So I did some handing out of how to vote cards in the safe Liberal Seat of Goldstein, VIC. I just wanted to share my experience.
I arrived just before 8am, and already there is a queue formed. I needed to arrive earlier as to be able to get to these people as they were already within 6 meters of the entrance. Also I wasted too much time stuffing around with the Corflutes when I should have focussed on getting the cards handed out more importantly.
Labor Party didn’t bother sending anyone except someone for half an hour 1PM-1.30PM. Before that, they had someone drop off a box of how to vote cards which said “Please take one”, which not a single person did. In the entire day only about 3 people specifically requested a Labor how to vote card in which the Greenies picked it up for them out of the box out of courtesy. The Greens are genuinely a bunch of do-gooders, if someone from another party wants to take a short break, they will gladly help hand out Pirate, Christian, Liberal flyers with theirs, they don’t discriminate (Happened twice, two different Greens on different shifts). Lesson: Don’t leave a bunch of unattended How To Vote cards unless it is only a short break with some Greenies around to hand them out, nobody will pick them up.
As for myself I wore a black Pirate Party t-shirt with a bandana over my head. I did have good feedback about the look with the bandana.
I made sure I was always smiling, coming up to people with a great big smile too. I was complimented on my appearance and approachability by a Greens person.
I made sure to greet as many people as possible, coming up to them where possible ahead of the other people heckling them with How to Vote cards. Not always possible with the amount of people coming in with only just me to cover both directions for 1 entrance, but when I was able to walk towards them I was able to get a higher acceptance rate of taking a How to Vote card and getting a conversation started.
My standard greeting would was along the lines of “G’Day/Hello/Sir/Madam I am from the Pirate Party, please have a look at our policies [hands them the card]”. If I was able to get any kind of attention from them I would ask if there are any specific issues important to them this election.
A common reaction would be to laugh at me when I said the name of the party, to my reply is “We are not a joke party, please have a look at our policies…” (more on this in a later). Even if I didn’t get a reaction (they just took the card) I always tried to mention to have a look at our policies.
I feel that I did a very good job of conveying the Pirate Party, who we are, what we stand for, our policies. I think that I nailed the message every time someone asked me. I made sure to ask them about the specific issues that they care about and helped them explain the Pirate position on that. They all seemed very impressed with my responses, mainly an expression of positively surprised that we have a sensible policy on something they didn’t expect from a left-leaning party.
By far, the biggest problem, is that people just don’t want to know about us.
It was quite a phenomenon with the Liberal voters is that they will come in, avoid all How To Vote cards at all costs and completely ignore everyone else, take a Liberal How to Vote card and go on their way. Not a single one of these people asked the Liberal person about Policy, it was simply a case of them collecting their “Cheat Sheet” of how they should vote. Not even interested to hear what anyone else has to say, not even as a curiosity. You could easily spot who were the Liberal voters were.
Nothing wrong with being a determined voter who knows exactly who they are voting for (that is a good thing), but it was in stark difference to everyone else. Even a determined voter of another party would still give you the time of day,
If I did manage to get a laugh out of the name of the party, a determined Liberal voter would refuse to take it further, not even take a card to even look at any policies, even though we were already engaging with each other.
It boggles my mind how fiercely loyal the Liberal voter base is. Yes I know that they have their reasons, but the loyalty is unrivaled. I don’t know if it is Liberal voters in general, or if would be the same for Labor voters in a Labor majority seat.
Even though there was some success with starting off with a “Joke” name, getting their attention that “This is not a joke” and get to give them a how to vote card and talk to them about checking out our policies, this was definitely a minority case. Probably about 20 people the whole day I was there. Not complaining about 20 votes (assuming that I did manage to convert them into a vote, I know that some people did say they voted for us after that), but for the amount of people that this worked for throughout the whole day (20 out of ~2000), overall it was high-effort/low-reward.
I would have much preferred a concise descriptive name for the Party that everyone understands than a Joke or Single-Issue (that is not big in the public spotlight) name. The guy from the Animal Justice Party had no problem getting his message across. Their policies are irrelevant, if someone loves animals (and who doesn’t?) they are going to take a card, give it a good look without prompting, and I’m sure that they probably got a lot of votes this way. Very Low-Effort/High Reward for the amount of total people there.
There was also a guy there from John Madigan’s Manufacturing and Farming Party. Again, he had a clear message - he dressed like a farmer and only said “Support the farmers”, a lot of people taking his cards. Who doesn’t love Farmers right?
Hardly anyone had even heard of our party before. Probably about 5 people actually heard of us, only 1 said they actually came to vote for us. A couple of people said they voted because they like the sound of Pirates (arrgh matey). One said he would vote because he likes using The Pirate Bay.
Only one person actually asked me about Copyright! Actually he asked if we believe in scrapping copyrights and that artists won’t get paid. I quickly turned that around that “No way! We definitely support having copyrights, they just need to be on fair and reasonable terms so that everyone can get affordable legal access rather than wanting to Pirate it instead due to market failure, and a having a ridiculous amount of copyright extensions.”
