Fourteen Votes

It all started on another election night — September 7, 2013 — as progressives Australia-wide stared into their own drinks to better avoid looking at the TV screen, where Antony Green was pronouncing unimaginable doom. Faced with the looming prospect of a Prime Minister who described himself as “the guy with the not bad-looking daughters,” they clung to meagre trophies like Cathy McGowan’s unlikely triumph over Sophie Mirabella in Indi as proof that the world hadn’t gone entirely mad. But it wasn’t looking good for the Left.

Andrew Bolt and the rest of News Corp had spent the last few weeks declaring, again, that the Greens were a political force soon to be consigned to history’s dustbin. It’s a claim that’s only gotten stronger since the hearty bollocking Tasmania’s voters handed the party on March 15 — the seventh straight election that saw the Greens vote go down. It wasn’t a good look for a party with not that much vote to spare.

Adam Bandt’s surprise win in Melbourne notwithstanding, the Greens did not have a fun time that night. In two states, New South Wales and Queensland, they not only failed to get a single Senator elected, but they polled a dismal fourth behind such political heavyweights as the Liberal Democrats — who people had mistakenly voted for thinking they voted Liberal — and former Australian prop forward Glenn Lazarus, a Palmer United Party candidate from Queensland known in his footy days as “the brick with eyes”.

While the Greens Senators up for re-election looked like they’d done well enough to hold their seats thanks to Labor preferences — even picking up a seat in Victoria — their bread and butter, the all-important Senate primary vote, was slashed by almost a third. As results trickled in from Western Australia, where a young first-termer was struggling to keep his seat against a conservative whitewash, the news looked grim for Scott Ludlam.

It all came down to fourteen votes — fourteen, out of over 1.3 million, that would decide the fate of four potential Senators and the balance of power for the next three years. On the first count, the Shooters and Fishers beat fellow microparty the Australian Christians by fourteen votes; the Christians were knocked out of the race, and their preferences flowed (eventually) to Labor Senator Louise Pratt and the Palmer United Party’s Dio Wang — both of whom were declared elected. Ludlam and the Australian Sports Party’s Wayne Dropulich, who both would have been elected if the Shooters had been knocked out first, challenged the result. After initially being knocked back, a recount was eventually ordered.

A ridiculous scenario, but there was a system in place to deal with it, which kicked into gear. The ballots would be painstakingly recounted by a crack team of well-meaning retirees. Panellists on ABC 24 would cross to bored correspondents standing outside community halls, and nod seriously at each other. Clive Palmer would rumble and boom that a conspiracy was afoot, as vague as it was omnipresent. The script was already written.

Then the Australian Electoral Commission sheepishly announced that it had lost 1,370 WA ballots, and everything went to shit. The recount continued, despite now being obviously useless, and eventually found that the Christians had gotten more votes than the Shooters, and Ludlam and Dropulich had won after all — at least on the count that didn’t include those missing votes. The original result was officially overturned, even as the head of the AEC admitted to a colossal balls-up and resigned in disgrace. Ludlam was a Senator again. Only he wasn’t.

After a few months of weary pondering, the High Court took the only option: the long-suffering voters of Western Australia would have to do it all again. A half-Senate by-election was ordered — the first in the country’s history — and each of the 62 candidates, plus 15 new names, would have to fight it out one more time for the six seats on offer.

Three seats were certain to be picked up by the major parties, two by the Liberal Party, one by the ALP — but the other three were up for grabs. At least four candidates — Ludlam, the ALP’s Louise Pratt, PUP’s Dio Wang and the Liberal Party’s Linda Reynolds — would be fighting for one of those seats, with the added possibility of a microparty securing a sweet enough preference deal to put themselves in play.

At risk was the balance of power in the Senate, and with it the Abbott government’s ability to implement its agenda. With Labor and the Greens opposing major government policies — repealing the carbon and mining taxes, defunding the Clean Energy Finance Corporation — the government already needs to negotiate with crossbench Senators who might not be that easy to negotiate with. A bad result for the government in WA would make it that much harder to convince crossbenchers they were worth supporting. A bad result for the Greens would see them spend the next few years watching everything they’d worked for be pulled apart before their eyes.

With the stakes so high, the Greens needed their lead man in WA to have his head in the game; to be focused, driven, ruthless. All business.

People Power

24 hours before the polls close, the final phone-bank at the Greens WA headquarters is gearing up.

