I’m baaack! (not permanently, sorry)
Just dropping into your inbox with a couple of Build a Ballot announcements and updates that might be relevant to a fair few of you on this email list. Plus, I’ve included 1 x hot take down the bottom as a thank-you 🫡
Build a Ballot updates:
Our policy submission period for the Victorian election is currently open (and closes at the end of this week on Sunday 18th!). We’re inviting organisations and experts to put forward a policy on one or more of the issues we're covering. We'll ask you to describe the problem, the solution, and the arguments for and against, with sources. From there, we’ll review all policies submitted (plus additional policies, sourced from across the political spectrum) and narrow them down to the final list.
You can head to our website to learn more and submit a policy (or share it with someone who might be interested!)
We’re looking for policy experts to review the policies we’re considering for the Victorian election. If you’ve got some time spare in the next couple of weeks (it doesn’t need to be much time!), reply to this email or fill out the form on this page and we’ll be in touch.
We’ll be reaching out to candidates and parties at the end of the month. We always do our best to email everyone we can find contact details for, but signing up on this page is the best way candidates can ensure they don’t miss anything.
In Victoria? Come join (or lead) one of our volunteer teams!
Hot take:
The political narrative at the moment seems to be largely along the lines of ‘economic anxiety is driving people to the right’. I think that’s true. But I don’t think it explains everything that’s going on.
Over the weekend, I was contemplating what it actually is that scares me about the direction of our politics. If I’m honest with myself, it’s not the extra carbon emissions, or health / education / economic impacts of poorly thought through, reactionary policy making. Logically I understand the way that grievance translates into worsening material outcomes. I know I should feel outraged and, to some extent, I do.
What really scares me is the realisation that I don’t share this country with the people I thought I did. It’s not to say I ever viewed Australia as some kind of utopia. We are a complex, messy mix of histories and people. But, when I proudly pulled on the green and gold uniform across my athletic career, I felt that I represented a country who’s values were not that far from mine.
If I can recognise that sensation within myself, I have to acknowledge that it’s likely how a lot of people on the right have felt for quite a while. That when they turned on the TV, they no longer felt included in the Australia they saw portrayed.
There is an entire book’s worth of conversation to be had about the institutions, people and messages that convinced part of this country that the aesthetic of ‘progress’ was not culturally compatible with Australian-ness. I’ll leave that to others, or to a future version of myself with more time (she will never exist).
What I want to focus on, for now, is a question about where we go from here.
In my opinion, offering material solutions is not enough. We need to offer a cultural home. And I think, in our love of good policy and genuinely trying to make people’s lives better, we sometimes forget that.
I am in the business of getting people to think about policy. I believe (and have seen through our data) that if you raise the salience of concrete solutions, at the moment people make voting decisions, that they will consider other political options.
But this alone isn’t enough. The idea of building a shared cultural space might seem impossible from our polarised vantage points, but after spending most of my adult life around sporting clubs and aths tracks filled with people I disagreed with but loved dearly, I’m confident it’s possible.
Creating movements that people want to be apart of is mostly about aesthetics, not policy. As we’re campaigning, building and strategising over the next months and years, we need to keep this in mind.
Ok that’s it from me (maybe). A reminder you can follow Building Build a Ballot and me on Substack - I promise I will actually write soon now that I’m back in Melbourne and life is slightly less chaotic.
Lizzie x