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Following a series of focus groups and other polling, Advance has announced its sole focus until the next election will be cutting the Greens’ senate vote by a third. By Jason Koutsoukis.
Advance’s plan to destroy the Greens
Hard-right campaign group Advance is amassing a multimillion-dollar war chest to hammer the Australian Greens at the next federal election.
Describing the Greens as the single biggest threat to freedom, security and prosperity in Australia, Advance executive director Matthew Sheahan has told supporters he wants to shrink the Greens’ share of the national senate vote by 4 percentage points and cut their vote in the lower house by 2 percentage points.
He said Advance’s strategy would target mostly women voters and be focused on people aged between 33 and 49.
“We’re not going to stop there,” Sheahan told an online forum last month. “We’ve got to continue after the next federal election to try and expose the Greens for who they are, and to try and get their vote back to the 4 or 5 per cent core radical rump.”
At the last federal election in May 2022, the Greens won six Senate seats, with 12.66 per cent of the vote, bringing the party’s total Senate numbers to 11. The Greens won four House of Representatives seats, with 12.25 per cent of the lower house vote.
Sheahan said if Advance met its goal of shrinking the Greens’ vote to 8.65 per cent in the Senate and 10.2 per cent in the lower house, it would erase entirely the party’s gains since 2016.
Advance is also expected to target three lower house seats where the Greens are considered a chance of dislodging incumbent candidates: the Liberal-held seat of Sturt in Adelaide, the Labor-held seat of Richmond in northern NSW and the Labor-held seat of Macnamara in metropolitan Melbourne.
“We’re actually doing nothing else between now and the next federal election but this campaign,” Sheahan said. “We think it’s so important that someone expose the Greens for who they are and reduce their power, their toxic power in this country. No one else has the ability to do it or the will to do it.”
Touting Advance’s 306,000 online supporters and 32,000 donors, Sheahan said the group had already raised $1.5 million of its $5 million fundraising goal ahead of the next election, enabling it to hire 23 full-time staff and expand its permanent campaign infrastructure to include data analytics, creative, digital, communications, fundraising, political strategy and a call centre.
Advance has also appointed a former Australian Federal Police officer, Sandra Bourke, as its new national spokesperson. She fills the gap left by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the Country Liberal Party senator who became the face of the “No” campaign in last year’s Voice referendum.
Founded in 2018 with $280,000 in seed funding contributed by retired Sydney financier Simon Fenwick, Advance shot to national prominence during the Voice referendum, with the group’s aggressive campaigning across multiple platforms credited with crippling the “Yes” campaign.
Despite collecting only $1.3 million in donations ahead of the referendum, Advance spent $10.4 million on the “No” campaign. Its affiliate group, Australians for Unity, spent $11.8 million after raising $10.8 million in donations.
In March, Advance spent a further $300,000 urging voters to put Labor last in the Dunkley byelection. Advertising during that race focused on the cost of living and the release of people from immigration detention but failed to stop Labor increasing its primary vote.
In the months before the Dunkley campaign, Sheahan said, Advance spent time assessing the greatest threats to the “fruits of the Judaeo-Christian West” – the defence of which he said was at the core of the group’s mission. “And after about two weeks of research,” he said, “we discovered that it was the Greens.”
Sheahan said the research, commissioned in January, involved quantitative polling of about 4500 people, while the qualitative research involved 25 one-on-one interviews with target voters across three focus groups.
“We instructed the researchers that we wanted to understand what the Australian people thought about the political parties from a brand point of view,” Sheahan said.
“We didn’t want to know about what people thought about the policies or the politicians … We wanted people to think about, ‘Okay, think about the parties as Nike or Apple or Toyota. How do they make you feel? What values do they hold?’ None of the survey was closed questions. We didn’t provide any of the answers.”
The results indicated that for the Liberals, 29 per cent of respondents said the party’s brand stood for nothing, 25 per cent saw it as looking after big business and the rich, 17 per cent nominated strong economic management, 16 per cent saw the Liberals primarily as a right-leaning, conservative party and 8 per cent said the party represented small business.
For Labor, 37 per cent of respondents said the party was primarily about looking after workers, 26 per cent saw the party as standing for nothing, 16 per cent nominated equal opportunity for all, 10 per cent said Labor’s main reason for being was to look after themselves and 7 per cent said Labor stood for wildlife, water and the environment.
“People don’t understand anymore what these guys stand for from a values point of view,” Sheahan said, “and that’s a problem for those two parties.”
For the Nationals, 47 per cent of respondents said the party stood for nothing, 20 per cent nominated supporting the regions, 15 per cent said looking after farmers and agriculture, 8 per cent said looking after big business and the rich and 8 per cent said equal opportunity for all.
“The National Party? Well, they’re in real trouble,” said Sheahan. “That 47 per cent think they believe in nothing, which is, you know, if you own that brand, you’d probably trade it in.”
