"It's not all about getting your candidate elected"

A conversation with former member for Indi, Cathy McGowan, about the real promise of community engagement

[What is required is] cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.

—Greta Thunberg

I have half-followed reports over the last few weeks about both Labor and the Coalition moving into “election mode”, that they are soft-launching their campaigns, settling on slogans, rehearsing their killer lines, and cycling through endless interviews to “hone their messages”.

The more I read, the more I could feel my skin going clammy with a sort of dread.

Is this really what they think democracy is? Must we really put up with x months of the mindless ritual of two-party politicking in lieu of actual problem-solving and meaningful democratic deliberation?

Of course it is. Of course we must.

One person who has done more than almost anyone to break this tired template of political campaigning is former independent member for Indi, Cathy McGowan. She contacted me recently, wanting to speak about what the community independents movement was doing across the country, particularly in regional and rural Australia. McGowan is currently speaking with media outlets to help explain what she sees as the strength of the community engagement process she helped develop and make successful, and you can read her recent article from The Saturday Paper and listen to her interview on the 7am podcast.

“I was thinking of your recent articles and wanted to connect,” she told me in an email last week. So, on Monday, we ended up having an interesting conversation about various aspects of the community independents’ movement.

We covered a fair bit of territory, but the central theme was that the process that has successfully upended Australian politics—the community independents’ movement—is, from her perspective, less about straight politics and elections than it is about finding ways for communities and individuals to engage in democratic participation.

She wanted people to understand the complexity of what goes into putting together these community campaigns and the transformation they can bring about.

“There's a lot going on, and there's a lot of people involved, so that's one thing. There's a huge diversity of skill and talent, and most of its volunteer. So, you're relying on what's out there. There's no one size fits all, and there's no one way of anything happening, because of the diversity.”

Then she floored me with her next comment.

“And it's not all about getting your candidate elected.”

I probably shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to hear McGowan say this. My interest in the Voices Of movement has always been based on the idea of democratic engagement, not politics per se. It’s not as if I have ever seen what they are doing as a conventional political movement.

Still, hearing a (former) politician relegating the idea of electoral success to a secondary role can take some processing.

“Lots of the groups know that getting their candidate elected is not going to happen, but they're really prepared to do the work, because in the longer term, it enables them to hold their local member to account, and eventually, you know, things will change.

“So, there's a natural focus, I think, to say, well, who's going to win at the next election? and I certainly can talk about that, but it's much more complex than that.

“These sorts of movements get organised around getting someone elected, but then they use all their networks and their strengths to other purposes.”

This gently radical idea is, to me, the essence of what is happening in these communities and it is what most media coverage misses. It is also why I think the sort of astroturfing being done by coal-industry front organisations like Australians for Prosperity will ultimately fail, and why the likes of Clive Palmer won’t be able to just back a truck of money into an electorate and buy themselves seats at will.

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, especially when they talk amongst themselves at kitchen table conversations and other forms of genuine local engagement. So we need to have the confidence that big community can beat big money.

Despite not necessarily focussing on winning a seat, I said to McGowan that the Voices Of process has actually been incredibly successful at just that. This made we wonder whether that success doesn’t change how the movement thinks about itself.

The idea I put to her was that the Voices of movement initially grew from a dissatisfaction with particular local candidates. Whether it was Sophie Mirabella, who McGowan herself defeated in Indi in 2013, or Tony Abbott who Zali Steggall trounced in Warringah in 2019, the driving force of the community movement was about finding a better, more responsive local member.

My point was, once you get to the stage where a crossbench of independents may be able to be part of a minority government, it is no longer about dissatisfaction with a given local member; it is now about dissatisfaction with the two-party system itself. And once that line is crossed, I said, doesn’t that mean you are now governing for the entire country?

She rejected the idea entirely.

“It certainly is a disrupter, but I don't know about challenging the two-party system. Quite frankly, I don't actually know about that.”

She pointed out that “mostly all the wins have been in Liberal seats. Yes, there's certainly people running in Labor seats. But I think, to be really brutally honest, it's a particular dissatisfaction with the Liberal Party, and then, to a lesser extent, but growing, with the National Party.

“I don't think you can assume that it's the demise of the two-party system yet, because it's going to be really interesting to see how effective the mechanisms that the parties put in place are.”

She was very clear that she didn’t see things through this lens at all.

“To go to the logic of where you went, of governing for the whole country. It’s a bit of a stretch,” she said.

“You've actually got to factor in how the major parties react to what's going on. They're not playing dead, you know; they're really working out what they're doing. And will that be successful? Probably because they're really clever, and they've got a lot of money, and they've got nous.

“So, I think the trajectory that you and a lot of people are putting up, it's not that it's wrong, but I just think you’re not actually looking at the play.”

I’m not sure I agree with this, but I found it incredibly useful to hear how McGowan is thinking about what the community independents are trying to do, particularly her notion of the forces of push and pull.¹

“The other thing that I watch,” she continued, “is that the community independent movement is so agile. It's not just about major party failure. That's absolutely important, it's the negative, it's the push.

“But the pull—the thing that really brings people in—is the fundamental attraction of democracy itself, and it's so strong.”

For McGowan, and for me too, I must say, it is the joy of participation that it is at the heart of all this. And this is not some airy-fairy, kumbaya notion driven by naivety. It is a hard-headed, proven practice that actually works in electoral terms, but that ultimately reaches much more deeply into the democratic substratum of these communities and potentially effects a more lasting change.

