One way to take the helm

Climate of Hope

18 May

One weekend not too long ago I attended Getting Elected: The first national convention for community-minded independents. To be honest I hoped to turn up on the Friday night, get a bit of an insight and then dip in and out on Saturday and Sunday. It was pretty annoying to be totally suckered in and inspired that I spent my entire weekend on Zoom.

The convention was billed as an opportunity to share knowledge and practical advice for getting independents into Parliament. It was a place for people interested in supporting, electing or being an independent community-minded candidate.

I turned up because I’ve long been fascinated by the way that Cathy McGowan and the Voices for Indi crew shifted not just who was elected, but the way democracy in Indi was done (I’ve written more about this here).

Cathy had gathered together most of the federal independents and a group of state and council members as well. The program included Helen Haines, Zali Steggal, Kerryn Phelps, Rebekah Sharkie and Jacquie Lambie.

Attending the convention were 300 Australians from across 78 different electorates. I was struck by the real mix of people on the call. There was one woman who was a long time Liberal Party supporter who said, “I’ve had to leave the party because they just don’t offer anything to women” – all the way through to a previous Greens member who reflected that while their policy views were broadly in alignment, “I don’t like the way they message.” While the audience was probably two thirds women, there was a surprising mix of ages and backgrounds. There were the people who were attending because they wanted to run as a candidate. There were those who saw themselves as the “worker bees” wanting to get behind someone they believed in. There were people calling in from cities and people calling in from rural areas (special shout out to the guy who called in from a ride-on lawnmower!). Some people were already part of “voices 4” groups, while others were merely curious or just beginning on their journey.

Regardless of age, gender, race or political persuasion, the thing that bound participants together — the thing that meant people gave up their weekends to sit on yet another freaking Zoom call — was the desire to own, to connect with, to love the way this country works and what it stands for.

I felt such joy and aliveness to be with so many ‘amateur yes people’. ‘Amateur’ in that these were mostly people who hadn’t been through the sausage factory of politics, who hadn’t made their way as career politicians or staffers; but who had come together with a sense of responsibility and vision for what this country could be. And ‘yes people’ in that they were eager to have a go, try on new ideas, put their hand up for new ways of doing things. It presented as an attitude, not a qualification.

As one of the presenters said, “we’re playing our own game. They don’t even know the rules.” I realised the thrill of being amateur is that you have permission to do things differently. I realised I would not just be spending my weekend on Zoom, but in a virtual room full of these diverse amateur yes people, being guided and supported (but in no way controlled) by others also wanting to get closer to democracy. Oh yes. This was exciting.

While I loved the many loud yeses, I came away with more than just an enthusiasm for cheering on the yes people. This was a weekend about strategy and skill as much as attitude and values. And three key insights from the discussions struck me most:

We need to learn to win... as a community
Getting elected is not the only victory
We make the rules

We need to learn to win… as a community

Cathy McGowan, the first Independent MP elected to the federal seat of Indi in 2013, opened the convention talking about winning. “We need to learn how to win as a community,” she said. She had my attention. We’d just published one of our reMAKER memos with advice on better leading in this moment, and a key point was not being so attached to the resistance that we missed opportunities to embrace the helm.

Independents in Indi know something about this subject: it’s the only place in the country where two independent candidates in a row have won office in previously safe, tightly-held party seats to become federal MPs. But Cathy was clear from the beginning that she didn’t believe in winning at all costs.

“Don’t want to win too badly, that is when you start to compromise,”she cautioned. And later, as she closed the convention she added, “We are not in a hurry. We need to do this slowly and carefully. We need to be considered and we need to do this well.”

But what Cathy did say is that those with power don’t hand it over willingly. It needs to be won, fought for and held onto. So anyone who wants to take that on needs to learn to be outspoken and opinionated, but to do so in a way that’s deeply grounded in their personal and community values. Cathy’s advice is that you need to be clever, strategic, respectful and a part of a team. “Australia doesn’t like tall poppies very much and they tend to get mown down.” Her solution? “You need a whole field of sunflowers standing behind you.”

Helen Haines echoed this sentiment, speaking to the importance of the ‘hero’s journey’ of hearing the call, facing the challenges and returning triumphant. Only in her story, the hero isn’t the candidate, it’s the community. The community actually needs to be on the journey. In Indi this was partly done through the concept of radical trust, where volunteers on the campaign signed up to the values of the campaign and supported from there to do what they thought was necessary — including spending money and making real decisions, not just implementing someone else’s plan.

There was a lot of talk throughout the weekend about how we go from ‘me’ to ‘we’ — both as a community and as potential candidates. ‘I’ve got an idea for something, how do I build community around it?’ was a question that came up again and again. The answers: you start from where you are. You invite your six best mates, they invite their friends. You host a kitchen table conversation. You ask the people who show up what they care about, listen and trust the process.

As Cathy summed it up best: “First we create belonging. Then community. Then we get things done.”

Getting elected is not the only victory

As important as learning to win is recognising that winning can take many forms. Creating an Australia reMADE, including a country with a thriving democracy, is an ongoing process. We need to celebrate the different wins we make along the way of a journey that can be joyful as well as jarring — but is never complete.

There were two key conversations during the convention that really cemented for me the importance of recognising that there are multiple ways to measure winning.

