Having single-handedly destroyed the right wing of the Liberal Party (at least according to to Messrs Bernardi and Abetz) and inspired a right-wing competitor (that would Cory Berardi’s probably ill-fated Australian Conservatives), what is next for progressive not-charity GetUp?
Reforming the political donations system and superannuation concessions are top of the list, and they look to dominate the parliamentary agenda in coming weeks.
The organisation’s campaign director Paul Oosting told Crikey that GetUp wanted to shape the political landscape both in and outside of the election cycle.
“We’ll be pushing those politicians that are in marginal seats to hold them to account. We’re keeping a very close eye on politicians that have got elected, or are new to parliament to hold them to make sure they are actually representing their communities,” he said.
[Pssst, Abetz: GetUp is not a charity, does not care what you think]
GetUp members in dozens of seats across the country, starting with the marginals, will be asked to write to their local MPs, now that Parliament has resumed. Then a group of them will be sent to the offices of their local MPs to outline their expectations. The GetUp members will then seek to get another meeting in a year’s time to present MPs with a scorecard on how they’re going with representing their constituents on those issues.
“This for us is about building our grassroots membership and political power so people will become more active across the country and make sure we’re holding our politicians to account so that they know by the next election if they are dragging Australia more towards the right, they could face the mobilisation of GetUp members in their area,” Oosting said.
GetUp itself will be split into four core areas, bringing together experienced campaigners and strategists into human rights, economic fairness, environmental justice and democratic reform.
Environmental justice is being headed up by Centre for Policy Development director Miriam Lyons. Oosting says her task will be, in part, to determine how to push governments at all levels to get to 100% renewable energy.
“That’s a massive task for Miriam, but she’s an expert in her policy areas,” he said.
GetUp claims success on several lawsuits against the Adani coal mine, using crowdfunding to get the cases off the ground. Healthcare, race and multiculturalism are also likely to be issues that dominate the next few years, with cuts to healthcare starting to bite, and the rise of One Nation into Parliament, Oosting says.
For human rights, GetUp is currently targeting the corporate backers of Australia’s offshore detention centres to attempt to shame them into discontinuing their services, and GetUp is looking to develop policies and more humane alternatives to offshore detention, to counter the “well, what’s your alternative?” response.
GetUp is also now helping to crowdfund the legal case being taken up by doctors who have worked in Australian immigration detention system to challenge the secrecy provisions contained in the Border Force Act.
“With the doctors we’ve been able to go in when they don’t have the financial support to challenge the coverups that are happening under our new legal arrangements and be able to provide them the support of having a movement behind them. The doctor’s case is something [GetUp members] can effectively do to move the issue.”
In the area of economic fairness, GetUp is working with tax experts from UTS to work out what equitable policies it can push, such as superannuation tax reforms, and closing tax loopholes. GetUp is still working out its approach to democratic reform, but a ban on foreign donations and more transparency over donations are “low-hanging fruit” (particularly now), as well as working for changes so people can enrol to vote right up until and on election day.
Oosting says GetUp is far from perfect, and the group needs to learn how to engage with its member base better. It claims more than 1 million active members, but it wants to get more — and to better engage the ones it has. He says GetUp is looking at places where groups have been able to grow (like in Spain against austerity) and where there have been some failures (like some elements of the Occupy movement).
“We just want a better system where their voices are heard and their vote is more effective [and we] hand over more agency and control to our members because I think that will be a key way of determining whether GetUp can grow from where we are now, and whether we can be more influential and winning on those issues our members care about.”
[George Christensen wants own GetUp]
Goals are much less about the topline number and more about how many people take real action like volunteering to make calls, or door-knock. At the 2016 election, 3,500 GetUp volunteers had 45,000 conversations with voters. Oosting said he wants to double this by the next election at have close to 30,000 volunteers.
“I want us to be a large social movement who can wield real political influence. The right, despire the fact in the majority of cases the policies they push are not something the majority favour, are seeing many more successes on the policy front. I think the scale is a big challenge for us, how do we give more agency to people over who is selected in their local seat or the makeup of our parliament generally.”
That means having realistic goals, like knowing it is going to take at least a few years to change Australia’s approach to asylum seekers, and take on smaller targets for incremental change. It also means GetUp will partner with more organisations and won’t be actively visible in many campaigns.
“Increasingly to be effective, it has to be less about the organisation. We were approached by the Human Rights Law Centre to work on [Let Them Stay], and it became apparent that to reach the people who had shown a more humane response … to reach them was going to require the whole refugee sector,” he said.
“We didn’t really brand that campaign. We tried to provide as many different ways for our members to take action. A lot of work was done to ensure it was a good space for premiers, for church ministers, and others to get involved in a way that was appropriate for them and in that case it won’t be under the banner of GetUp.”
Great organisation – more power to it.
I will be renewing my membership and getting more involved..!!
Dir Lyons had better mean to include nuclear when she says “100% renewables” or the people she is addressing in the power industry will dismiss her as a hopeless visionary.
GetUp gets to the heart of the failure of Australian democracy with its concerns over political donations. Resolutely and scandalously missing from implicitly Sinophobic Mainstream public discussion of the catalogue of huge foreign political donations that make Dastyari’s $1,670 even more extraordinarily trivial are (a) the huge sums given to the Lib-Labs by Zionists with massive loyalty to a nuclear terrorist, racist Zionist-run, genocidally racist, democracy-by-genocide Apartheid Israel ( e.g. Bob Carr in his book “Bob Carr: Diary of a Foreign Minister” reveals ex-PM Kevin Rudd’s intelligence that about one-fifth of the money he had raised in the 2007 election campaign had come from the Jewish community – one notes that Australia (population 24 million) has a Jewish population of about 100,000 and one would hope that more than 50% would be opposed to racism, genocide, Israeli Apartheid and the ongoing Palestinian Genocide ;see Lenore Taylor, “Bob Carr diaries: foreign policy was subcontracted to Jewish donors”, Guardian Australia, 9 April 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/09/bob-carr–gillard-foreign-policy-jewish-donors and Gideon Polya, “Racist Zionism and Israeli State Terrorism threats to Australia and Humanity”, Palestinian Genocide: https://sites.google.com/site/palestiniangenocide/racist-zionism-and-israeli ) , (b) the king-making $22 million spent by largely foreign-owned mining companies to successfully remove PM Kevin Rudd in a US-approved, pro-Zionist-led Coup and to emasculate the Mining Tax (this empirical success evidently prompting the gambling industry to commit $20 million to stopping gambling reform), and (c) the tens of millions of in-kind election propaganda support given to the neoliberal Lib-Labs (Coalition and Labor Right) by king-making US citizen Rupert Murdoch whose media empire includes newspapers read by 70% of Australian newspaper readers. While resolutely ignored by Mainstream media, politician and academic presstitutes, Australia is a Plutocracy, Kleptocracy, Murdochracy, Lobbyocracy, Corporatocracy and Dollarocracy in which Big Money purchases people, politicians, parties, public perception of reality, political power and thence more private profit – and much of this Big Money is from foreigners or from Australians with massive loyalty for a genocidal Apartheid rogue state. Sinophobia aside, Senator Dastyari’s trivial $1,670 is no more remarkable than a connection picking up the tab for a routine free lunch at a top restaurant.