To get up or not to get up

Anyone who thinks GetUp is aligned to a political party should actually look at how it is constituted and how it works. Let me give you an example of how GetUp actually remains impartial when encouraging people to participate in the resolution of issues of significance.

In the lead up to the 2007 election GetUp published an interactive How to Vote Card (H2VC). It asked people to respond to a number of policy issues and only then generated a customised H2VC which ranked the candidates in the relevant electorate according to the policy preferences of the person it was made for. In other words, if you were a coalition voter it would have given you a H2VC that identified candidates who would support your views in Parliament.

But wait, there’s more. This process was so impartial that it was capable of producing H2VCs that displeased the recipient! Let me tell you about the H2VC it produced for me. On the basis of my policy preferences it placed the candidate for the Citizen’s Electoral Council at no 3!! Naturally I didn’t vote that way. But it gave impartial advice on how I should vote given my expressed preferences. An organisation pushing a left-liberal agenda, as distinct from encouraging people to participate and facilitating that participation, would not have put the CEC third on anyone’s ticket.

GetUp is not beholden to any political party or point of view. It is a vehicle for the prosecution of issues held dear by people who care about the future of the country. Anyone who thinks it does not take an interest in their concerns has as much right as anyone else to have input. If enough people provide input on any issue it will get an airing from GetUp. And why wouldn’t it? How short sighted would it be to ignore what a significant number of people are concerned about.

Anyone who thinks that they are unlikely to get a look in at GetUp is, of course, free to get their own activist network up to work on behalf of whatever specific agenda they think is being ignored. All that’s needed is a coherent world view and some ability to say what it is; and use it to identify issues of concern; and to publicise those issues; and provide a means of responding in writing to the appropriate stakeholders; and facilitate public participation in the identification of opportunities for community development as well as issues of concern in local communities and the nation as a whole.

Nation!? Oh, I forget. Someone on the right of politics already tried something like that. It was called One Nation, remember? Except of course, it never was a network – just a black hole into which a prodigious amount of good will poured, never to be seen again. People were betrayed by a “gang of four” whose tools of choice were misrepresentation, manipulation and grubbing (sic) for power. People who feel that GetUp doesn’t address their issues, would do well to learn from One Nation in getting an alternative network up.