2 weeks Ago By Stephen Mayne
Note from the campaign manager: Well, we said Australia’s opaque political donations system allows donors to hijack party platforms and gain access to candidates, and we’re no different. As he represents roughly 100% of our donors, we are powerless to deny Stephen Mayne his role as an unofficial advisor to our campaign. Here’s his take on how to avoid being elected: If only Crikey for PM had asked me, before even contemplating running for the Senate.
Don’t do it, I would’ve said. It’s hell. Where do we start? Crikey was born out of a botched independent political campaign, with a failed run against then Victorian premier Jeff Kennett in his seat of Burwood in the 1999 state election.
The problem was quitting as the AFR’s Rear Window columnist and declaring an intention to nominate in the Victorian election when enrolled to vote 10 doors down from Paul Keating’s place in Queen St, Woollahra, up in NSW. Ineligible, son! So, the debut campaign didn’t even get off the ground, and the only option was a web campaign through jeffed.com that later morphed into Crikey , but that’s another story.
Fast forward to the 2001 Aston by-election, and much noise was made about the yet-to-be-registered start-up party People Power standing a candidate in the first of what would be many earth-shattering political forays. Hang on, aren’t you meant to be a journalist running this fledgling Crikey online publication? Despite very little enthusiasm from anyone else in the Crikey bunker at the time, our man, Mark Ward, still ran in Aston — despite the lack of any political branding. Alas, we managed to muster a miserable 126 votes on the day, finishing stone motherless last in a field of 15 .
Have you got the message yet? Next stop was the 2001 City of Melbourne election, the first under a new voting system with a directly elected lord mayor, introduced by the Bracks government. We devoted plenty of conflicted editorial coverage to the tilt, but the quixotic Crikey editor and wannabe lord mayor finished poorly, and was dusted up a few times by so-called “independent” Crikey council election correspondent, Terry Maher. We actually entered Maher’s nine-part series on the council elections for the Melbourne Press Club Quill Awards in 2002.
As you can see in these final three instalments , he didn’t hold back on his candidate editor, with pearls like: “Stephen Mayne, being a moron, sadly, still cannot understand this fundamental concept of conflict of interest.” I finished well back with less than 5% of the vote, and Maher didn’t win a journalistic gong for Crikey either, sadly. That was it for political elections until the sale of Crikey in 2005, and then it was on to blowing $50,000 on a disastrous People Power (which finally got registered a few days before the deadline) run at the 2006 Victorian election — after Steve Bracks once again changed the electoral system and made it easier to crack the upper house with proportional representation across eight regions with five members each.
The quota was 16.67%, but none of our upper house candidates got more than 2% of the primary, and not even one of our dozens of lower house candidates cracked 4% to qualify for the new public funding regime that had just been introduced. The party quickly imploded after the election and was deregistered.
You’d think that would be enough, but no, it was time to ditch the concept of being shackled to a party and instead run as a true independent. A teal before the teals ran against Peter Costello in Higgins in 2007 on a platform of gambling reform and sticking it to the big banks, who were getting away with murder under the treasurer’s weak approach to financial regulation. We manned most of the booths and it was good fun handing out in Toorak — but polling a miserable 1.
98% and once again not getting the deposit back was another sign that this was a mug’s game. Costello certainly rubbed it in at the declaration of the poll, where I sent two camera operators to stalk him and he readily engaged on an interesting array of topics . After that, someone called up the night before nominations closed for the Victorian council elections in 2008 and suggested a run in Manningham to take down a corrupt council (it was fine, the critic was corrupt).
Why not, I thought, having lost every other type of political election? Tick the box of losing in the local suburban council election too. Alas, to the surprise of many and with the benefit of the donkey vote, I was one of three councillors elected to Heide Ward for a four year sentence on 25k a year, and whooped it up in Crikey at the time, claiming it ended a run of 37 straight election defeats (including various corporate tilts — which is now up to 57 losses , by the way). Manningham was a revelation about the joys of postal voting, which massively lowers the barriers to entry for independents because you don’t have to do any printing or man any booths.
Ratepayers paid not only for your 250-word statement, but also a full distribution of preferences in the ballot book, a practice that ended a few years back. Stupidly, I blew up the council with a churlish Crikey piece (now removed from the archive, presumably after a legal request) after losing the 2009 mayoral election 5-4, and the rest of my council term was one big dysfunctional rolling brawl between my four and their five. You really shouldn’t mix politics and journalism, Crikey for PM, they should be completely separate.
