Skip to content

Monday, 13 November 2006

Stephen Mayne’s campaign diary

By Stephen Mayne, candidate for People Power in the Victorian election

Dear Diary, this has been close to the most chaotic and stressful two weeks of my life but most of the ducks are now lined up to pull off a coup at the 25 November Victoria election.

It’s amazing how hard it was to get some of this sorted but after all sorts of preference horse-trading over the weekend, the check list now reads as follows:

  • Party registered
  • Eight good upper house candidates nominated, supported by 27 lower house candidates
  • Campaign launched with an effective stunt
  • All key policies and platform launched on revamped website
  • Highly favourable preference deals secured

The last point is the most important because getting preference flows from the Democrats, DLP, Family First, ALP, Liberals and key independents in key seats has dramatically improved our prospects.

The simple arithmetic is that we’re picking up preferences from fellow tiddlers like the Democrats and the DLP, and then Liberal, Labor and the Greens are all preferencing us ahead of each other. Therefore, all we have to do is get ahead of one of them somewhere and we’re in with a show.

In Eastern Metropolitan and Eastern Victoria, a primary vote of just 3% will be enough to “do a Steve Fielding” and I’m a good chance to knock off the Green in Southern Metro with just 5%.

Both Antony Green and Liberal campaign director Julian Sheezel were on Jon Faine this morning saying it would depend on our ability to man the booths to capitalise on these extraordinary preference flows. They’re right.

The last four dot points needed to be ticked off to achieve the impossible dream of sharing in the balance of power in the upper house are as follows:

  • Demonise Greens and Family First for being too extreme to hold the balance of power
  • Get how to vote cards registered with the VEC by Friday’s deadline
  • Secure some extra donations to ensure we can afford expanded print runs
  • Recruit volunteers and focus all efforts on manning booths in the three winnable regions

This once in a lifetime opportunity is now there for the taking – it just comes down to logistical execution, which hasn’t exactly been our strong suit so far.