The internet won the election

In 1517, Europeans could simply pay the Catholic Church to absolve them of their sins. This practice became so popular that it paid for crusades and cathedrals. Known as ‘indulgences’, the scheme grew until professional pardoners travelled around Europe, offering the unrestricted sale of forgiveness, raising vast sums of money for the church. In short, the entire system had been corrupted.

A German priest named Martin Luther was outraged. Finally, after his protests to Catholic elders fell on deaf ears, Luther nailed a list of complaints to the door of a local church. This is where the story gets interesting. As Luther's friend Friedrich Myconius recounted, "Within a fortnight these propositions were known throughout Germany, and within four weeks almost all of Christendom was familiar with them.” In a few short years, the entire church would split, with Catholics and Protestants diverging. These events are known as the Reformation and mark the end of the Middle Ages.

How did a list on a door result in major damage to the church's power? How did a grassroots campaign reform a corrupted institution? The answers are surprisingly contemporary; the Reformation was made possible by new technology and social networks.

The Gutenberg printing press had been invented sixty years earlier, around 1450, and enabled its users to print thousands of pages per day, compared to roughly forty by hand. This breakthrough allowed the mass reproduction of texts at a scale that had previously been impossible. By 1517, there were printing operations in over 200 European cities. Political texts became a popular genre, and the most popular form of political text was the pamphlet. These consisted of printed sheets folded to make four or eight smaller pages, assembled without a hard cover. They were cheap, easy to hide and transport, making them perfect for reaching a mass audience.

Using Gutenberg presses, Luther's list of complaints was reprinted first by friends and then by strangers as it spread across Europe. The speed of the new printing presses combined with interconnected social networks to rapidly spread Luther's list without a centralised operation. Luther's ideas had gone viral.

Fast forward to Australia in 2022. After nine years in power, the federal LNP government had fomented white-hot rage at its unprecedented failures and misuse of public money. Billions had been thrown at electorates that the government wanted to win. Renewable energy funds had been redirected to fossil fuel projects. Climate change action was scoffed at despite horrific fires and devastating floods increasing in severity and frequency. Across the country, people were furious at the failures and self-serving nature of the Morrison government.

Add to this the Prime Minister's obstinate refusal to create an anti-corruption commission, thereby breaking his own 2019 election promise, and the public was desperate for change.

While Australia’s political leadership had stagnated, there had been major changes in Australian society over the preceding decade. Many of the most profound involved the ways we communicate with each other. Much like the Gutenberg printing press had transformed communication in 1517, the internet and social media had transformed the communications of most Australians between the 2013 and the 2022 elections.

On average, one gigabyte (GB) of mobile data cost $30.70 in 2015, fell to $2.30 in 2019, and only cost $0.98 by 2021. This steep fall in data prices enabled Australians to watch and share video content on mobile devices almost constantly by the time of the 2022 election. To put it in perspective, a modest 10GB use of mobile data—less than one week’s consumption for many Australians today—was more data than any Australian mobile network transmitted in the entire twelve months of the year 2000.

When Australia entered election mode in 2022, information was flowing more freely than ever before. Like Martin Luther’s list of demands in 1517, Australia was primed for major social change, enabled by revolutionary communication technologies and social networks.

Politically, two strands of change were already underway. The rise of community-backed independent candidates had been pioneered by the Voices for Indi group and their candidate Cathy McGowan in 2013. McGowan retained the seat in 2016, and her preferred successor Helen Haines prevailed in 2019. These achievements proved that grassroots candidates could not only succeed in winning seats from the major parties, but that they could retain them, and even pass them on to an independent successor. The axiomatic concept of ‘safe seats’ had begun to crack.

Far from the rural Victorian seat of Indi, a second movement had begun shortly before the 2019 election. Frustrated by decades of climate change denial and inaction, a group of concerned Australians identified the need for real and rapid measures to combat climate change and formed Climate 200.

The group’s founder and convenor, Simon Holmes à Court, had been a member of Josh Frydenberg’s Liberal Party fundraising group, Kooyong 200, but had been expelled after writing an op-ed supporting the closure of a coal-fired power station in 2018. Far from being discouraged, Holmes à Court took what he had learned about fundraising and created Climate 200.

The intertwining of these two strands, the Voices model and Climate 200, would have its roots, like so much of what followed, on social media. During the lost decade of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government, Twitter became the main meeting place, organisation site, and megaphone for progressive politics in Australia.

Today, over 5.8 million Australians use Twitter at least once per month. The lack of progressive daily news media in Australia leads many people to Twitter every day to consume news, complain about biased reporting, share opinions, learn, support each other, and discuss ideas.

