Our community campaign is growing in numbers and building significant community power at both the state and federal levels. This year, while political parties were counting votes to win seats in parliament, we were busy building power to make our environment the top issue in the long-term. Our community campaign is local, grassroots and growing enormous influence in the areas that matter for state and federal elections.
Federal election campaign
We have spent the last 12 months ramping up capacity within our volunteer groups – recruiting new volunteers, growing relationships, delivering leadership training and developing the tactical skills to deliver local campaigns. In 2016 we put all that preparation into action with our biggest ever people-powered campaign leading up to the July 2 federal election. We have continued our long-term focus on the strategically important areas of Frankston/Mornington and Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, with a deep campaign in two key federal electorates – Dunkley and Deakin. We partnered with the Australian Conservation Foundation in the eastern suburbs, and we worked with local climate action groups and community environment groups in both of our target areas. More than 385 local volunteers contributed to our federal election campaign – calling undecided voters, getting on talkback radio, driving around our trailer billboard, speaking with voters on the street, knocking on doors and handing out our policy scorecards at pre-poll voting booths or on election day. Together, they had 4620 face-to-face conversations and 3375 phone calls with undecided voters, collecting 2814 pledges to vote for our environment. We also opened two Enviro Hub shopfronts – campaign headquarters and visible community spaces in Frankston and Mitcham. These shopfronts were staffed entirely by volunteers and provided a base for campaign trainings, local community meetings, media interviews and candidate meetings with volunteers.
Getting noticed
With billboards, opinion pieces, media stories, targeted social media advertising and creative, attention-grabbing protests, our sophisticated communications campaign put real pressure on the major political parties. Our biggest billboard was taken down after a complaint by the Liberal Party, but we turned that into a viral social media hit instead, reaching 200,000 people on Facebook and Twitter, and trending nationally. The added publicity spread the message even further. So far, in fact, that new Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg commented in The Australian about Environment Victoria’s presence in his electorate. We conducted polling the week before the election, which showed that across three Victorian marginal seats (Deakin, Dunkley and Corangamite) more than 75 percent of voters are concerned or very concerned about climate change. More than three-quarters of them support phasing out our dirtiest coal power stations, like Hazelwood in the Latrobe Valley. In other words, after years of working in these areas, we now have overwhelming public support for our position on the country’s biggest environmental issues.