Red Rag

Further to my previous post encouraging Labor supporters to get involved in the election campaign, this one’s for Greens fans who want to see Howard turfed.

A three step guide to supporting the Greens and ensuring a Coalition defeat:

1. Find out which are the marginal seats in your area. It doesn’t matter who currently holds them, they’re the most important seats come 9 October. Check out Antony Green’s handy Electoral Pendulum for assistance.

2. Contact your local Greens branch and tell them in which marginal seat you want to campaign. Don’t let them push you into a seat with a margin of more than a few percent, and don’t campaign if they’ve decided not to preference Labor — you might secure a few more Senate votes, but it will have absolutely no impact on who forms government.

3. Doorknock, letterbox, do all of that. But most important is that you hand out how-to-votes on polling day.

So why is a Labor hack like me telling you to campaign for the Greens? Well, I know some of you are die-hard Greens supporters. I’ll never convince you to give your first preference to Labor. The next best thing is to secure as many second-preferences as possible.

If the Greens direct their preferences to Labor, roughly 3% more Greens voters will send their votes our way. In most seats, that works out to a couple of hundred votes — in a tight contest for a marginal seat, it might make all the difference.

To give you some idea of just how important those votes are, consider these results from the last election:

Solomon
ALP:  23,670
CLP:  23,758
Difference:  88 votes

Canning
ALP:  34,330
LIB:  34,860
Difference:  530 votes

Dobell
ALP:  37,005
LIB:  37,565
Difference:  560 votes

There’s not a heck of a lot in a marginal seat.

One of the biggest problems with this is that the Greens often don’t have volunteers available to man every polling booth. The Coalition could end up back in power because nobody was there to tell Greens supporters how the Greens wanted them to vote.

So all the Greens who read this must volunteer on a marginal campaign. Drag your family and friends along. Remember: Evil triumphs when good people do nothing.

(Thanks to Giovanni for inspiring this post. He’s the kind of guy who, when he gets out of your car, remembers to lock the door. A lot of people don’t do that, but Gio does.)