in the online domain, would allow Labor to truly canvass the possibilities new technology has for fundraising. If it was successful, the coalition’s traditional edge as having the biggest “campaign war-chest” could be under threat.
There are of course risks to being online pioneers as well. What effect, if any, Labor’s desire for a strong online presence could have on its policy platform is another unknown factor in the equation.
Meanwhile, veteran political journalist Laurie Oakes reminded parties of what happens when social engagement goes bad, telling the ABC that Twitter’s role in the 24 hour news cycle as an “enabler of anger” had been a key factor in the historically “nasty” previous three years in Canberra.
Albanese says Labor’s approach is a stark contrast to the Coalition’s – which seems to stem from Tony Abbott’s throwaway line “I am not going to commit to talking unless I’ve got something to say” – but for Albanese it is far from talking simply for the sake of filling the silences.
“It meant that rather than going through a line-by-line assessment of what went wrong, in a very short period of time, the party as a whole was talking about the future,” he said of the leadership ballot, that returned Bill Shorten as the party’s new chief instead of him.
It’s a line that plays well with the new opposition’s overall modus operandi to be more open and not “relentlessly negative”. And for now, it seems to be working.
The party’s membership has just ticked back above 50,000 according to President Jenny McAllister, with Albanese estimating around 4,500 people joined in response to the rank-and-file involvement in the leadership ballot.
But with more members comes more voices and with more voices, more accountability.
What kind of logistical issues are raised by swelling membership numbers – all after their own slice of direct engagement – remains to be seen. And what of further expansion, which certainly seems to be on the agenda, if it isn’t already being aggressively pursued.
“For too long the Labor Party has looked inwards for its ideas and looked backwards to old sources of support and looked sideways for leadership, and instead a progressive political party must reach broadly across the communities for its ideas and its support.” Per Capita chairman Josh Funder said as part of the think tank’s Reform Agenda Series during the leadership election.
Albanese at least remains confident Labor’s use of new mediums, particularly online town hall meetings or online engagement with shadow ministers, can be an effective method to manage its growing base.
“The fact that you could talk to people throughout a vast state like Western Australia in real time and actually have a discussion with many hundreds of people at once and they could get to speak to directly, the potential leaders of the Labor party, it’s a way of opening it up,” he said.
As the resumption of parliament next week edges closer, Labor’s instinct to take the front-foot with its democratisation agenda is a wise one and will go some way to neutralising any teething issues in the transition from government to opposition.
While some in Canberra are staunch in their assessment that Labor will take a long time to become an effective opposition, if they take the best of Bird’s campaign – “a grassroots, people-driven, metrics-centred, digitally sophisticated campaign” – and funnel it into a long-term engagement strategy, the party may be a political force again, long before many suspect.
Follow Mitchell Neems on Twitter @mitchneems