So, this election, I’m following civil society / third party campaigns, for some research with colleagues Ariadne Vromen and Anne Nielsen. We’ll be observing various of their activities – their media appearances, social media activity (Facebook, Insta, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn) and also the emails they send to their supporter lists.
The aim is to understand how these organisations attempt to advance their agenda, both through influencing public discourse and mobilising their supporters. Bearing in mind our limited resources, we can only really observe what is publicly available (or available to members of the public when it comes to supporter emails).
While I am (punishing myself by) collecting the data, I thought I might as well share some of my observations in real time.
We have a list of almost 20 organisations that we’re following. The four main ones are the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), GetUp, Advance and the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL). I’m not going to link to any of their sites. I’m going to assume you know how to use the internet.
So after looking through the email inbox and the various social media accounts today, here are my initial thoughts.
Day 1 – Supporter Email Calls to Action
On Friday 28 March, I received 18 emails from 16 different organisations. Unions Australia (the ACTU) sent three between 9am and 8pm. Four of those organisations are conservative (Advance, Australian Christian Lobby, Australians for Prosperity and Binary Australia); 11 progressive (ACTU, Australia Institute, Australian Conservation Foundation, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Australian Democracy Network, Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Climate 200, Climate Council, Everybody’s Home, GetUp, Greenpeace); and one centrist (Amplify).
Half of the emails were asking for donations. Four were asking people to register for an election webinar (AYCC, Greenpeace, 2x from the ACTU), while two had form emails for people to contact candidates (Everybody’s Home and the Australian Conservation Foundation). Amplify asked its supporters to fill in a survey about their opinions on housing policy announcements during Budget week.
Of the four main organisations we’re following (the ACTU, Advance, ACL and GetUp), only the ACTU’s email wasn’t focussed on soliciting donations – their call to action after the webinar asked people to sign up for further action. The ACTU’s messaging in their emails was almost exclusively anti-Dutton, which matched with their messaging across other social media (screengrab of their Facebook profile and banner below).
The ACTU was also the only one of these four organisation who posted election material on LinkedIn on Day 1 – the message there focussing on the Coalition’s proposed cuts of “41,000 public sector jobs.”
The primary messaging from GetUp in their donation call-to-action email was also anti-Dutton, e.g. “The only thing that can cut through Dutton’s billionaire-backed campaign right now is thousands of us taking action together”. GetUp’s TikTok activity during the day was also largely focussed on Dutton.
The message from Advance in their single supporter email of the day was explicitly anti Greens, with a frame attempting to connect the Greens with Labor representing a bridge between their “Greens Truth” campaign that has been running since pre-election and the “Weak, Woke, Sending Us Broke” anti-Albo campaign that they launched across socials today (screengrab of one of their Instagram posts below).
The messaging in the Australian Christian Lobby’s email was less overtly partisan, though there is certainly a relationship between their messaging and Advance’s (as you could argue there is between the ACTU’s and GetUp’s).
After leading off mentioning cost of living, the ACL urged supporters to consider “the bigger picture”, which according to them is that “the greatest threat to a well-functioning and healthy society is political correctness”, where “‘Woke’ champions good as evil and evil as good, and as a result, injustice increases, and we all suffer as a result.”
This ‘truth’ theme continued across the other conservative supporter emails of the day that we received. Australians for Prosperity’s explicitly anti-Teals email focussed on polling they had commissioned (and which ran in the AFR and Sky News) in various Teal independent electorates. “If the Teals won’t tell the truth, we will,” they wrote.
Similarly, anti-trans group Binary, who appears to be focussing their attention on raising money for advertising in Western Sydney electorates, mentioned “truth” five times in their fundraising email (along with 5 links to the donation page, which adds up to 10, which is actual binary…). For an anti-trans group, they don’t say “trans” once, but with content like “Under this government, men are being allowed into girls’ sports. Into women’s prisons. Into female bathrooms and change rooms,” the meaning is clear.
What’s Next
We have a methodology for our research, though I don’t necessarily have one for these posts. I’m just going to share and make comment on what I’m seeing and what I think is interesting – as part of the process of preparing for the outputs we have planned – as long as I have time and interest.
Also, none of us are being paid to do this work, either, so these observations are limited by the time I’m able to put in outside of my regular full-time job.
If you’re seeing things out there in civil society campaign world that you think are interesting, or there’s something you’d like me to look at, please do let me know.
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