Excellent article Lucy. I despair of the independents movement to replicate the kind of network that you describe belonging to the far right. Sure, we don’t have the big donors, but with some proper strategic planning and dropping the fascination with everybody celebrating g their “uniqueness” and concentrating on the 90% of values and desired outcomes that we all share, I believe we could actually become more effective. We have started Northside Community Voices covering the City of Moreton Bay and the entirety of the 11 state electorates and 3 federal divisions that lie mostly inside the LGA. We are roughly the same population, number of politicians and budget as the ACT.

We are committed to work in “Communication mode” after each election at each of the 3 levels of govt, collecting and refining the desired outcomes of our community through traditional means (meetings, petitions, surveys etc.) and our IT system which will allow us to collect outcomes directly and using pol.is conversations to raise issues and find common ground. We want to manage the demographics and statistics behind the data to be able to demonstrate that it is a truly credible, representative voice. We will have 12 local govt, 11 state gov and 3 federal govt Coordinators to then inform our elected representatives what their community wants them to achieve.

When an election approaches we cease communicating with the politicians at that level and go into “Accountability mode” and assess, as best we can, the performance and potential of candidates. If none are sufficiently aligned with our values and desired outcomes, we will seek to identify and sign a formal endorsement agreement with a suitable independent.

When the election process begins, we will go into “Campaign mode”. Our endorsement agreement means the candidate must form a separate legal entity and be responsible for all fund-raising, T-shirts, signs and advertising etc. We will supply volunteers (not funding) and access to our IT system for campaigning.

Once we have our IT system and all our documentation (Business Plan, Codes of Conduct, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, Strategic Plan, User doc campaign management plans etc.) in place and stress tested and de-bugged and operating successfully in our area for a suitable period of time, we would like to offer the entire set of toolkits/templates for use and customisation to local needs as required, under licence, to other voices groups around Australia to stop everybody reinventing the wheel. With everybody acting so loosely at the moment it is like we are only bringing a blunt penknife to the Advance/Atlas network gunfight (and they’ve got artillery, not just bigger guns).