I had several people tell me that they don’t like the name of the party, it is stupid, it doesn’t represent the values of the party (once I had told them what we are), and so on. I took it as a chance to try out the currently-most-popular suggest of our name change topic “TLDR - Transparency Liberty Digital Rights”. In 100% of cases, the response was dumbfounded. They had no idea what it actually means that they did not get the TLDR reference. I found that TLDR worked great as a slogan but as a party name it would only appeal to the highly computer literate. We need something short and direct to the point.
I initially came at 8am with my dog dressed as a pirate. As things got more busy/hectic I realised that it was a bad idea to bring him along. He started getting restless and also there was a risk that he could have got trodden on. A cute one -eyed dog in Pirate Outfit did not bring much attention either. Only 1 person gave him a pat. I left 10.00-10.30 am to take him home. I do not recommend bringing dogs/animals for campaigning unless you happen to have a super chilled out Parrot who will stay on your shoulder the entire time. I will post some pics tomorrow.
I left again from 12.00-1.00 because I had other commitments. When I came back one of the Greenies told me about a person who actually looking for me! (Probably because they saw the corflute sign, but other than this I don’t think that the corflutes had much impact even though I had them front-facing to the crowd from both directions - nobody else was looking for the Pirate Party person except the guy who said he had already decided to vote Pirate Party). He was still in the back of the (short) line and I called out to him, but he wasn’t interested in coming back, so not sure exactly why he was interested.
I had 2x nutcase-assholes (N-A) and one Stupid Asshole (S-A)
N-A 1 heckled me for 15 minutes because they were really offended that I would dare to even campaign for a party who wouldn’t win. After ascertaining that he didn’t have any genuine issues to talk about, I just told him that I respect his right to his opinion… there is nothing more I would really say to him.
S-A said I had to talk like a Pirate if I wanted her to listen to me. I so play along (pirate accent) “Ahoy me hearties please have a look at our policies.” her: Oh you got to do better than that. me: (pirate accent) “We have lots of good policies on Freedom and Civil Liberties, please have a look ARRRRR”. her: Oh ok you got me at ARRRR! She came back to me after her vote and said “Oh I didn’t vote for you, I don’t think that your pirate accent as good enough.” (Well thanks for making a mockery of me then) [not actually said].
N-A 2 heckled me “What do you stand for!” “What are your policies?” “…no don’t tell me from your How to Vote card, I want you to explain it to me directly person-to-person”. I chose the subjects of Copyright, Freedom of Religion & Foreign Policy. He was very impressed with my response. He then heckled the Liberal person, similar sort of thing, and then the Green person who failed his demand (both not explaining their position very thoroughly and also I think he already hated the Greens) and he went on a 15 minute tirade at her. After he had finished he said that he had already voted and walked off. He wasted my time to put in a detailed response when I could have been talking to other voters for his own personal pleasure of giving others a hard time, when he had no intention of voting at all.
This is the problem when dealing with the public. Be aware.
Overall the Greens people and the Australian Christians & Animal Justice persons were great, as well as a couple of the Liberal guys. The Greens people all took an interest in Pirate Party policies (one ended up taking a card to look at even though she said she wasn’t going to) and took particular interest in our stance against TPP.
One of the Greens people took offense to our Policy on Gene patents (She works in this area and said that this policy sounds too broad and when I looked up the actual policy text she said that the issue has already been resolved by the High Court). I took her email address and told her I will look into this (I’ll raise this separately), and she seemed quite impressed with that response.
The Christian person was quite respectful. I asked him what motivates him and his view is that he is on a calling from God (just to give you some context of where he is coming from). I asked for this thoughts on our Marriage Equity policy, and he actually quite liked it! He said that there is no requirement from god to be involved in government, but having Government that supports Christian is helpful.
Animal Justice guy was quite respectful that not everyone wants to be a Vegan (even though that’s a party policy).
I tried to socialise with the farmer guy a little bit, but he just did not want to talk to anyone. He never went into anyof his Policy that he was there for. I could get out of him was that he lives in the area (nowhere near the country) but he OWNS a Farm (From what I can gather, he doesn’t even operate his own farm, but here he is dressed like one). The best I could get out of him was asking him about his thoughts on Live Export “No Live Export, Keep the jobs in Australia”. OK that’s makes sense.
Be aware also of The Liberal party people though. Most of them were great. But I feel that one of them was trying to distract me with questions (which he didn’t even seem too interested in anyway) just when influx of voters were coming in. You just got to learn to ignore that and address them when the voters have passed. Primary role is to talk to voters not other parties.
I definitely have no regrets. It was really insightful experience to see what people really do in an election when you have boots on the ground.
Having our policies on the How To Vote cards was absolutely brilliant. I really couldn’t have got anything done without it.
My takeaway is that elections are very much physical world matter (you can say and do all you want on the internet but barely anyone will see it unless you penetrate into their circles - Facebook/Mainstream News/Friends & Family/Events). Practically nobody has even heard of us. It takes an incredible amount of effort to get someone to look past the name and onto what we actually stand for, and that hook to flip it around isn’t all that strong. We have a chance at capturing votes where a voter hasn’t made up their mind or put much effort into their decision in advance, but the time to capture votes is well before election day. Not to mention all the lost leads with Pre-Poll and Postal Votes.
I would support moves towards a complete branding and media overhaul of the party.
That is everything I can think of. Hopefully this experience shared helps us with future campaigns.