It is the duty of a party to be democratic. Which means that, whatever our personal views are, we are aspiring to serve the public. This is why we must be able to isolate our own egos and look at ourselves critically. In saying that elections are a chaotic time for everyone who gives their time to help and where there’s chaos, there are mistakes, and it is important we reflect on what happened. In addition to congratulating people on their efforts and what went well, we must also commit ourselves to working out what went wrong, how we can fix it in the future, and how to cope better with problems we are likely to face again in elections to come.
So firstly, a sincere thankyou to everyone who invested their passion, effort, and time in helping the Fusion party. We are volunteers and literally nothing happens without you.
In this election we ran more candidates than previously, but overall volunteer count and candidate experience levels were both lower. The reduced vote count which we received in some areas can largely be attributed to this. Additionally, between elections we had focused on getting our house in order and completing important works (such as the Value Framework and Policy Principles), which did pay off in a variety of ways this election. Due to this focus though, we knew from long in advance that we would have to be able to step-up quickly to accommodate last-minute candidates if we were going to have the same level of presence as last time - and we did our best to prepare for that eventuality.
However, at the end of the day there is no real substitute for candidates being organised and committed earlier.
Still, it is worth noting that our lower house candidates with a good volunteer team (10+) performed strongly for first timers or saw a small boost. With the addition of more dedicated campaign team members, in particular a volunteer coordinator for each candidate, our volunteer numbers could potentially have been doubled (especially for Queensland and New South Wales) and the evidence shows that small additional support could have a large impact on our results. In future, we will likely make it a requirement to have an active volunteer coordinator assigned before accepting a candidate for endorsement.
We also know that centre/left minor parties tend to lose vote share in an election where Labor makes a strong showing (with the reverse true when the Liberals make a strong showing), and with the landslide Labor victory it's clear we were very much fighting an uphill battle.
Which makes the data we have on our website hits even more remarkable: 153,000 visitors over the course of the election is an impressive amount of awareness and appears to be greater than any previous election.
This resulted in a veritable flood of feedback on the website, some good, some critical.
A chief learning was that our policy presentation was too dense for the average visitor. Policy pages received the most traffic, and data indicates people largely skimmed them - meaning a review of how we present policy information at the highest level is needed to get the message across as succinctly as possible... with the option for people to dive in and read more detail as they choose.
We are pleased to say that a number of people with marketing backgrounds have come forward to assist in this work going forward - and we will aspire to have dedicated coordinators that handle aspects of branding, messaging, identity, and communications in the future.
Our partnership with the Australian Progressives and Democracy First also complicated this due to the lateness of the arrangement, though it should be acknowledged that the resources they brought to our combined campaigns was a strong boost. A significant improvement to our campaigns going forward would be to have a coordinator for those specific aspects: branding, messaging, identity, and communications.
There were of course some hiccoughs here. In the past we have had the great fortune of working with people in good faith in a high trust environment, and so when investing our limited energies investigating cooperation with political allies, we made the mistake of only focusing on similarities. This led to challenges with a couple of "rogue" candidates who made decisions that reflected poorly on the party.
It was challenges around effectively presenting this coherent messaging and identity that led to one of our most notable learnings: the need to better manage our preference recommendations.
There will always be a tension between allowing candidates and member parties the freedom to choose their own messaging and preferences, as alternative to a centralised process. The main benefits of candidate autonomy are locally adapted and empowered campaigns, giving them more ownership over their results. The risk is that we have a less aligned movement and inexperienced candidates/campaign teams will struggle. A centralised process also adds administrative burden on the national campaigns team in exchange for reducing it on candidate campaign teams. In this tension between decentralisation and centralisation we have learnt key lessons about where the balance should lie on specific points.
The main takeaways are:
- Most Australians see preference recommendations as "alignment" between ourselves and the parties we preference.
- Tolerance for the merits of good candidates in questionable parties is now at an all-time low, and so preparing preferences based on candidates while ignoring their member parties is a mistake.
- The previous model where preferences are selected locally, and National Exec goes to candidates to discuss specific preference considerations is unmanageably cumbersome.
- The onus needs to be on candidates to come to Exec if they want to do something unexpected - as such, we should prepare a generic set of national preference recommendations containing parties that we have political alignment with, including indicators of how/where the policy and philosophical alignment is.
- This will result in a default set of rules that leverage the system of recommendations for assigning preference order.
- These rules will not be immutable (this is not about preventing candidates from setting preferences) - but Candidates will be obligated to come and discuss with Exec if they want an exception to these rules, this way Exec won't be blindsided by decisions we had no knowledge of.
- The recommendations should include a blacklist of specific parties that we collectively agree are a risk to be seen aligning with - which will be constructed with the support of a party membership vote
- This way members will have a voice to make clear what they find acceptable.
- There will then be no exceptions granted for candidates to preference blacklist parties.
In conclusion, we made a lot of progress this election in a number of ways that aren't readily visible to the public. We grew in membership, and as an organisation we matured greatly over the past couple of years, and this was reflected in the attention and consideration we received from interest & advocacy groups, other parties, and the media. This growth and progress comes with challenges and lessons to be learned, and we are committed to learning those lessons so that we can continue to grow and progress in the future.