Don’t lose young voters to paper flyers this federal election.
An open letter to all this year’s federal election candidates, who would be stupid to continue campaigning with paper flyers, and ignoring the concerns of young voters.
Dear candidates,
Please, save the trees and your printing costs this election, and don’t accost me with your paper flyers on my way into the polling booth.
There are plenty of things to complain about come election time. It’s my quadrennial opportunity to spout off, Bob Katter-style, about anything even slightly exasperating in politics. Whether it’s those obnoxiously large campaign posters, the debates that get ugly on Q&A, the ‘party’ buses with wrapped with campaign slogans, the visits to the mines, or the constant kissing of babies, I will have something to say about it. Don’t even get me started about that time ScoMo gave us the ‘ick’ when he washed that girl’s hair for the campaign cameras at a hairdresser.
But hands down, the most infuriating thing about election time is the last leg of the race: that walk up to the local school and into the polling booth. And it’s not about the fact that I’m spending my Saturday in a queue, or about how ludicrously long the senate ballot paper is going to be. No, it’s those freakishly passionate, blood-thirsty campaign volunteers, who have sniffed me out and are ready to strike. Their weapon of choice: paper flyers.
It’s bad enough being attacked by those vultures, only for the flyers to be instantly crumpled and thrown away. But the reality is that the use of paper flyers in elections is a token of a much bigger problem: the lack of political action to protect the environment and combat climate change, and the continued disregard for the concerns of young people in Australian politics.
Old-school campaigning methods are just another stinging reminder that young people are not the priority in acquiring votes.
According to Mission Australia’s Youth Survey, the environment was the second biggest concern for young people in 2021, just behind the COVID-19 pandemic. And although some might be recyclable, campaign flyers are not an environmentally sound method of getting your message across to voters. Plus, it’s not like each candidate’s environmental action plan is front and centre on their flyers in a bid to get young voters on board.
The lack of action on climate change from the Morrison government since 2019 has been criticised by so many, from academic experts and intergovernmental organisations, to the school children who took the government to court for their failures to protect kids from climate disasters. Last year, we ranked last place out of 193 countries for action taken to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. We were one of the last countries to commit to the target of net-zero emissions by 2050 before the Glasgow summit of the UN Climate Change Conference. And even then, the plan has been called a “fraud” full of “false solutions to climate change” by progressive thinktank, The Australia Institute, just recently.
So we’re out there, on strike from school and calling for climate action, whilst old mate ScoMo is opening new coal mines with Adani and ignoring calls from The Climate Council of Australia about the climate crisis driving worsening natural disasters.
The wastefulness of paper flyers just doesn’t align with young voters’ desire to live more sustainably and protect the world we live in for future generations. By extension, their continued usage in electoral campaigns doesn’t reflect our desire to see climate justice prioritised in this election. And our hopes aren’t very high about that changing, given how the last three years of this government has panned out for us.
The whole flyer-based campaign process truly makes me angry. It’s the colour-printing of empty promises onto pieces of glossy paper. The shoving them in voters’ faces, as if it will change their mind in those last couple of minutes. The immediate disposal of said glossy papers, and the proceeding guilt about the waste of time and resources. And then, to top it all off, it’s the claiming the printing back on tax-payer money as ‘electoral campaign costs’. It’s right up there on the same level of frustrating and useless as the crusty, old men who run this circus we call a ‘federal government’.
It all boils down to the fact that paper flyers are just another symbol of the ‘old way’ of doing things in Australian politics. It’s just how we’ve always done it. And these old-school campaigning methods are just another stinging reminder that young people are not the priority in acquiring votes.
The 2019 election saw record highs in young people enrolling to vote, and this surge brought the overall percentage of enrolled eligible people to at 96.8%; the highest enrolment rate in Australian history. Clearly, young people wanted to be heard in the last election. Yet as we roll into the next election, I can’t help but feel that young people are still waiting for their voices and their votes to matter to those in charge.
In fact, last year, Foundations for Tomorrow found that out of the 10,000 young people they surveyed, 93% said the government was not doing enough to address climate change, and only 11% felt as though their vote actually mattered.
What makes things worse is that flyers, alongside giant posters and door-knocking, are not even logically sound methods of campaigning in this day and age. An ABC poll conducted when voters went to the polls in 2019 showed that 76% of voters had already made up their mind before the election campaigns even began. So it really raises the question: why are we still doing elections like this? As far as I can tell, the abruptness of this campaign method only inhibits the political will and interest of young voters.
The bottom line is, I don’t like being talked at by people in politics. I want to be heard and I want our generation’s concerns to be addressed. Really, I just want to have a conversation. And paper flyers are not conversation starters.
So, dear candidates, this is what I’m asking for: when you’re making your way along the campaign trail, connect to us young voters in ways that we value. Engage with us on social media, don’t exacerbate the generational divide, and address the climate crisis so that the world is a liveable place for us in the future. You should be encouraging us to be involved in your change-making, because our votes should be as important to you as those of our parents.
