GetUp for a change, voters

The seat of Bradfield may be the safest Liberal party seat in Australia — with a two party preferred vote of 73 per cent — but GetUp campaigner Toby Brennan thinks the month-old political movement still has a place on the North Shore.

GetUp campaigner Toby Brennan

"A number of quite important lobby groups in peace and justice and refugee issues have actually emerged from the North Shore itself over the last five to ten years," says GetUp campaigner Toby Brennan, "so there is a good base of progressives."

"A quick look at our database shows there's certainly evidence that people on the North Shore are concerned about the direction this government is taking the country — concerned about the mandatory detention of refugees, the lack of a fair trial for David Hicks, and the direction of health and education under this government," says Brennan.

The ex-Knox Grammar school captain is one of two staff members chosen to run the fledgling political organisation. Since launching on 1 August articles either heralding the group as an exciting new form of political engagement or demonising it have featured in almost every major metropolitan newspaper in the country. Within the space of a fortnight GetUp had recruited nearly 10,000 members and expect to have signed up at least 100,000 members by the next Federal election.

It's a mammoth task that Brennan has undertaken and happily admits the project is, "taking over my life." Brennan has had a long history of involvement in the political process. He was President of the University of Sydney Union from 2003/04 and says a foundational experience was being offered the presidency of the Student Representative Council (SRC) in Year 11.

"In those days the SRC wasn't a strongly political organisation but I tried to do some things with it to really stamp the idea of student representation on the school culture — the idea that students had a rightful voice and could make a useful contribution to discussions regarding the governance and direction of the school."

GetUp is the brainchild of two young Australians — Jeremy Heimans, 27, and David Madden, 30, who met while studying at Harvard. Heimans and Madden conceived and worked on the ads for a group in the US called 'Win Back Respect' which campaigned against the Bush foreign policy. They are now duplicating that model here in Australia.

While GetUp is a political organisation, its founders say it will never become a political party. Heimans admits, "We've been completely clear from day one that this organisation is no friend of the Howard Government". That doesn't mean, he says, that GetUp is a 'front for the Labor Party' as some Liberal MPs have suggested. 

GetUp is a web-based movement that seeks to mobilise frustrated Australian voters and "bring participation back into our democracy." The low-level membership of political parties is a case in point. "I think one of the reasons for that is that political parties really provide a very limited avenue for political participation and people aren't as interested or satisfied by institutional politics in the way they once were," says Brennan.

GetUp's activities are issues-based. Upon its launch and to coincide with the government majority in the Senate, GetUp initiated an email campaign from Australian voters to Coalition senators expressing their concern and their intention to hold senators accountable for their decisions. A staggering 50,000 emails were sent.

Liberal MP and former federal director Andrew Robb called GetUp's first foray "undergraduate" and said it constituted "spam." Brennan says, "These are incredible comments by Robb that voters in the Australian community — citizens of this country — communicating with their elected representatives was spam.

"This is the federal Liberal Party we're talking about, who pioneered direct marketing in election campaigns over the last 10 years. John Howard left recorded voice messages on peoples' phones last year and yet they have the gumption to turn around and say we're using 'spam.'"

So far GetUp has primarily operated as email based but Brennan says future campaigns will use a whole range of techniques. "Some of those campaigns will be really online focused — like online petitions. But some campaigns will be getting people offline, getting people making phone calls or in the future, even meeting up physically."

As a web-based movement one might assume GetUp excludes older people who aren't so techno-savvy. Not so says Brennan, "Doing this work over the last month has reshaped my view of how web-savvy the older generation, retirees and pensioners in our community are. I think it's easy to have the wrong perception about whether or not these people are accessing web-based services but we've had an amazing response from that generation.

"Sure there are limitations on access because we are web-based and that's just a feature of the resources we have in the organisation unfortunately."

At a critical juncture in the Australian political landscape, GetUp represents an exciting new venture. Time will tell of its effectiveness.