When it came to the Greens, however, Advance’s research showed that 52 per cent of respondents said the Greens stood for looking after the local environment, water and wildlife, while 26 per cent nominated action on climate change.
Only 20 per cent of respondents said the party stood for nothing. Eight per cent said the Greens were about looking after the disadvantaged, and 6 per cent saw the party as either left-leaning, progressive or socialist.
“There’s 78 per cent of the Australian people – not just Greens voters but all voters – think they either stand for action on climate or protecting the environment,” Sheahan said. “So, they clearly have the strongest brand in this country, politically.”
With most people falling into the category of being either undecided or a “low information” voter, Sheahan said, many Australians turned up to vote not knowing what either of the major parties stood for. He summarised the thinking as this: “I don’t really want to be here anyway. I’m disinterested in politics. If I vote for the Greens, at least No. 1, I’m going to feel good about something that I did today.”
Instead of attacking the Greens head-on as a party wanting to enact radical change, Sheahan said Advance would try to meet voters where they were with the message the Greens “are not what they used to be”.
“We’ve got to be a bit more softly, softly in the beginning – and this is the message that tested the best out of the research,” Sheahan said. “It’s good for a couple of reasons, at least at the theoretical level, because it gives the voter permission to say, ‘Well, I haven’t changed. They have. And I wasn’t stupid for voting for them because I didn’t know they weren’t who they used to be.’ ”
Whether the election was in three months or nine months, Sheahan said, Advance would spend all its considerable resources and effort targeting the two thirds of Greens voters it thought were persuadable, first with the “softly, softly” approach.
The centrepiece of Advance’s so-called “Greens Truth” campaign will be a documentary film with a $317,000 production budget that promises to tell the “full story of why the Greens have fallen so far”.
According to a fundraising pitch emailed to supporters on Thursday, the film will not only inform and motivate voters on its own but will also be used as the basis for social media, television advertisements and other campaign material to “make sure no Aussie is left in the dark about the TRUTH”.
After that, Sheahan said, Advance would revert to messaging focused on “here’s what they’re really like”.
“We’ll use the same sort of techniques we used during the Voice, where we can geotarget messaging using our propensity model scoring and our database, to actually get a message to predominantly women aged between 33 and 49 who are persuadable, who do think the Greens are just doing the right thing by the environment but don’t know anything else,” Sheahan said. “We think we can persuade quite a considerable lot of them.”
Spearheading that message will be the newly appointed Advance spokesperson, Sandra Bourke, who declined an invitation to speak to The Saturday Paper.
In an introductory video posted on Advance’s social media channels, Bourke said she started out as a “young officer in the federal police, then the National Crime Authority, before serving in national security and defence”.
“Up until now, I have never been politically active,” Bourke claimed in the introductory video, despite the fact she stood as an independent candidate in the Mid-Coast Council elections in New South Wales in 2021.
Since then, Bourke has been actively involved in a local campaign against an offshore wind zone declared near her home town of Tea Gardens.
Insisting she spoke every day to farmers who were being reduced to tears as their land was acquired to make way for the roll-out of renewables, and to shattered small business owners who were being driven into the ground by red and green tape, Bourke identified herself as a quiet Australian who could no longer watch from the sidelines.
“For me, it was like pulling on a thread,” Bourke said. “I discovered that the Labor, teal and Green government’s roll-out of turbines is gutting Australia. It is tearing up farmers and families and their land, but more importantly, it is tearing up your cost of living. It is gutting our economy.”
Fresh from the parliamentary winter break that saw Greens volunteers knock on more than 50,000 doors across the country, Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt said he was unfazed by the threat posed by Advance. He told The Saturday Paper that voters trusted the party because it consistently fought for the things people cared about.
“We’ve got thousands of people across the country who are knocking on doors and being part of our people-power movement,” Bandt said. “I expect that, you know, Advance will try and gather as much money as they can to throw whatever they can at us. You can flood the airwaves as much as you like, but what people are craving at the moment is a connection with people who are fighting for change, and when we build that people-powered movement and have those conversations on the doors, and give people a sense of hope that politics can be different, we see that seats can change hands and can affect the direction of the country.”
While Advance may have a few wealthy donors, Bandt said, a key question to ask of the group was why they are doing what they’re doing.
“The conservatives are attacking the Greens and not Labor because we’re the progressive alternative, and at this election, with commentators predicting a minority parliament, we will be in a really strong position to fight for people and to take on big corporations,” Bandt said.
“So, for us, it doesn’t change our strategy, which is to have that people-powered movement that’s based on those conversations we are having with people, because we know it works … They can put whatever they like on Facebook, but by that stage people have understood that we’re fighting for change. It might not happen overnight, but nothing changes if nothing changes.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 17, 2024 as "Advance’s plan to destroy the Greens".
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