No one on Earth likes phone-banking. It is a hideous thing to do to yourself. It involves calling people when you know they’re home — at dinner time, usually — and asking anyone who answers if they know there’s an election coming up, before spruiking some candidate they probably haven’t heard of.

People do not respond well to this kind of thing. First they assume you’re trying to sell them insurance, or convert them to a strange religion. Then they will rant to you about the government, or refugees, or the neighbour’s tree that grows over their side of the fence. They will scream in your ear and slam the handset down so hard you hear it before the line breaks. It is mind-numbing, soul-crushing work. Getting people to do it is hard.

Yet the room is packed, as it’s been packed every night this week, and Ludlam’s office in Fremantle is a full house too. Chairs are dragged out of storage. Laptops and old mobiles are swapped and bartered. All the gruntwork in the office appears to be done by an old battler with a bushman’s beard named Frank. He does the dishes, passes snacks around, makes the tea.

Rick’s a 60-year-old teacher trainer from England. He hunches over his laptop in checkered shirt and vest, peering at the screen through professor-style glasses. It’s his first time phone-banking, and the only people he knows who’ve been politicised more than he has in the last six months are his two kids, who are handing out how-to-votes for Ludlam tomorrow.

Four tables over sits 19-year-old Alistair. Like Rick’s kids, he’s never campaigned in his life, but he went to a Greens event on Monday night and Ludlam’s speech blew him away.

The place is lousy with Senators: Christine Milne, Rachel Siewert from WA, Larissa Waters from Queensland. They circulate, shaking hands, taking photos with volunteers, listening to people’s stories. Milne steps out of it for a minute and looks the scene over, arms folded. “I think we’re gonna get him over the line tomorrow,” she says quietly, before heading back in to become half of someone’s future profile picture.

The election is so near now, and the mood is electric: a mix of anticipation and dread, excitement and exhaustion, adrenaline and fear. In between calls the volunteers swap anecdotes and predictions, reasons why Scott has to win. A staffer calls me over and pulls some figures up on a screen, delirious with excitement: they’ve made 2,000 calls tonight, smashing their old record, and it’s only six o’clock. Such signs and portents, so minor outside this muggy room, have taken on a significance far outside themselves. The slightest thing becomes totemic.

But there’s a shadow looming over all of this. Clive Palmer, the great white blimp of Australian politics, is everywhere. Everywhere. Pick up the West Australian, Perth’s main rag; he’s got half-page ads on four or five pages each day, and he’s the lead story. Drive down the freeway; there he is on a billboard, giving you the big thumbs-up. Turn on the TV; one of his ads is telling you that the major parties are taking bread out of the mouths of West Australian babies.

Babies don’t eat bread. Nor does a federal Senator have any impact on GST distribution — that’s what state Premiers spend their time doing at COAG — but that hasn’t stopped Palmer United promising to get WA a bigger slice of GST revenue as his party’s major policy platform. Meanwhile, the guy actually running for election on the ticket, Dio Wang, is nowhere to be seen, so absent from his own campaign that Palmer’s been accused of hiding him.

The Palmer United Party’s lack of workable policy and visible candidate won’t end up mattering, though, because of the awe-inspiring amount Clive’s thrown at this election: $477,000 on TV ads alone. That’s more than twice as much as every other party’s entire campaign spend combined, and it doesn’t include the radio spots, newspaper ads, billboards, flyers and letterboxing, or the Palmer United-brand jet Clive hops around in.

The electoral implications of this contest are well-known. By winning his third Senate seat in WA on Saturday, Palmer can force the Coalition to bargain with him to pass anything that Labor and the Greens oppose — especially if the Liberals lose the third WA Senate seat they briefly won in September.

But perhaps more significantly, this kind of money has never been thrown around by a minor party before. The Greens have found common ground with Tony Abbott, of all people, who accused Palmer of trying to buy his way in: "[Mr Palmer] is out there trying to buy seats in the Parliament and that's something that I don't think the people of Western Australia will fall for," Abbott said while campaigning in Perth. It’s the kind of campaigning normally associated with US Presidential races, not a one-off byelection in WA; a bull-roaring, steamrolling juggernaut of pure cash, come rampaging out of the east.

Up against it is this room of Alistairs and Ricks plugging away, calling people who either have no idea an election is on or are sick to death of it. They’ve thrown themselves in front of this new behemoth and held up a STOP sign. The Greens are outspending both Labor and the Coalition, but people power is what they do — their entire ethos is built around it, and they don’t have a choice anyway.

