Building support across the political spectrum

With One Nation’s big rise in popularity, associations are considering what the landscape will look like should they win? ;

Parliament consists of a wide range of representatives representing different parties.  Whilst One Nation may have differing priorities, it does not mean they will not have a listening ear.

Your organisation can often gain support from individuals in a party, which may or may not be in contrast to how the party’s leadership is approaching this issue.  This can happen due to various factors:

Factions

Even though political parties are meant to demonstrate differences in beliefs across the political spectrum, there are still drastically different beliefs within a party. This results in groups of MPs forming factions within their parties. This is why you might have liked Malcolm Turnbull as a leader but not Tony Abbott even though they’re both in the Liberal Party. Turnbull is in what’s called the “moderate” faction, and Abbott is in the “hard right” faction.

This is important to note because your organisation may be able to receive support from a whole faction of MPs in a party, even if you may not be able to gain support from the whole party.

Marginal Electorates

MPs in marginal electorates are much more likely to support initiatives and organisations if it means it’ll give them good press in their local community. Often, their priority is to appeal to their communities as much as possible to increase their chance of being re-elected, even if that means challenging party values.

If you can demonstrate how your organisation can practically benefit or solve an issue in an MPs local community, you’re more likely to receive their support even if their parties values don’t completely align with your organisation.

Conscience Votes vs Party Bound Votes

Disagreement on controversial issues within a party is inevitable and different parties have different methods of handling this. These fall into two main categories:

• does the party allow their members to “conscience” vote? or
• do they “bind” their vote?

When a party allows their members to conscience vote (literally defined as voting with their conscience), it means every member can vote however they like on the issue without consequences. The party may attempt to influence how they want party members to vote, but ultimately each person is free to vote how they like.

If a party binds their members, a member is not allowed to vote outside of the party’s position. Instead, debate is meant to happen privately where they reach a decision to then head to the Parliament floor as a united front. A famous recent example of this is Fatima Payman, a former Labor Party member who defied a bound vote on Palestine, and was then kicked out of the party.

You can find out which topics parties allow conscious votes on and use that to see if you can get support across parties on issues relevant to your organisation.

Takeaways

It’s easy to think that when you’re engaging with government that you should only focus on the party in power or on the parties that align with your organisation’s values the most. It’s best to aim to get support from the party in power first, but if you don’t receive it, don’t lose hope.

The individuals within a party system are a lot more diverse than we often assume they are, don’t rule them out as a way to get wider support.

For more detailed, expert advice on government engagement, reach out to the Fifty Acres team.