It is no coincidence that Simon Holmes à Court says that Climate 200 would not exist without the Twitter community. The destruction of Australian manufacturing removed the shop floor as a site of progressive organising. Decades of Liberal Party and media attacks decimated union membership. Twitter has emerged as the new home of progressive politics in Australia.

Importantly, Twitter’s community is not restricted to traditional progressive groups. By mid-2021, many lifelong Liberal voters were voicing their anger at Morrison’s government on the platform. As Morrison lurched from scandal to scandal, Climate 200 crowdfunded over $2 million in six weeks to back independent candidates at the election. This crowdfunding, from over two thousand donors, would not have been possible without the internet, and was the first major tremor indicating the force that was about to be unleashed on the government.

Previously, election campaigns had largely excluded the public, operating as party-political processes. Voters watched soundbites on the nightly news and read recaps in newspapers. Now voters used the internet’s crowdfunding technology to raise vast sums of money for independent candidates who would only have to commit to three tenets:

• A science-based response to the climate crisis

• Restoring integrity to politics

• Advancing gender equity

Thanks to the internet, the public was able to finance this political movement in a few simple clicks. Supporters had direct contact with Climate 200’s founders on Twitter. Questions about the movement were answered in real-time. A huge breakthrough in democratic participation had occurred.

Cathy McGowan had used crowdfunding since 2013, and Climate 200 raised over $500,000 for the 2019 election, but the stratospheric success of crowdfunding in the 2022 election is a major story in itself. Crowdfunding would prove to be pivotal, with the internet and social media enabling rapid fundraising for independents who would have been unable to raise the same amounts in a pre-internet age.

The importance of this breakthrough has been wholly missed by our media. By dramatising interpersonal conflicts, the media has overlooked the importance of technology. Without these new technologies, it is likely that Climate 200 and Voices groups would never have got off the ground. Like Luther’s list if the printing press had not been invented, Climate 200 would have been a good idea, but one without a realistic way to reach its audience.

Across Australia during early 2021, Voices groups formed, were taught how to organise themselves, and began looking for the right candidate to unseat their local representative. Nowhere would this task be more Herculean than in Kooyong, where the federal treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, had been the local member for twelve years. The seat had been held by the Liberal Party since the party’s formation in 1944, with the party’s founder and luminary Robert Menzies holding the seat for 32 years. It is fitting that Menzies, Australia’s longest serving Prime Minister, held the seat for so long. Frydenberg was widely heralded in conservative media as a future Prime Minister. Unsurprisingly, the seat of Kooyong was regarded as the beating heart of the Liberal Party.

Despite the odds against them, The Voices for Kooyong group was formed by members of two Facebook community pages, Kew 3101 and Vote Them Out. In early 2021, thirty members from these groups met at the Camberwell Library. Voices of Kooyong, based on Voices for Indi, grew out of this meeting.

On October 30, 2021, an advertisement appeared in the Australian Financial Review, calling for nominations for the independent candidate for Kooyong. Voices for Kooyong had endorsed it, with the Kooyong Independents Group – the group set up to run Oliver Yates’ independent campaign in Kooyong in 2019 – responsible for the advertisement. As Voices for Kooyong was never intended to be a campaign organisation, the Kooyong Independents Group would go on to select the candidate and run their campaign.

Seeing the AFR advertisement, several people urged a paediatric neurologist with no political experience, Dr Monique Ryan, to apply for the candidacy. After being short-listed, Dr Ryan was selected, and her announcement went live on December 9, 2021. In her first post to Twitter, Dr Ryan explained that she could not stand by while her “local member votes with Barnaby Joyce on climate change.”

The Kooyong Independents Group had six months to win over their community. Competing against the country’s Treasurer and the Liberal Party’s choice for future Prime Minister, a high-profile, well-liked celebrity would have faced a daunting task. For a political newcomer with no name recognition or public profile, the task appeared impossible. The group got to work.

Dr Ryan’s social media accounts quickly became central in efforts to reach the electorate. As the campaign’s Social Media Manager, Hayden O’Connor explains, “Monique’s social media accounts were used to communicate not just her policy positions, but also to garner support within the community. We regularly highlighted the contribution of volunteers and supporters through ‘voter voices’ profiles and videos.”

These upbeat videos showed the positive experiences of volunteers, many of whom had never participated in a political campaign before, and inspired others to join the campaign. Like Martin Luther’s list spreading across Europe, the Dr Monique Ryan for Kooyong campaign was quickly gathering pace, aided by new communication technologies and social networks.