They’ve made over 60,000 phone calls, knocked on almost 30,000 doors. 1,700 people will rock up to hand out how-to-votes on the day, including dozens who’ve flown in from interstate to help out, sleeping on mates’ couches and in dodgy hostels. And now they’re phone-banking, one last time.

You get the sense that all the viral speeches in the world are nothing compared to this endless, exhausting grind, this eking out of an infinitesimal advantage over your rivals one halting conversation at a time. This is where elections are won, vote by vote: with small groups of people fighting to determine the course of a country’s future in dusty converted office spaces, by the glow of insect-riddled fluorescent lights.

Tomorrow night they will gather in the Oxford Hotel, consume heroic amounts of liquor and watch their man romp home. But they don’t know that yet.

Noted.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and Ludlam is livid. A journalist has just quietly let him know that the AEC have stuffed up the handling of around 75 pre-poll votes in a retirement home, which have been declared invalid as a result. The West Australian is running a story tomorrow.

He says some things. I am not allowed to tell you what they are.

It’s been more than six months since Ludlam was first told he’d lost, before being told he’d won but the result was void, before finally being told that the whole thing had been chucked out and would he mind doing it again, please. This second lost-votes debacle is far smaller than the first, but it’s a prickly reminder of the state of limbo the Ludlam camp has existed in since September. Since then, they’ve inhabited a strange parallel universe, planning committee meetings and appearances that might never happen. Ludlam seems to be trying very hard not to think about it.

“I decided in the run-up to the first campaign not to have a Plan B, a comfortable fall-back plan psychologically tucked away, and I still don’t,” he says. “There were a couple of days where I thought, ‘Okay, I need to get serious about what July looks like once we’ve packed this place up’. But suddenly we were back in the fight again. I still don’t know what I’ll do [if we lose].”

The desire to leave something of a legacy (or at least take one last opportunity to vent) might have been on his mind when, on a Monday night in March only a week after the second election was announced, Ludlam rose in a near-empty Senate chamber and quietly delivered the adjournment speech that catapulted him into that most fickle of states: internet fame.

At the time of writing, Ludlam’s ‘Welcome To WA’ speech, ostensibly directed at an absent Tony Abbott but really geared towards would-be voters, has clocked up over 856,000 views on YouTube, drawn 718,000 people to this website, which first picked it up, and spawned countless flame wars between people who really shouldn’t be friends on Facebook.

Whether or not the speech’s virality had any effect on the final count will be debated until the End of Days, but the popular view seems to be that the internet has about as much influence on election results as a Sky News broadcast. Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech clocked up 2.5 million views, for instance, and look what happened to her. Most of the people who watched Ludlam’s speech aren’t WA residents and can’t vote for him; even those who can have had over a month to forget about a video that popped up once or twice in their Twitter feeds.

Despite his affection for all things Teh Interwebz, Ludlam hasn’t relied on it to get over the line. “We’ve not yet been in an election that wasn’t dominated by the four or five lead stories on the nightly news and in the paper,” he says. “Elections are still won and lost in the Daily Telegraph and by TV advertising spend, there’s no question about it. We’re still doing broadcast politics.“

Not that the Ludlam campaign hasn’t been flogging the beJesus out of those seven minutes and forty-one seconds. From the crowd-sourced selfie recreation of “Our Speech” to the campaign tees featuring just an outline of his hair and the word ‘Noted’ (the original design came from an online fan), every conceivable strategy to remind punters that Ludlam is That Speech Guy has been, in the parlance, noted. He is definitely playing to an audience — a small and disparate one, for sure, but one he believes is growing, and will come to have a far greater impact on the future than most people are giving it credit for.

“I got the sense years ago that, at every election, the internet will be more and more important. I wonder whether or not we’ll find, after this by-election, that we’ve just been through the first poll where the internet made its presence known — not decided the result, but made its presence felt. At some point in the future, the internet is where politics will be. It won’t be anywhere else.”

These little shout-outs to the online vote don’t always come off so well — like the cringeworthy pop-up Dogetext eight minutes and twenty seconds into this recent video. Even without the murderous eloquence of ‘Welcome to WA’ shuffling awkwardly in the background, “very animosity, such Liberals, wow” is not so much a burn as it is a cup of tea forgotten on the kitchen bench.

