If you wonder why various Liberals are currently railing obsessively about the dreadfully underhand business of Labor operatives phoning old ladies in their homes at night, and why Cory Bernardi thinks the Coalition desperately needs a functional field campaigning model – consider the following mind-focusing metrics.



On the afternoon and evening of Thursday 30 June – 48 hours before Australian voters went to the polls – Labor’s field operation for the 2016 election campaign made 62,000 phone calls to voters in its targeted seats.

Let me repeat that. One afternoon and evening: 62,000 phone calls. In the final 72 hours of the campaign, Labor logged 50,000 individual conversations with voters in targeted seats.

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The final push by Labor’s field operation was predicated on the judgment that one in four voters would only make up their minds in the final 72 hours, so that was the time when contacts with voters would be most productive.

Some more metrics. The Labor party’s national field operation for 2016 comprised 15,000 volunteers, the culmination of a recruitment drive that had gone on behind the scenes for the best part of three years.

Some of these people were party members. Some were more passive supporters – people recruited after interacting with the ALP on Facebook or some other social media site, following up with people who had signed petitions, or had sought to be on the party’s email contact list.

Careful records were kept. Targets were set and reported against, with organisers doing due diligence to check the data supplied by the volunteers. The field team logged 1.6m contacts with voters over the eight weeks – either through phone calls or door-knocking. They made a million phone calls, they knocked on 560,000 doors, and logged 450,000 successful conversations in targeted seats.

The volunteer field team were supplied with campaign packs and scripts, given precise training about how to interact with people either through door-knocking or on the telephone: taught how to listen, how to pick up on concerns, and to deploy the best methods of persuasion that had been honed through trial and error.

They were told not to phone anyone after 8pm at night. They were also told to use their own personal story, the connection to the community they lived in, to connect with undecided voters. Labor’s field operatives weren’t sitting in call centres, they were canvassing from their own lounge rooms, in the targeted seats, on their own phones, inside their own neighbourhoods.

The call lists and door knocks were data driven. The party used material such as the results by booths from the last federal election combined with separate survey work, to get a sense of the people in the neighbourhoods they were canvassing. Social media also allows the opportunity of directed messaging among key demographics to supplement the human contact, so that was deployed on an unprecedented scale.

Labor trialled this particular field model in the Victorian and Queensland state elections. Then they used the opportunity of the Canning byelection in September 2015 to trial a model that could work federally.



The Victorian field crew was parachuted into Western Australia for the Canning byelection to phone bank every night and also recruit a group of organisers to door knock every weekend. Labor insiders say the Canning byelection was the first major stress test of the model that would be deployed with great success federally. The targeted seats operation for the campaign was spearheaded by the ALP’s national assistant secretary Paul Erickson, who honed his techniques at the ACTU and in the Victorian party organisation.

And this is the point where I tell you this was the party’s operation only. The trade union movement ran its own, entirely separate, field campaign, flying volunteers and organisers around the country into their own targeted seats.

Liberals observed union volunteers on booths handing out for Labor but also for micro-parties: in Queensland, Glenn Lazarus and Bob Katter for example. Others in other states.

The ALP and the union campaigns coordinated efforts but were executed separately with separate objectives. Internal trade union reporting of their operation puts contacts for the entire campaign in the order of 50,000.

Activist groups such as GetUp also ran their own field operations yielding metrics such as 27,000 conversations with voters in Bass and Dickson, where the group was running campaigns against Liberal incumbents Andrew Nikolic and Peter Dutton.

Having a coordinated ground game is still a relatively new phenomenon in Australian politics.

Ground games were once an exclusively American fixation – a function of the imperative of having to get out the vote in a system where voting isn’t compulsory. There is no campaign in American politics without a comprehensive ground strategy and a field model but in Australia we are still catching up.

Labor says the operation for 2016 was the largest and most sophisticated organiser-driven field model it has ever turned out for an election. And it will continue to refine and hone the operation: recruiting more volunteers, collecting more data, refining the methods of communication, using social media more than traditional media.

Many Liberals, out defending their seats, felt hopelessly outflanked in 2016 by the ALP organisers that they could see, and nervous about an operation they knew was comprehensively in the field, but wasn’t always in plain sight.

The Liberal party, contrary to much of the roiling and self-interested revisionism that is now under way, did not run a terrible campaign at the organisation level using techniques from the stone age.

The Liberals communicated with voters through direct mail, through robocalls, through virtual town halls, through directed social media communications in targeted seats – all up-to-the-minute and proven as far as it goes – and on current trends, the Coalition may emerge from the current carnage and recriminations victorious, just.



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But it faces a sobering reality. The Liberal party cannot hope to match the activist armies the progressive parties can now field during campaigns, and with those armies comes experience, insight and the prospect of productive evolution from campaign to campaign, a process of learning and adaptation that only enhances outcomes.

The Liberal party has an ageing party membership, its institutional supporters are happy to give money but not time, or manpower, or shoe leather.

Conservatives are trailing, and trailing badly in Australia at least, when it comes to large-scale, rapid, mobile, grassroots campaigning, which, of course, can be the difference between winning and losing.

Now you might understand Cory and his conservatives recruitment drive – and those anxiety filled protestations by senior Liberals about phone calls to old ladies in their homes at night.