I worked on the EV election campaign and scorecard so can explain the thinking behind it.

Since 2012, EV has done most of its organising in the sandbelt seats of south-east Melbourne. It was a pragmatic decision: those are the places where politicians pay the most attention. Our clean energy focus was aimed at these marginal seats. We made 100,000 calls, handed out 82,000 scorecards, 4.5 million impressions online etc, just in those areas.

We chose clean energy because it was an entry into talking about climate change in suburbia, where most green groups don’t work, but where you need to win people over in order to convince political parties to create better policies. To establish this we did a literature review, ReachTel polling in the 4 sandbelt seats, then Facebook message testing. We tested leading with climate impacts (droughts, floods etc), shutting coal, or clean energy then pivoting to climate change. What worked was juxtaposing clean energy and dirty coal, and using that as a way in to talk about the seriousness of climate change.

In previous elections we’ve used more holistic scorecards, putting much more detail up front and showing the connection between nature, forests and climate change. But for suburban marginal electorates it needed to be simpler, perhaps oversimplified, to cut through.

The Liberal Party has now learned that Abbott-era anti renewables and anti climate positions don’t go down well at elections, which opens up space for more radical progressive policy.

Personally, I believe current thinking in mainstream ENGOs is still heavily influenced by the ‘carbon tax’ framing debacle and defeat. So I think the movement has been very defensive…building support for renewables rather than directly arguing for regulation to cut emissions. I think this was necessary, but now the renewables debate has been won, it’s time to go harder on the attack.

A lot of the big groups actually support the smaller groups. We need a whole ‘ecosystem’ of groups working together…e.g. groups like Darebin CAN do a smashing job in the inner north and EV focuses on marginal south east seats. They have different audiences so require different messages.

Groups sometimes run single-issue campaigns to avoid turf-cutting, and also to build up expertise. EV has been going for 50 years, and for many decades ran campaigns on forests, sustainable transport and waste/consumption. EV started working on climate more over the last few decades years because it was a newish topic, and other groups (TWS, FoE) were covering forests/nature. It’s a way of the movement assigning scarce resources and there’s lots of collaboration.

Totally agree that now is the time to go hard on much more radical campaigns. Especially “We need to build up the climate realist fringe movement, at the expense of maintaining one in the center.” That’s a good approach given Labor’s landslide win. However, I also think a strong, single-issue campaign on clean energy/climate in the last election was the right decision for EV, especially because of the focus on outer suburbs.

I have to disagree that ENGOs are campaigning on ‘climate reality’. Sorry that’s a weird term to use, as reality is clearly different depending on whether your in Syria, or Bangladesh, inland Australia, the inner city, or the Eastern Suburbs.

Depending on were we are that reality is clearly different, and we need to be able to change *how* we’re talking about climate change depending on who we’re talking to, to connect this bigger story to their disconnected experiences. But in this case, I think its clear we are dramatically changing *what* we’re saying – that the Victorian Government are leading the way on climate change, that we can log forests and build new fossil fuel industries while doing that.

I think its not fair to say that the messaging of the big NGOs is more successful when they are actually changing the message to make it more amenable. Its easy to give people a feel good story, for sure, but Australians are still among the world’s highest per-capita carbon emitters, and that is not a fact you hear repeated around that much nowadays. I totally agree that the messaging of the radical left hasn’t been very effective, either, that graphs, images of burning planets, ‘exposing the truth’ approaches aren’t working.

But I wouldn’t say that either end of this spectrum are doing better than each other. The ‘hard left’ have a harder message to sell, some of the ‘soft left’ such as EV have taken the harder job of selling it to outer suburban audiences.

We have a lot to learn from each other, that much is clear to me, and it will be cool to make more opportunities to that because between all these decades of campaigning there is a whole lot of amazing skills and experience. But talking about what we could have done 20 years ago, talking about ‘winners’ and claiming victories without acknowledging the struggle ahead, talking about ‘losers’ and abandoning hope, neither seems like a real choice to me.

Actually I think whatever our arguments are here, we have to acknowledge and prepare for a long phase of the struggle where we become certain that the world will go well beyond *safe* limits of climate change, to be able to continue to survive and struggle for a *safer* world. For the world of difference between 3 and 4 degrees, 6 and 7 degrees. To continue to fight to survive, and adapt, and not just to burn more carbon for the rich to buffer themselves against the storm. ‘Winning slowly means losing’ doesn’t give me much hope in this situation, neither does Dan Andrews being sold to me as a leader on climate change, I’m shit scared of the world he’s leading us to.

We will not get the action require until we begin by acknowledging the dire situation we’re in and the behemoth amount of work we need to do at emergency speed.

I’m blown away by a campaign that began in Darebin (Vic) council based on climateemergencydeclaration.org. Since Darebin passed a climate emergency motion in Nov 2016 this has spread to 5 Aus Councils, 6 US councils – including Los Angeles, and 2 UK councils with London now about to declare a climate emergency and take appropriate action (zero by 2030). A stark contrast to ‘zero by 2050’ suicidal target condoned by ACF, the climate council etc.

The first step to getting what’s needed is to state what’s needed. Winning slowly means losing.

I think ENGOs have been campaigning on the climate reality for the last 20 years. It’s just really bloody hard, and there’s a lot of money behind climate denial.