The Senator is aware of this, too; that clip’s been on his mind. “Can’t help myself. I put the Doge text in that video because it’s very now, but in two years people are gonna watch it and just go, ‘What was he doing?’“

The internet’s opinion matters to Ludlam. He’s worked very hard to make sure it likes him, and he doesn’t want to screw that up. “What the internet teaches you very fast is that if you’re rubbish, you’ll be told. You’ll be dismantled. It can be quite a cruel place because it’s not just a [one-way] broadcast medium anymore. It’s a massive conversation, and if you’re boring or condescending you’ll be torn to pieces.”

Perhaps the reason he gets away with the occasional online misstep is that, unlike a lot of other politicians, whose only arsenal of Getting Wiv Da Yoof online involves shitty, shitty memes (take heed, Wayne Swan), Ludlam’s relationship with the internet goes a lot deeper.

A few of his biggest policy bugaboos are the ongoing efforts by successive governments to introduce a mandatory internet filter, and security agencies who rampantly snoop through people’s digital movements without a warrant. A certain awareness of the endlessly-evolving quirks and foibles of online cultures comes with the territory. “If you want to run an effective campaign in defence of the medium, you need to learn how it operates, how it works,” he says.

It’s that rationale which best explains Ludlam’s massive online presence: the constantly-buzzing Twitter account, the “thunderclap” blitz of social media they planned for election do-over day, the Reddit AMAs. He’s turning more and more to the people who best know the internet to help him defend it.

“There’s a whole generation coming through who aren’t getting their politics from the evening news. They’re not reading newspapers. Some of what we’re doing is resonating partly because Labor and the Liberals have been so crap — on data privacy, on digital rights, on stuff that affects the medium where young people are actually getting their politics from — that I’ve had that space to myself, unfortunately. The others have just been on the wrong side of the argument.”

That generation turned up in droves to ‘Ludapalooza’, a dance night-cum-fundraiser at one of Perth’s largest nightclubs on the Saturday before the election, starring Senator Ludlam as DJ S-Ludz. Like the original Gary/’Noted’ shirt design, it was a free kick for the campaign that came out of the blue: the people who run Capitol nightclub messaged Ludlam’s Facebook page, and offered to set it up.

That night was like something from another planet: hundreds of raver kids in fluoro and snapbacks going berserk over this mild-mannered politician in his forties, up on the decks like someone’s gatecrashing dad. The Spotify playlist he put together included Underworld, Nine Inch Nails, The Presets and Chet Faker; he mouthed the chorus and pumped his fist to The Herd's '0.77'. In the corner was a merch table packed with the cover-nothing singlets your average club-going Slave To The YOLO loves so much, only with the word ‘Noted’ on them in place of an acronym.

These kinds of people — hard-partying, hard-drinking, young people — aren’t meant to give a shit about anything. But neither are the type who make memes and host club nights, and this time around at least, some of them felt strongly enough to use their skills to influence politics.

“I don’t know why we had 500 Gen Ys jumping around on Saturday night, but I’m bloody glad they were there,” Ludlam says. ”And it was fun.”

Playing Politics

Press conferences are easy to spot when they’re outside. Look for a gaggle of well-dressed people milling around in the middle of a field or somewhere picturesque, conspicuously doing nothing in particular. On the Thursday before the election, Ludlam’s due at one down by the water, in the middle of the inexplicably vast Langley Park. To call it a ‘park’ is pretty optimistic; back in the ‘20s it used to be an airstrip, but now it’s just there, a mammoth expanse of grass and a few trees with literally nothing else. Perth is weirdly full of such spaces — huge, empty vistas where nothing is going on.

The little knot of politicians and advisers is waiting to see which media outlets show up, if any. A press conference is only considered a success if you get at least one TV station there, preferably a commercial one. For the Greens it doesn’t happen often, but Christine Milne’s in town and there’s an election on.

As the cameras roll she rips into the usual suspects — Tony Abbott, the coal industry, the “big end of town” —  while Ludlam stands at her right shoulder and nods solemnly. It takes about twenty minutes, and his eyes glaze over slightly while he stares across Langley Park’s great big nothing. A lone seagull potters about. Its politics are unclear.

Ludlam doesn’t do this kind of thing particularly well. At an earlier presser a bored-looking reporter asked him how the result of the election would reflect on Milne’s leadership. “I think that’s a bit of a weird question,” he deadpanned. An awkward silence ensued.

