Idle Thoughts

So, what happened?

So, for the Greens at least, the NSW election wasn’t as good as hoped. It wasn’t a clusterfuck, by any means - take it from someone who saw a genuine clusterfuck when I was a member of the Australian Democrats for the 2004 federal election. But it wasn’t a glorious success, either.

There is a cruel all-or-nothingness that taunts parties at the stage in their growth where the Greens are right now in NSW. Good vote results can be achieved, yet no (lower-house) seats are won, despite such efforts. This is the “trough of sorrow” into which parties fall when they can muster primary votes of 30-40% - strong primary votes, demanding much hard work, and offering the tantalising prospect of victory, but which often, due to much smaller swings, or the vagaries of preferences, will deliver a big fat zero.

The remedy for this is to keep working in the community, harder than the other parties do, and build that primary vote up to 40-50%. At these levels, winning becomes much less of a long-shot. The major problem with the “trough of sorrow” is that it can be incredibly demoralising to party members and volunteers; a sense of fatalism, that “we tried our best, but it wasn’t good enough”, that “all our work was for nothing” is corrosive to the motivation of all involved. It can be made even worse in immature parties, such as the Greens, where expectations of success (within the campaign) can be raised, making the disappointment of election night all the more bitter.

Perhaps Jamie Parker will win Balmain on postal and pre-poll votes, perhaps not.

In the end, it doesn’t matter, and the correct response is to just HTFU. So we didn’t win. There’s still psychologically-scarred children in vile immigration prisons, and public housing being redeveloped into yuppie studios. The atmosphere, ever more perturbed by the carbon dioxide we pump into it, cares not for your electoral loss. Nor, for that matter, does the State of Israel. There is Work To Do.

My initial thoughts are that the Greens result came down to this: Despite people’s rage at Labor, we didn’t really give them a reason to vote for us, and nor did we tie our policies to the ordinary interests and values of voters. Having run an abstract campaign - “Real change for a change”, for fuck’s sake - perhaps we should not be surprised that concrete votes weren’t the result. We assumed our moral goodness was evident, and enough reason for people to vote for us. It turns out it wasn’t. 

(Thankfully, though, I have yet to hear a Greens member utter that “we’d only do better if the people were better educated about us”, as was common in the Democrats. Shades of Bertolt Brecht!)

Steve Blank has a wise saying: “Inside the building, there are not facts, only opinions”. He uses it to describe a common problem in new businesses: It’s not only possible, but common, for companies to conceive, develop and attempt to market a new product, only to find the market doesn’t want it. To me, this sounds an awful lot like how most Greens campaigns (and formerly, Democrat ones) are managed. A bunch of smart, politically aware people sit in a room and decide what issues to campaign on, absent any actual data of what might be of concern to the voters.

It is entirely possible that no-one in Marrickville or Heffon gave a flying fuck about the accessibility of train stations, despite the worthiness of the issue, and despite the resources the campaigns put into that issue.

Chaerephon asked the oracle at Delphi who was the wisest man of all, and the oracle said it was Socrates. Upon hearing this, and disbelieving it, Socrates went out to find men wiser than himself, believing that he himself was certainly not wise. But, having spoken to statesmen, artisans and poets, and found them wanting in wisdom, Socrates was finally able to resolve the oracle’s paradox by realising that he was only wise in that he knew of his ignorance.

I think this is the way forward for the Greens: we must admit to ourselves that we know a whole lot less about the electorate than we think we do, and then go out - in to the public - and fill in those major gaps in our knowledge. More meetings, electoral “post-mortems” and reviews (another favorite pastime of the Democrats) will achieve nothing; the same insiders will be spoken to; the same myths perpetrated, true or not; and, if nothing changes, the same mistakes made election after election. As they say, if nothing changes, nothing changes.