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- A last minute message!
Hi! Popping into your inbox earlier in the week than usual with some election eve updates and a special op-ed by Lizzie Hedding, co-founder of Build a Ballot. In many ways it’s a follow up to the editor’s letter I wrote four weeks ago, about wanting to prioritise real conversations > sharable digital content. I’ll be publishing it on the Zee Feed website on Saturday afternoon, but newsletter subscribers get to read it here first! This line is searing and true: “It’s increasingly obvious that the biggest divide in our politics is not between left and right. It’s between people who pay attention and those who don’t.” Click to skip to Lizzie’s piece.
If you are still deciding who vote for — or have a friend or family member who is unsure about who to vote for — the Build a Ballot tool is helpful. If you don’t agree with what it suggests, it gives you full control to change the order and essentially create your own how to vote card. Even if you know exactly how you intend to vote tomorrow, I still found it helpful to (as the name suggests) literally create a preview of how I’ll fill out the ballot papers for my electorate. Found it particularly handy for the Senate. Less time in the booth, more time at the cake stalls.
Remember, parties don’t dictate preferences — you do! The best how to vote card to follow is the one you create for yourself.
Heads up: there won’t be a Sunday morning newsletter, as the results will have only come in a few hours before and useful analysis takes time. So expect a special issue of the newsletter in your inbox at some point during the week. For those who want an initial reaction, I’ll be recording an episode of Electioncast with the Crikey team on Sunday that will be published around lunchtime – keep an eye out for that here.
That’s all for now, see you on the other side!
Let this be the last vibes-based election
I went on a date at the end of last year with a guy who proudly told me he was related to Barnaby Joyce. Amused that he seemed to think this would appeal to me — a climate activist — I shared the anecdote with a friend the next day. Her response? “Who’s Barnaby Joyce?”
It’s easy to forget how vastly different our algorithms and echo chambers can be from the people we sit next to at work, jog alongside at run club or catch up with at the footy. But while my feed was filled with political content over the past five weeks, 44% of Australians said they paid little to no attention to the election, even in the very late stages of the campaign.
The reasons why someone might not engage with politics are complex, but if we want to make progress on the big issues that affect our country and planet, we need to find ways to include everyone in the conversation.
It’s increasingly obvious that the biggest divide in our politics is not between left and right. It’s between people who pay attention and those who don’t. Politicians have clearly recognised this, and have turned to brain rot memes and diss tracks in an attempt to connect with voters typically removed from mainstream political discussion.
In today’s fragmented media landscape, the focus becomes ‘how do I get voters to notice me?’ rather than ‘what do I actually want to say and do?’.
The result of this race to the bottom is a political conversation that assumes the only way to connect with young voters — and, in fact, all voters — is to dumb things down. To meme-ify, to slogan-ise, to ignore policy altogether.
This approach not only underestimates voters, it prevents us from the kind of meaningful discussions required to address the compounding crises we are facing. An overheating planet, rising inequality and a housing crisis driving more people towards homelessness cannot be solved through memes. The ‘vibes’ based approach to campaigning pushes voters further away from the political process as they rightly question why their local MP seems to spend more time chasing TikTok trends than actually standing up for them in parliament.
Whatever these content strategies imply, Australians are not fools. They do complex, important jobs in our economy; they effortlessly keep up with the latest MAFS drama; and they’re more than capable of talking about policy, weighing up tradeoffs and voting for a better future. It’s just that they’re often disconnected by algorithms and a political discourse that ignores many of the issues that matter most.
A couple of weeks ago the climate organisation I co-run released a tool designed to engage these voters, while shifting the conversation back to policy. Since launching, over 500,000 voters have used Build a Ballot and we've reached users in every single electorate. The same algorithms that reward angry comment sections reward the shares, comments and conversations this tool generates; so far we’ve had over 3.5 million organic views on social media.
We’ve received hundreds (if not thousands) of messages from people talking about how this is the first time they’ve really understood what they’re voting for; how empowering it feels to make an informed choice at the ballot box. It has helped voters start conversations with family members, group chats and communities about the kinds of policies we need as a country, and which candidates and parties will actually best represent them.
Regardless of the final election result, the uptake of Build a Ballot throughout this campaign has given me some hope that we will not be doomed to vibes-based elections forever.
How they will ultimately vote on Saturday still remains to be seen. But it has given me some hope that we are not doomed to ‘vibes’ based elections forever.
As for my Barnaby Joyce-unaware friend? She messaged me last week to ask if I had any voting resources that could help her actually do some research for once. I sent her Build a Ballot, and realised I should probably talk about my job a bit more amongst the dating life updates.