Elections

The third Labor speaker at CMPM2014 is Kaila Murmain, NSW Labor's Assistant General Secretary. She begins by outlining the current political environment in NSW, which has been difficult for Labor following the 2011 landslide towards the Liberals; at the next election Labor would need to regain some 27 seats to win. There has been a need to rebuild with the help of strong local candidates.

One focus of this rebuilding is to attract strong small local donors for the Labor campaign. This is difficult given the considerable lack of trust Australians have in politics and politicians, and the lack of …

Next up at CMPM2014 is Elias Hallaj, the ACT Labor Party Secretary, who reviews the 2012 ACT election campaign. Every campaign is different, of course, but it also adds to the collective knowledge about campaigning. ACT elections are further complicated by the fact that they use the Hare-Clark electoral system, too.

The political environment for Labor in 2012 was very tough, party due to federal factors. In response, Labor began its campaign twelve months earlier than in previous elections; it needed to reestablish the ACT Labor brand after the leadership transition away from John Stanhope, and distinguish it from federal …

From the two Coalition speakers at CMPM2014 we now move on to an ALP-themed panel, starting with Skye Laris, the Director of Digital for the Australia Labor Party. She says that in 2013 Labor used online media to push power down and out, trying to engage with a new supporter base and increasing its email address base tenfold over the course of a year. It has also amassed a strong following on Facebook, and used Facebook advertising extensively during the campaign.

This has resulted in a 1000% in online donations (to $800,000) from 2010 to 2013, and a 1500% …

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Nathan Quigley, Director of Communications for the NSW National Party; his focus, unsurprisingly, is on campaigning in regional seats. Key elements differentiating such seats are population density, autonomy, and demographics.

The largest seat in NSW, Barwon, is slightly larger than Germany, for example, but only has some one per cent of that country's population. Such seats are highly autonomous, with local media including local papers, local radio stations, and some local television playing an important role. These seats are self-contained in that residents may rarely travel outside the area of the seat (very different …

Next up at CMPM2014 is Felicity Wilson, Vice-President of the NSW Liberal Party, who self-deprecatingly begins by showing some footage from Jaymes Diaz's trainwreck campaign in 2013.

The keys to winning a campaign is to have a strategy, a campaign plan, the resources, and the activities to execute the plan. Good candidates are crucial to this, especially in marginal seats – they need to have strong local connection, be well-known, viewed favourably, be seen to understand the important issues, and be seen to be able to do something about them.

In planning campaigning strategy, the different electorates are considered separately …

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Neil Lawrence, CEO of Lawrence Creative, which executed the Kevin07 campaign as well as Anna Bligh's campaign for Queensland State Premier and Jay Weatherill's campaign in South Australia; he is alongside his colleague Tony Mitchellmore.

Neil suggests that through the federal election campaigns before 2007, Labor had been comprehensively outcampaigned – the Liberals had imported US techniques from the Republicans, and nobody in the Australian Labor Party understood issue framing.

The first question to ask candidates in any election is whether they actually want to win. Labor at some point decided that it did …

The next speaker at CMPM2014 is Graeme Orr, whose interest is in the legal frameworks for political campaign funding. The law focusses mainly on accounting and auditing aspects of this, but indirectly affects a great deal more – campaign aesthetics, styles, strategies, staffing, and much more.

The law regulating political finance hasn't changed much overall, but the way in which it is being administered tends to swing between different states. Such concerns have a long history – even in pre-modern times there were concerns about vote-buying, porkbarrelling, and overwhelming an electorate with campaign materials.

Restrictions were gradually introduced over the …

We start the second day of CMPM2014 with Jennifer Rayner, whose interest is in the extent to which American campaigning innovations are being imported to Australia (and whether this makes sense). Some US approaches simply don't work elsewhere, due to different laws on advertising and funding, and the different electoral laws.

So in truth this is more of a process of hybridisation of campaigning, rather than a straight-out importing of US approaches. Any such approaches need to be adapted and filtered through local contexts, even if the Australian media appear to be obsessed with the "Americanisation" of Australian political campaigning. …

The final speaker at CMPM2014 today is Campbell Klose, and adviser on the wildly successful Cathy McGowan campaign which managed to unseat Liberal shadow minister Sophie Mirabella in the electorate of Indi in the 2013 Australian federal election. Indi is a very large electorate (roughly the size of the state of Massachusetts), with some 100,000 voters.

Early on, the Voice 4 Indi campaign began by holding some 55 kitchen table conversations with 425 participants, covering local and national issues. The results of this process were taken to Mirabella, who fundamentally disagreed with them and suggested Indi-ans cared only about cost …

The final session at CMPM2014 starts with Mike Smith from Ethical Consulting Services, who has worked with the Obama campaign in the past. He suggests that the Australian Labor Party can campaign like Obama, but only if there is considerable culture change in the ALP. However, he also notes that there are significant differences between the US and Australian system.

Voting in the US is voluntary, so there is a need for campaigning to generate a preference for one or the other side which is strong enough to motivate people to go to the polls on a regular working day …