Is Getup Useless?

Hey mojo.

If you think scrutineering is an interesting job, you out to try running a booth sometime.

I have had to bounce scrutineers out of the booth in the past (on more than one occasion) and with one particular belligerent bugger; I had to call the police to get the scrutineer out of the polling booth. He couldn’t understand the difference between a polling official assisting a blind person (how to vote) and him bullying them into what to numbers to enter.

And I am not talking about enthusiastic party workers handing out pamphlets. I am talking about guys had been registered in the morning and were wearing official scrutineer badges.

There are rules and guidelines for scrutineers. Sometimes I wonder if they have the capacity to verify the ballots because they seem to have no capacity for understanding the rules they are supposed to abide by.

But G.Al, bear in mind that the change in composition of the Senate is almost all down to the ALP securing seats it didn’t get last time, rather than the non-majors.

For example, the ALP look to have taken 3 Victorian Senate seats (whereas they lost one to Family First last time); 3 Queensland seats (lost one to the Nats last time); and 3 Tasmanian seats (they had 2 last time).

The territories and WA haven’t changed since the last election – the only interesting result is in SA, where the 2004 result of 3-all to Lib and ALP has changed this time to 2-all Lib/ALP, 1 Green and 1 Xenophon.

GetUp may have just missed getting the immediate balance of power changed, but they did run a national campaign and the balance will change in July. So I think it’s a long bow to say they failed.

I think that other 1% that Kerry Tucker needed probably says more about the strong campaign run by Troy Williams, who had one of the lowest swings in the country. That’s why senate teams always need lower house candidates (even if they have no chance of winning) too – to help harvest senate votes.

And as pointed out elsewhere, Margo’s getting carried away here on RA probably lost a few votes too.
Be interesting to analyse the site traffic that went to that particular thread…

I’d back what mojo said – being a scrutineer is indeed “interesting”.

I don’t think it was too complex, most people can comprehend what their talking about.

Rather my belief is that they are just seen as a front for the greens here or labor there, so why give it any more credibility than any other political advertising. Probably didn’t help that they pushed the nonsense lines about the greens being independent.

Also consider that many people who support Gary, do so either because they like him personally, or because they don’t think the liberals actually abused the control of the senate.

Get Up’s message was way too complex. They would have been better off just supporting the greens. anyone who could understand Get up’s message already knew it, and didn’t need to be told. and those who didn’t know, are the types that vote for people who they’ve heard of (1 lundy, 2 gary h), and don’t want to think about it too much.

GetUp does more than election campaigns though – they’ve run a number of effective ones that have successfully applied pressure on the govt on key (member nominated) issues including funding for the ABC, the RU486 vote, holding children in immigration detention centres and more.

Having worked a booth on Saturday I am of the opinion that the Getup campaign was counterproductive. Many voters eagerly took their how-to-vote card only to find it gave no information on how to vote, it only contained general information. If it had said “you have the choice of voting 1 Lundy 2 Tucker or of voting 1 Tucker 2 Lundy” it may have had an effect but instead it probably confused people who picked up their pencils then realised they had no guidance.

As a result Gary Humphries wasn’t even close to being rolled by Tucker. His primary vote needed to fall below 30% for him to be at risk as preferences, including leakage from Kate Lundy, would have carried him across the line if he scored at least that high.

I commend a scrutineering role to any interested observer of politics. Some of the crazy preference votes will astound you. How can a rational person vote 1 Lundy, or 1 Conway, and then 2 Humphries? Mind you, it goes both ways, the best I saw was 1 Myers and 16 Humphries.

Well the Greens vote in the ACT actually went from 16.36% in 2004 to 21.90% at this election – at the same time the Democrats dropped from 2.14% to 1.75% and the Liberals from 37.87% to 34.08%. The ALP also suffered a slight drop this election, from 41.10% to 40.72% – which was against their trend in the ACT House of Reps seats. (See here and here).

ie, the Greens share improved by 5.5%, and the Democrats only dropped by 0.4%, so it seems that they were able to take some votes from both the Liberals and ALP.

Now I’m not sure that I would attribute this to Getup (or SaveOurSenate either, for that matter). Incidentally, Gary’s vote only had to drop by another 1% or so for Kerrie to have gotten in instead – a quota is 33.33%, and Gary was virtually friendless on the group voting tickets (only the LDP ticket directed preferences to him ahead of Kerrie, and they were only able to get 0.23% of the vote).