While Dr Ryan’s social media accounts were introducing her to Kooyong voters, versatile campaign member Brent Hodgson set about creating a list of every known Kooyong voter who had a Twitter account. It paid off. “By the end of the campaign, almost all of these people were volunteers - some in quite senior leadership roles,” Hodgson says.

The internet was allowing Dr Ryan’s campaign to do things that an independent would not have been able to do in previous elections. Dr Ryan’s team could produce high-quality video updates and reach hundreds of thousands of viewers instantly on their phones, energising the community movement and attracting new recruits, all without the vast cost of TV advertising.

Using the hashtag #Mon4Kooyong, the campaign and its supporters could communicate directly with each other and local voters. The breakthrough tool of the preceding election in 2019, targeting specific demographics with purchased ads on social media, was now being co-opted by regular Twitter users at no cost.

The office-warming celebration at Dr Ryan’s campaign headquarters on 19 February, 2022, provided a second tremor indicating the momentum that was growing in Kooyong. Hundreds of people turned up and the positive energy was palpable. Support was surging, both in the electorate and online.

The campaigns of Dr Ryan and Josh Frydenberg differed in advertising strategies as greatly as they differed in policies and manners. Dr Ryan’s campaign spent most of its advertising budget on positive ads online, while Frydenberg purchased every billboard in Kooyong and plastered the electorate with gloomy fear slogans for months. Tellingly, the Liberal Party logo and Prime Minister Scott Morrison did not appear on virtually any of the billboards.

It quickly became a truism of the Kooyong campaign that Frydenberg appeared almost everywhere that could be purchased, while Dr Ryan appeared almost everywhere that community members could help, whether it was in shop windows, front gardens, t-shirts worn in the community, and a deluge of communications on social media. Weekly pizza nights at Dr Ryan’s campaign offices kept growing. The campaign’s viral success was accelerating.

Soon, one in thirty houses displayed a Dr Ryan billboard, 2000 volunteers walked the streets in teal t-shirts, and 3000 donors had crowdfunded over $1 million dollars for Dr Ryan’s campaign.

By early 2022, Frydenberg was nervous. This same man and Liberal Party who had attacked Victoria throughout the traumatising 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, when Victorians had needed support from their elected representatives, now set about attacking Dr Ryan as a “fake independent” who was wholly unsuitable for the job. Thanks to the instant nature of social media and the strength of the community network that had been built in Kooyong, these lines of attack did not register as credible with the majority of voters in the electorate.

“The ‘fake independent’ claim didn’t work because voters’ friends, neighbours or colleagues knew people involved in Monique’s campaign, or Monique herself - and could see for themselves that it did not reflect the true state of things,” the campaign’s Social Media Manager, Hayden O’Connor, says.

The community’s ability to reject the media onslaught of attack pieces against Dr Ryan is testament to how quickly the campaign built a tight, unified, positive movement in Kooyong. As O’Connor explains, “What we achieved in 6 months—in terms of cut-through—was possible only with intelligent and targeted use of the various social media platforms.”

After Luther’s list was published in 1517, he came under fierce attack from the Catholic Church. The church’s colourfully named Edict of Worms, handed down in 1521, demanded that citizens stop spreading Luther’s ideas and deliver him to the authorities for arrest and punishment. Instead, he was protected by the community and kept safe while his ideas continued to spread rapidly across Europe. The previously untouchable system of power was cracking.

In Kooyong in 2022, with the election approaching, Dr Ryan’s campaign kept posting positive stories about volunteers on social media, targeting positive ads in the electorate, and kept growing until it reached a critical mass. Over 2000 volunteers had been recruited by social media, targeted advertising, word of mouth, and direct contact with door-knockers. The campaign’s initial goal was to knock on 20,000 doors and speak directly to residents. Two days before the election, they had knocked on all 55,000 accessible doors in the electorate.

Mirroring her team, Dr Ryan had been having face-to-face conversations with the public at regular engagement sessions for months. In contrast, Josh Frydenberg was the only candidate to not attend a community debate in late April, and then attempted to pressure Dr Ryan into appearing in a nationally broadcast debate on Channel Nine, a station with deep and active links to the Liberal Party. Frydenberg himself had appeared at Liberal Party fundraisers with the Chairman of Nine, Peter Costello.

Rejecting the national debate on Nine as inappropriate for a local election, Dr Ryan and Frydenberg eventually faced each other in a community forum in Kooyong, filmed by Sky News. Dr Ryan’s messages regarding climate change action, a Federal ICAC, and integrity in politics were delivered well and had already proved hugely popular in repeated polls.