“When you've got these really active groups doing good work,” McGowan says, “then people go, Oh my god, this is so much fun. I've learned so much. I like the people I'm working with. You know, when communities start campaigning, when communities go door knocking, they see this is really good fun. I didn't understand that they say.

“So, the actual engagement in democracy is creating its own epicentre of interest, which is much, much stronger than ‘I want to get rid of the two parties’.”

I tried, too, to get a sense of how she imagined the crossbench might work together in the event of a minority government. But McGowan saw this as beyond her remit. She said, “I’m not a player in that space,” and that “you need to talk to them about it.”

Nonetheless, she was keen to relay the potential of what might happen as the number of independents in the parliament increases. Her main faith is in the ability of the community process to unearth exceptional candidates and the possibilities that that opens up.

“There's another part of this whole picture that people—the media, I’ll say—just absolutely miss, which is the calibre of the human beings that are in Parliament. And there's not only the calibre, but the skills.

“So, these guys on the crossbench, Andrew Wilkie and the women—don’t underplay Andrew—they're really good, skilled, strategic thinkers, and they've all had lives, and they've all been doing other things. So, they've got a really high-level of negotiation skills.

“But I don't actually mean negotiate. They understand alternative ways of doing stuff, right?

“So, I think that because we've got them there, and they're so clever and diverse and competent and able, that the solutions they'll come up with as to how to organise themselves—which is really your question—will be different and new, because that's who they are.

“In fact, I don't think anyone's even begun to think about the background of who these people are and what they know, and what they've done in other lives, and how they'll bring that knowledge and skill to the challenge of organising together on the crossbench, but also using the committee system and everything else they can use to get things done.”

McGowan also made the point that strength and confidence increases once an independent is re-elected, as she was in Indi, as Helen Haines has been in the same seat, and as Zali Steggall, Rebecca Sharkie and Andrew Wilkie have been.

“Once they get re-elected—and that includes David Pocock in the Senate—I think there will be a really different sense of who they are. Yeah, communities have chosen them clearly this time and like what they do, but I think it's too early to actually talk about how they're going to work together, because I think they've got to wait till they get that confidence boost.

“When you get elected for your second term as an independent, you know it's not a mistake. You know your community wants you, and you know you've got their backing, so your level of confidence is much higher, and you don't have to constantly be proving yourself.”

McGowan herself is confident more independents will be elected at the next election, but she doesn’t at all underestimate the challenge involved. I was particularly interested in her assessment of the National Party, who, as we discussed, didn’t lose any of their seats in 2022, while blue-ribbon Liberals seats went independent in record numbers.

“I think the regional Libs are just bloody hopeless, I have to say, and they're easier to topple than the Nats,” she said.

I asked if the National’s success was because they had good community engagement and she laughed out loud.

“No, no, they are just much better campaigners.”

She mentioned Tony Windsor’s former chief of staff, John Clements, who she said knew better than anyone how the Nationals campaign and why they are successful.

“John Clements has a theory that the Nationals go in early and plant their seeds of discontent, and then they very slowly water them, and then when they're ready to run a full-blown campaign, they just play to those seeds they have planted.

“Maybe it only takes a thousand votes,” she said, and gave the example of what happened to Susannah Sheed, an independent member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly between 2011 and 2022.

“What they did was basically plant all these seeds of discontent, that she was too closely aligned to Dan Andrews, with stories in the paper saying she's a Labor light, she's Labor light. And even though she got millions of dollars into the electorate and delivered huge benefits, they were able to run a good local woman candidate, saying we are not Labor. We're country people; we're not Labor. So that was the campaign they ran, and Sheed lost.

“So, no. It's got nothing to do with ideology. It's got everything to do with the processes of how they do campaigns.”

As our conversation ended, it occurred to me that Peter Dutton has no doubt learned these lessons over the last three years—or maybe it just comes to him naturally—and I think we can expect an uptick in this style of campaigning. Anthony Albanese has shown little ability to do anything other than react to Dutton’s (and Murdoch’s) provocations and it has left Labor vulnerable. The depleted legacy media, meanwhile, are unlikely to elevate their coverage above the usual horserace nonsense that plays into the Coalition’s hands.

We will see many more headlines and stories like this ⬇️ over the coming months: tired, old and unproductive ways of thinking about a democratic process that should bring us hope, not despair.

And yet, speaking with Cathy McGowan, and other people from these community organisations, reminds you that politics doesn’t have to be this way.

More than a decade of community independents’ campaigning suggests there is truth in the idea that if you build it, they will come. This is not to play down at all the difficulty of launching and maintaining community independents’ movements in multiple electorates. It is simply a reminder that the payoff can be much more far reaching than simply getting a candidate elected.

It is the cathedral thinking Greta Thunberg talks about: build the foundations before worrying about how the roof will work because win, lose or draw, it will be worth the effort.

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1. To clarify a little, I’m not arguing that the major parties will disappear, only that the two-party system is being effectively undermined. That is, the system of government that has dominated in Australia since 1904, where the parliament is controlled by Labor or a Coalition of the Liberals and the Nationals. If, by chance, minority government became the norm in Australia in successive elections, where we regularly had the crossbench as being necessary to the formation of government on the floor of the House, then the two-party system would no longer be our dominant form of government, even as the parties themselves continued to exist.