Especially at the beginning, the message was all about conveying the facts of climate change and assuming that would be enough to prompt rational humans to action. But it hasn’t been enough, because humans aren’t always rational decision makers.

What the Right also does well is “slippery slope” initiatives. Passing something that appears reasonable but can be used as leverage for a more radical action later. They understand that what matters is the outcome, which can be reached indirectly. Sometimes ENGOs take this approach.

To me it seems like the ‘radical Left’ is still stuck in the ‘information-deficit model’ of the 1990s. As if showing people more hockey stick shaped graphs will win them over. It won’t. While listening to the science of climate change, we also need to listen to the science of communication. We need emotive images showing local climate impacts, for example. And we need conservative climate messages that the Left disagrees with.

Thanks Bryony – I really agree we could have done so much more in the past 20 years to bring people up to speed with the reality of climate change and move a whole lot faster on it. But I guess the question is what can we do right now. Now always being a best time, but even more so that Labor has won a landslide in Victoria, and will win the upcoming federal election – and that the urgency of the crisis has deepened as well of the public understanding of it. How can we make the ENGOs switch their gears right now to be slamming Labor until they commit to Stop Adani, stop all new fossil fuel projects, close down the existing ones. I think without specific intervention grassroots campaigns and youth organisations are forcing them to switch their gears anyhow, but the bureaucracies and salaries will slow down the process intolerably.

I think four years time we’ll need to be having an election campaign around local resilience and self-sufficiency, bushfire survival, agricultural sustainability, as well as renewable energy, so there’s a lot of gear switching to do…

I worked on the Environment Victoria (EV) election campaign so can explain the strategic decisions behind the scorecard.

Before that, though, letting you know my background. I came to EV after exploring voluntary simplicity, permaculture etc so I agree with your views on the value of a radical fringe. Since then I have also learned the value of larger ENGOs. We need an ‘ecosystem’ of different approaches and they can work together.

Anyway, some background on the campaign…

Since 2012, EV has done most of its organising in outer suburban south-east Melbourne. It was a pragmatic decision: those are the places where politicians pay attention. Our clean energy focus was aimed at these marginal seats (we made 100,000 calls, handed out 82,000 scorecards, enrolled 1353 young people and had 4.5 million impressions online etc) just in those areas.

We chose clean energy because it was a way to talk about climate change in suburbia, where most green groups don’t work, but where you need to win people over in order to convince governments of all stripes to enact strong policy. To establish this we did a literature review, ReachTel polling in the 4 sandbelt seats, then Facebook message testing. We tested everything, including leading with nature or focusing on climate change impacts (images of droughts floods etc). The best results were leading with clean energy then talking about the severity of climate change. This is consistent with much comms research in Australia and overseas.

In previous elections we’ve used more holistic scorecards, putting much more detail up front and showing the connection between nature, forests and climate change. While it was popular with educated people in inner city areas, it doesn’t cut through in marginal suburban electorates. Hence we chose a simplified scorecard.

One of the biggest problems with the environment movement is it has had little electoral power, especially in marginal suburban seats. This clean energy/climate campaign showed enviro messages could cut through in the outer suburbs. That’s huge. The Vic election will shift the whole debate to the Left. A few days ago the new Vic Liberal Leader was appointed, and in his first press conference he mentioned that our state needs to cut emissions. This is amazing, considering the Victorian Liberal Party has not had a formal environment policy since 2006.

I also worked on the 2014 state election campaign, and environment or climate change was hardly mentioned. So this is a massive shift.

In my opinion, current thinking in mainstream ENGOs is still heavily influenced by the ‘carbon tax’ framing debacle and defeat. So I think the movement has been very defensive…building support for renewables rather than directly arguing for regulation to cut emissions. I think this was necessary, but now the renewables debate has been won, it’s time to get on the attack again.

A lot of the big groups actually support the smaller groups. E.g. EV has helped grassroots groups with funding and resources over many years. Likewise, ACF has also done heaps of work to support grassroots, and they’ve done great work with Stop Adani (IMO). FoE, as you know, has done absolutely amazing work with lock the gate etc. AYCC did heaps of work with the recent schools climate strike. The list goes on…

Having said that, charities are constrained in what they can say, and so we need a whole ‘ecosystem’ of groups.

Groups sometimes run single-issue campaigns to avoid turf-cutting, and also to build up expertise. EV has been going for 50 years, and for many decades ran campaigns on forests, sustainable transport and waste. EV started working on climate over the last 15 years because it was increasingly urgent, and other groups (TWS, FoE) were already covering forests. We do work on nature laws (Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act), recycling, river systems (Murray Darling Basin Plan) and energy efficiency (e.g. rental standards) as well. Different groups working on different issues is a way of the movement assigning scarce resources.

I’d love to see a holistic nature/climate/solidarity campaign in Vic…it’s just hard to create! But yeah, let’s try it.

Totally agree that now is the time to go hard on much more radical campaigns. Especially “We need to build up the climate realist fringe movement, at the expense of maintaining one in the center.” That’s a good approach given Labor’s landslide win. However, I also think a strong, single-issue campaign on clean energy/climate in the last election was the right decision. It has given space and momentum for a more radical approach.

Thanks Josi – it was really a pleasure to work with you on this project – you were really patient and gave great ideas and input and in no way as you said at first a ‘luddite’! Let me know how it goes with the Salon – you have a great community building vision – I hope that comes across in the website so that people will come and join in.