The strength of Dr Ryan’s eloquent, confident debate performance, where she held her own against the country’s treasurer, put even more wind in the Ryan campaign’s sails. In the last month of the campaign, Kooyong was a sea of teal. Over 2000 volunteers had joined the grassroots campaign. Meanwhile, Frydenberg was forced to pay young casual workers $30 per hour to carry 7kg billboards on their backs, hardly the act of an ascendant local candidate.

The election was fast approaching. In April, Dr Ryan’s Twitter posts received over six million tweet impressions. In May, this figure was 16 million. Dr Ryan posted three Tweets during the campaign that were retweeted more than anything by Anthony Albanese or Scott Morrison. Online and in the streets of Kooyong, the support for Dr Ryan’s campaign was stratospheric.

While Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google ads enabled the campaign to grow so quickly, during the later stages of the campaign, Social Media Manager Hayden O’Connor began to focus more on youth platform Tik Tok. Changing demographics meant that in 2022, young voters were the largest age group in Kooyong. As a result of this shrewd campaign focus, Dr Ryan’s TikTok page received over 40,000 likes and 270,000 views. A community-created page, Youth4Mon, was even more successful, attracting more than 500,000 views.

Within six months, Dr Ryan’s campaign had created a groundswell for a previously unknown candidate. The campaign team—led by campaign director Ann Capling, and with high-profile members including Rob Baillieu, the son of former Liberal Premier Ted Baillieu—had harnessed new technologies and social networks to create a real community movement which would have been impossible to do with the same timeframe and funding before the internet, mobile devices, and social media.

Significantly, the media missed the importance of these events while they were happening. Preferring to focus on negative stories during the campaign, the unprecedented growth and positive inclusiveness of Dr Ryan’s campaign were footnotes in otherwise melodramatic conflict pieces.

Even when Dr Ryan’s campaign crowdfunded over $126,000 in just four hours to mount a successful legal challenge to COVID-19 positive people being unable to vote, a Morrison government oversight that could have disenfranchised over 200,000 Australians, the media totally missed the significance of how quickly a grassroots independent could use the internet to raise a large amount of money and immediately improve our democracy.

On Twitter, where deeply insightful election discussion was actually happening, respected commentators were able to predict the election outcome months in advance. Due almost solely to the high-value information I learned on Twitter, I was able to write a detailed prediction of the election outcome two months before election day and was proved presciently correct.

On election night, Saturday May 21, Dr Ryan’s supporters gathered at The Auburn Hotel and watched history being made. Six months of hard work and indefatigable positivity—“chop wood, carry water” was their mantra—led to Dr Monique Ryan, a previously unknown candidate with no political experience, winning the seat of Kooyong and beating the federal treasurer and Liberal Party’s heir apparent. Five more Voices campaigns, supported by Climate 200, would go on to unseat Liberal incumbents across Australia. The nation’s political landscape had been permanently changed.

For years, the media had denigrated online political organising as ‘armchair activism’. Now, Facebook groups and Twitter users had performed major roles in unseating a nine-year government and destroying the Liberal Party’s heartland. Following the election, the Liberal Party is decimated. The idea of safe Liberal seats is dead. To borrow from Martin Luther’s success, the church has been split in two.

A core member of Dr Ryan’s campaign team, Brent Hodgson, thinks that the election result was a lesson in the power of community and connection. “The extent to which we influence our "neighbours"—both online, and in the real world—can't be underestimated,” he says.

The success of Dr Ryan’s campaign would not have been possible without the internet and social media. A six month campaign to unseat a safe Liberal local member, a treasurer, a future PM, featuring an unknown candidate in a seat that has never left Liberal Party hands, would have cost an astronomical amount before the internet and cheap data. Even if the money had been spent at a previous election, it is highly doubtful that the same outcome could have been achieved.

Martin Luther changed the Catholic Church with a single list nailed to a church door. The printing press enabled that spark to grow into a raging fire that burnt away the dead wood from the Catholic Church, the corrupted power structure of the day.

Climate 200, Voices groups, and the Kooyong Independents Group used the internet and social media to rapidly grow their campaigns and succeed in new and revolutionary ways. Another successful Voices independent, Zoe Daniel, received over 350,000 views for her first campaign video. Huge capital is no longer required to create successful political campaigns.

The 2022 election created major social change, enabled by new technologies and social networks. These technologies will continue to advance, become cheaper, integrate more deeply into our lives, and enable smoother and more data-rich communications that spread rapidly and widely.

Where will these technologies lead us? How will they empower grassroots movements, progress, and democracy in the future?

The lesson of the 2022 election is that participation is key. New technologies and vast social networks are at our fingertips. Success will favour those who embrace them.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berniers-Lee, believes that our best days are ahead of us. “The Web as I envisaged it, we have not seen it yet,” he says. “The future is still so much bigger than the past.”