Inside the Pingers campaign
If you’re as old as me (soon to be 45), you’ll remember setting up your first Hotmail account and choosing a super cool email address. Using lyrics from my favourite song (“32 flavors” by Ani DiFranco) seemed like a great idea at the time. The same goes for purplepingers, as I found out when I first met Jordan van den Lamb in a bar in Brunswick to suss out whether I wanted to lead his campaign team. He was gracious in answering the question that he’s been asked hundreds of times. It turns out that “purplepingers” was a high school gaming handle that stuck.
As Karl Marx (roughly) said, the political challenge we faced was set by the circumstances we found ourselves in. As a founding member of the Victorian Socialists, I have been part of the party’s development. Last year, we won more than 70,000 votes in the local council elections and got a councillor elected in Bendigo.
We’ve got some great policies, one measure of which is how many of them have been adopted by the Greens over the last few years. Most importantly, we have fantastic volunteers. At the core of the party are serious socialists. Many more are local activists, and plenty are enthusiastic young people who would do (allegedly) anything to tear capitalism to pieces with their bare hands.
But since 2018, we’ve never had the opportunity to campaign with a candidate who had a following way beyond our limited socialist circles: a candidate bemoaned and/or celebrated as a TikTok influencer who set up a website to document “shit rentals” and found thousands of people eager to send in submissions (4,755 and counting).
As a Senate candidate, you need to win votes. So how do you get people concerned with the shit state of their rental properties or radical solutions to the housing crisis to vote for a party they’ve probably never heard of? And could we get these people involved in a socialist party as volunteers? How would we run a ground campaign across a territory the size of the UK and appeal to an electorate of 4.5 million people to put a 1 in the Victorian Socialists’ box on the Senate ballot paper?
Not afraid of a challenge, we set up the Pingers4Parliament website, and I chaired our first campaign committee on 8 October last year. After some serious discussions, we decided to organise a tour of the state to see whether we could meet real people and talk to them about socialism. The selection of locations for the tour was partly scientific (demographics, voting history, size of population), partly “vibes” (aka where could we go wild swimming after the meeting). Luckily, the alchemy worked.
We started in Bendigo, where, with socialist Ned Kelly (aka VS councillor Owen Cosgriff) promoting the meeting, we had a turnout of more than 60, including 30 new to socialist politics. They may have been new to organised socialism, but they had clear ideas and were keen to share their experiences.
The tour continued, visiting fifteen locations and attracting more than 750 participants. At all of the meetings, there was no shortage of contributions to the discussion. What should we be talking about at this election? I didn’t have to ask twice.
In Castlemaine, a grandma worried about her grandchildren’s future living in a regional town where minimum-wage jobs and the explosion of Airbnbs mean that they will never be able to afford a rental.
On a hot day in Ballarat, a local council worker talked about the failures of local “social” housing promises to deliver anything real.
In Geelong, a young person described receiving a call that week about emergency accommodation—eight years after lodging their original claim.
We launched an “empty home crime scene” campaign to highlight (with bright yellow stickers) that the housing crisis is more about distribution than supply. The simple fact is that more empty homes exist than people experiencing homelessness. Jordan took part in a live online debate with Fiona Patten (now with Legalise Cannabis) and “bad Jordan” (the Libertarian candidate), during which we discovered that Legalise Cannabis has only one policy (no prizes for guessing it).
Our volunteers did the time-consuming but vital work of delivering more than 700 yard signs and thousands of letters to the mailboxes of people who had never had the opportunity to vote for a socialist before. We hit our target of raising $25,000 in donations in two weeks.
When the ABC broke an exclusive story featuring “Carol”, whose empty house had been moved into by squatters after Jordan listed the address online (with no connection found between those two facts), we finally had the opportunity to get some mainstream media coverage.
When Albo described Jordan’s activism to address the housing crisis as “a disgrace”, a former Greens candidate suggested we send him a bouquet of flowers as a thank you. That night, Jordan went on The Project to defend his actions and suggest that building public housing would be a step in the right direction. More than 360,000 people watched the video.
The evening before election day, we had the final training session for new volunteers. While we were hopeful Jordan’s social media reach would translate into votes, we also knew from previous elections how important it is to talk to people in person to convince them of the importance of putting us number one on the ballot.
The centre was packed. One volunteer had driven nearly two hours to collect materials for a voting booth at which he would spend the next day on his own. Another new volunteer wanted to make sure they understood preferential voting so they could explain it to their friends and neighbours at their kids’ primary school booth. On election day, dozens of new volunteers set themselves up at booths from Warrnambool to Wonthaggi to campaign for a socialist senator.
To each and every one of our volunteers: thank you! We know the steps we’ve taken are hard fought and small, but they matter. Now, more than ever, we need to rebuild a socialist opposition to capitalism. Let’s go and meet the next layer of people who can help us build it.