The first was the story of Judy Ryan. Judy told the story of living in inner city Melbourne and witnessing the high number of drug overdoses in the alleyways near her house. Caring deeply about the people affected, Judy decided to run for local council on the single issue platform of safe injecting rooms. People told her that she would never get elected on a single issue, and they were right. But what happened was even better: she got enough of the vote to prove to the elected council just how much community support there was for safe injecting rooms — and as she said, it meant she didn’t have to actually do the job of being a councillor. The very act of campaigning built community, support and a network of people engaged on a huge social challenge. Now her council has engaged in a successful trial of a medically-supervised injecting room, and they’re about to extend it.

Judy didn’t need to get elected to change lives.

While Cathy McGowan did indeed win a seat in Federal Parliament, the original intention of Voices4Indi was less about getting elected and more about changing the way democracy was done in their community. They wanted to make the seat competitive in order to get the incumbent MP to listen more. As Cathy reflected, before the final votes were even tallied, “we had won a pre-election outcome. We’d shared, we’d made the seat competitive. The process was the outcome.” You could hear in Cathy’s voice the joy she felt in the campaign, the fun they had; the energy that came from laughing together, playing with new ideas and doing things differently.

Many journalists covering the growing movement of Voices4 groups (there are now about 24 across Australia) assume that any independent’s ultimate goal is the balance of power in Parliament. But here again, Kerryn Phelps urged us in her speech to reframe the idea of victory — from winning the ‘balance of power’ to winning ‘the power of balance’. Not that MPs’ positions on legislation or governing should lack passion, commitment or strength; rather that the power of parties or indeed independents should be used in service of a balanced, respectful and collaborative approach to governing. What a radical reframing of Parliament this would be if this became the norm.

We make the rules

Last year I started an experiment. I asked my friends and community who they thought should run for Parliament among our networks. I collected names and then approached those people and told them what the community had said. Every single one of them said something like, “I’m not smart enough,” or, “I don’t dress well enough,” or “I’d be too scared” — or laughed awkwardly and made some comment about politics not being for the likes of us. There is an assumption in these answers that there is only one way to be a politician and only one way to do politics.

“We’ve created our own game here. We get to make the rules” - Jill Briggs

The type of democracy on offer at this convention was one where ‘ordinary people’ (whatever that means) are allowed to participate in Parliament; to rewrite the rules around how politicians are created and the role of the community. Elsewhere overseas it’s been referred to as ‘flatpack democracy’.

Some of the messages from the stage: you don’t have to run a campaign in the frame of the opposition. You're allowed to be clear about values. You're allowed to be kind. You're allowed to be collaborative. You're allowed to lead in new ways because you've built community and political power in new ways. The old rules that say you can't have integrity and transparency and kindness in politics and survive are crap, so chuck them out.

I already knew from previous conversations with some of the people behind the Voices4Indi group that a commitment to values was a key element of their campaign — but this convention really illustrated it in practice.

Listening to the women on stage was exciting. I loved getting a sense of the person, not the politician. I loved the differences between them and the deep respect they showed for each other, other politicians and the participants attending online. Not once did I hear a single politician (current or ex) speak in a way about another person in a way that was not deeply respectful.

In opening the event, Cathy McGowan and MC Jill Briggs both emphasised strongly the values that were to apply while we were together. Building on the commitment from the Voices 4 Indi members to “be their best selves” — as attendees we were all asked to act with integrity, respect, honesty, transparency and inclusion.

It felt wonderful to be in a room of people with at times very different views on issues, but to still feel like we could agree on the basic values of respect and integrity. As we talked about how to go from ‘me’ to ‘we’ in engaging our communities, we also experienced first-hand what this felt like over the course of the convention itself. It was understood that while we might disagree on things, in this space we were here to take off our team jerseys, put down the loud barracking horns and fundamentally experience what it means to do politics differently; to do politics from a space of shared respect for community.

We talked about how prioritising kindness and other good values does not make you un-strategic or a pushover. As Cathy said, it’s important to expect backlash and to use that as an opportunity to really deeply commit to your values. One of the speakers noted that when her core flutes were defaced she got more media time speaking about how that demonstrated the need for a different type of politics than she could ever have hoped to generate.

In one workshop a woman asked, “how do we convince people of these values?” and the answer very strongly back was, ‘you don’t. You listen. You practice democracy by enabling participation and enabling people to be heard.’ In other words, you trust people and trust the process. When people come together around a table to talk about what they want for their community, that automatically puts them in a different mindset to when a pollster, marketer or politician asks them, ‘what can I do for you?’.

At the end of the convention there is a deluge of connection. I watch it on the closed Facebook group.

“Anyone in XXX seat? I’d love to connect!”

“You’re in my area, can we chat?”

“Anyone got any tips on XYZ??”

The organisers of the convention were keen to make sure people stayed connected, but made it clear that they were now stepping back and letting people and communities do their own work their own way.

I know there has been commentary in the media that the independents’ movement is a coordinated attack on the major parties, or on certain MPs. What I witnessed was not a conversation about attack. It was a conversation about one way for ordinary people in Australia to get closer to democracy.

This was not a convention about independents getting elected at all costs, but about new pathways for participation: for community enlivenment, for ownership of the direction this country takes. If the existing parties can do this too, so much the better!