Battlelines are drawn with the ex-PM and his opponents using shareable videos and old-school door-knocking to win over voters

In what has become an existential battle for Tony Abbott’s political future, Facebook, Instagram and other online platforms are being weaponised with highly shareable videos and memes designed to capture the attention of the 100,000 voters in the former prime minister’s beachside electorate.

Some rely on humour, some on local celebrities, some on recycling an important news item. The key thing is that they catch the attention, even just for a fleeting moment, as voters scroll through their feeds.

Mark Kelly, a local surfboard manufacturer in Manly who runs Vote Tony Out, an organisation dedicated to removing Abbott from Warringah, has moved from T-Shirts to videos.

His latest offering featuring a local singer, Josh Fergus, came about when Kelly sent out a message to supporters asking them to turn up at a local park one Saturday. Around 85 people came. The video is now being shared among like-minded citizens and another is in production.

Warringah video

Abbott, having advertised for young interns with social media skills a month ago, is now ramping up his shareable videos. He might look like a 60-something white guy – not the usual profile of an influencer – but he starts with the enviable advantage of having nearly half a million followers on Facebook, thanks to having been prime minister. Not all of those followers are in his electorate, but it’s a big reach.

He’s also been the local MP for 25 years, an event GetUp celebrated this week, with a “retirement” party outside his office.

It was quickly turned into a meme, though a GetUp spokesman said the group is much more focused on organising a different kind of social campaigning: an on-the-ground game that involves mobilising their supporters to door-knock all 64,000 households in theelectorate.

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Abbott has also opened a new fundraising site, Battlelines, named after the title of his book written in 2009. Subscribers to Battlelines were sent the latest endorsement video featuring the former Australian cricketer Brett Lee and several women supporters on Wednesday.

“He stands up for the underdog, he leads from the front,” says Lee. “You want people who fight, who fight for what they believe in.”

The video, which is appearing in sections on Abbott’s Facebook page, underscores Abbott’s community credentials: local hero, fundraiser, firie MP.

Tani Ruckle, a former Australian athlete and ambassador for the youth work charity, Streetwork, highlighted Abbott’s fundraising efforts. She rode with him in the Pollie Pedal in 2017. “So many things that he does the cameras don’t see,” she says.

Roxanne Holmes, the daughter of James Ricketson, who was freed from a Cambodian jail last year after being convicted on espionage charges, tells how Abbott played an important role behind the scenes in freeing her father.

Whether the endorsement videos work as shareable content remains to be seen.

“The interesting thing about his videos, is they are all about him being the man about town,” says Kelly. “There’s nothing about representing Warringah in parliament and his record.”

“Our plan is to make sure he’s got more time to help out the community,” he says.

Battlelines aims to raise $227,000 before the election is called, probably on Sunday week, with an appeal that speaks to his supporters.

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“With a $10m war chest, GetUp think they can buy the election,” Battlelines warns. “Their approved candidates – in seats like Warringah – will clearly do their bidding if they are elected,” he warns.

“These far-left activists want to weaken our borders, make our electricity bills more expensive, and divide our nation with the politics of identity and race.”

His office did not respond to questions about the target and how the fundraising was progressing.

Meanwhile Abbott is using the advantage of incumbency – the ability to deliver real money and outcomes – with $5m pledged by the Morrison government to Manly surf lifesaving club this week.

Of course not all videos hit their mark. Abbott’s attempts to show he was a man of Warringah out door-knocking backfired when his video of him discovering for the first time a street library went viral – and for all the wrong reasons.

Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) It’s amazing the things you see and learn when you’re door knocking. The Tango Avenue street library is a testament to the strong community we have throughout Warringah. 📚 pic.twitter.com/njDpFinFWl

“First time out door-knocking, eh?” commented one person. Another sent a map showing the locations of over 1,000 street libraries in Australia.

It soon led Abbott impersonator, Jonas Holt, to create his own spoof of the street library incident.

Abbott Impersonator 🚻 (@ComedianJonas) "I am learning every day"#auspol #streetlibrary pic.twitter.com/2mvXJR4rrI

Abbott’s opponent, Zali Steggall, a barrister and former Olympian, is sticking to a more conventional strategy of talking about her policy priorities and leaving the attacks on Abbott to other groups.

This week she launched her health policy, with a particular focus on mental health, and next weeks she’s at a climate change conference, sharing the stage with fellow independent Oliver Yates, who is running in Josh Frydenberg’s seat of Kooyong in Melbourne.

Her official campaign launch is a sell-out event at the Manly Novotel this weekend, with 500 people expected to attend. So far her site boasts she has 655 volunteers for her campaign – which will make for a strong ground game on polling day.

But her Facebook page has a much smaller reach than Abbott’s – less than 2,000 – and the question is: does she have just a small core of highly motivated supporters or a genuinely large backing?

A Reachtel poll commissioned by GetUp in early February had her comfortably ahead 54% to 46%, two-party preferred. But there are several weeks to go and the campaign proper is just heating up.

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While digital media is important, campaigns are just as much about other more conventional social interactions, from door-knocking to holding kitchen table conversations with neighbours.

Voices of Warringah started as a community organisation that was looking for more progressive representation than Abbott provided. Now that they have helped recruit a candidate, they are busy spreading the world through Warringah that there are viable alternatives to Abbott in the form of Steggall and others.

GetUp, which has had a seat campaign up and running in Warringah for several months, plans to door-knock all 64,000 homes and is putting its efforts into mobilising volunteers to make calls and get out on the street. The main thrust is to get people who care about climate change to vote against Abbott, whose parliamentary record as a climate change sceptic and blocker of his own side’s national energy guarantee is well known.

Also on the scene is Advance Australia, which claims to be the rightwing antidote to GetUp. Its national director, Gerard Benedet, told the Sydney Morning Herald this week it had 27,500 members and a $395,000 war chest raised from 2,000 “mainly small donations”.

It is looking at defending up to nine seats, including Warringah, which are held by conservative Liberal MPs.

But compared to GetUp’s funds – GetUp is said to have raised close to $10m in donations – Advance Australia has a way to go.

In Warringah it has funded a mobile billboard on a truck that carries a message linking Steggall to Labor’s Bill Shorten. An earlier advertisement by Advance Australia on social media saying Steggall backed Shorten’s changes to dividend imputation, backfired after the media pointed out it was blatantly inaccurate as Steggall had clearly opposed the changes from the outset.

In its communications with members via its site, Advance is concentrating on raising money to support its bid to give “mainstream Australia” a voice and stop the “far-left activists” from taking over.

But whether money will be enough to combat the army of supporters that both Steggall and GetUp have remains to be seen.