Getting elected to Manningham was also the end of The Mayne Report as a subscription business, as you can’t have local developers paying $500 a year just to read your corporate governance missives. Having played in and watched the system for almost a decade, I finally came up with a canny strategy in 2010 when the federal election was held shortly before the Victorian election. It went like this: Richard di Natale had lost almost as many times as I and was desperate to score a Senate seat for the Greens.
Family First incumbent senator Steve Fielding was keen to win a second six-year term, having fluked a victory on Labor preferences in 2004. So I went to both of them and offered a 50-50 split of my first preference in the Senate contest in exchange for an unconditional and non-reciprocated first preference from each of their parties at the subsequent Victorian election in the winnable upper house region of Northern Metropolitan. Just like Sophie’s mum, we were an ungrouped, below-the-line Senate ticket that stood no chance, so on federal election day we just drove around scoping out some of the booths that we’d be attempting to man at the subsequent Victorian election.
Having been there and done that, the benchmark for Crikey for PM is to beat the 3,629 ticket votes we got in 2010, plus the 2,328 below-the-line personal votes I got. All up, that was 5,957 votes for Victorian Senate candidate Mayne , out of 3,218,751 formal Senate votes across the state — a miserable 0.18%.
Yes, that’s right, not even one-fifth of 1%! Beat that, Mrs Black! When it came to allocating the preferences via the group voting tickets, a system Malcolm Turnbull thankfully abolished ahead of the 2016 election despite Labor opposition, Fielding and Di Natale split the 3,629 ticket votes equally, which Di Natale didn’t need and did nothing to make up Fielding’s lost ground from the Family First ticket only polling 2.49% after six years of representation. Fast forward a few months to the state election, and both Family First and the Greens stuck to their preference agreements, and I would have been elected to the upper house if the disappointing 0.
97% primary vote I received in Northern Metropolitan had instead topped 1.3%. So near and yet so far.
Alas, I deployed the multi-election preference strategy again in 2012 by nominating for the state seat of Melbourne when former health minister Bronwyn Pike suddenly quit. The Greens thought they were a big chance to win their first Victorian lower house seat, so I stood as an independent and negotiated a preference deal where their candidate Cathy Oke got my first preference in the state by-election, in exchange for me getting Green preferences in the subsequent City of Melbourne election later that year. And it worked.
I squeaked in as the eighth of nine councillors at City of Melbourne without even needing those Green preferences because their second candidate, Rohan Leppert, snaffled the 9 th spot. Crikey for PM, it is so much more fun being in office than running for office, but winning is damn hard. After four years larking it up as an independent City of Melbourne councillor, causing all sorts of problems putting up 54 motions for the vote on everything from Donald Trump to Rio Tinto abandoning its Melbourne head office, I got delusions of grandeur and thought another crack at federal politics was a goer at the 2016 election.
Sadly, succeeding outside the council sandpit is tough, and after spending about $55,000 and making lots of noise about Kevin Andrew being a “fake Liberal” and me being a “true Liberal”, I only landed 6.72% of the primary vote in Menzies, which is certainly not teal-like, and will definitely be beaten Labor’s former Menzies candidate Stella Yee, who is running hard as a teal in Menzies this election. After receiving donations of almost $40,000 and public funding of around $16,000, we didn’t finish up badly out of pocket — but we will never get those six weeks back during that awfully cold winter campaign of 2016.
We had to buy our 12-year-old son Philip a new $500 Nintendo Switch, given he spent much of his school holidays helping man the early voting booth (this wasn’t a thing back in 2007), jagging a 10% primary vote at the big booth at the primary school where he was school captain after cheerily declaring “vote for my dad” all day. Apart from failing to declare I was a dual citizen with a UK passport, the two biggest rorts of that 2016 campaign were the way registered parties were given a full electronic copy of the electoral roll, but independents were only entitled to receive a printed copy under the law (what the hell can you do with that?), and how, when it came to public funding, there was no need to invoice or provide receipts, the money just landed in your account from the AEC less than 20 days after the election, no questions asked. Government contractors would love to get paid that quickly by federal taxpayers.
Sadly, the ColesWorth duopoly together got control of the electoral system to make sure it was tilted in their favour, with many barriers to entry for challenging independents. The only advice I’ve got at this election is: “smash the duopoly and vote independent”, but good luck cracking the 4% threshold to qualify for public funding. Reckon we’ve got a shot? We want to hear from you.
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