“I’ve always found the 24-hour news cycle — having to do messaging discipline, having to crunch complex ideas down into short, snackable statements for the evening news — an extraordinarily degrading way to have to communicate complex policy ideas,” he says later. It’s not a great sentiment to come from a Senator fighting for his political life two days out from an election, but according to Ludlam, there’s nothing he can do. “I’m not very good at it, and I’m not very interested in it, that kind of broadcast politics.”

I've always found the 24-hour news cycle an extraordinarily degrading way to have to communicate complex policy ideas. I'm not very good at it, and I'm not very interested in it.

Another of his pet hates? The glorified pissing contest that barely passes for Question Time.

“It’s theatre. Question Time is theatre; it’s the least interesting part of the job. It’s become so completely debased, because the tactics in there — shouting each other down or scoring points or throwing someone off-message or whatever — that make sense inside that pressure-cooker look completely ridiculous from outside the building,” he says.

You can understand why Ludlam might not be wild about the Question Time schoolyard, given that he sometimes seems like the weedy little nerd the bigger kids pick on. Just two weeks after ‘Welcome to WA’ went viral, his questions to Finance Minister and fellow WA Senator Matthias Cormann were drowned in a constant barrage of jeering and hollering from the government benches. It makes for depressing viewing, watching him try to get to the end of a sentence without deflating. When he calls for a debate between the WA candidates, a Coalition Senator yells, “You debate real political parties, not children and anarchists!” The boys all cheer.

Ludlam grimaces when I bring it up. “And that’s being screamed in your face.” He smiles tightly. “It’s funny, isn’t it? That people have no sense of irony.”

There’s a moment in the footage, after the Coalition erupts yet again into braying hilarity, when Ludlam stops and contemplates them outright, as though only just realising the absurdity of how he is spending his time.  “If only you could hear yourselves,” he calls to them, barely audible over the sound of their derision. “If only you could hear yourselves.”

A Party In Full Swing

As the count progresses and it becomes obvious the Greens have pulled it off, the 500 volunteers who’ve rocked up at the Oxford rapidly move from anxious-drinking to happy-drinking. On TVs in every corner of the garden, Antony Green is working his numbers sorcery on a touchscreen the size of a wall. He brings up a graph showing who’s done better than last time and who hasn’t, and as the red and blue lines go down and the green one goes up, up, up, the air thunders with cheers.

While the numbers will jump up and down all night, and into the coming weeks, the Greens look to have locked in at least 15% of the primary vote. It’s an upswing of more than 6% in six months.

Ludlam is loudly exhorting people not to look at the screens, but he doesn’t have to watch the results at all. He’s done more than keep his Senate seat — it’s only the fourth time a federal Greens Senator has won a quota in their own right, without having to resort to preferences. The WA Greens have been sending Senators to Canberra since 1990, when Jo Vallentine became the first, but they’ve never had a result like this.

On the ABC, Tasmanian Coalition Senator Eric Abetz looks like he’s swallowed glass. The Liberal vote has dropped by more than 5%, and the third Senate seat they won in September is at risk. It’s their worst Senate showing in WA for 25 years.

Labor’s Sam Dastyari also seems to be heartily wishing he was somewhere else. The ALP’s primary vote has collapsed to a miserable 22%, and sitting Senator Louise Pratt is on the verge of losing her seat.

Her running-mate, right-wing union powerbroker Joe Bullock, is probably the reason why. The day before the election, a video surfaced online of him giving a bizarre speech saying his own party can’t be trusted, and openly wondering whether Pratt is a lesbian. Bullock shoehorned himself into the number one spot on the Labor ticket a year ago; he’s safe to win his seat, but he might have crashed the WA Labor campaign into a tree in the process.

It is too early to tell, but if Pratt does eventually win, it will probably be because of Greens preferences. The party deliberately preferenced her far higher than Bullock, and they’ve gotten enough votes over and above quota that their surplus might decide it.

At the time of writing, the two parties with almost 90% of seats in Parliament — Labor and the Coalition — have scraped together just over 55% of the vote between them. They’ll blame voter apathy and a low turnout, but the Greens are more than 30,000 votes up on last time. If people were meant to stay away, it seems they missed the memo.

In the corner of the garden, Ludlam pulls discreetly on his beer, looks around at the buoyant crowd and shouts over all the noise they’re making.

“What I love the most about this is that there are a heap of kids here who’ve never really been involved in politics before. Their first experience is gonna be that if you work your arse off and you’re clever, you can win. That was the start that I got, years ago. It’s a good feeling.”