Week One

So the first week of the campaign has come to a close.

Despite the election hanging over my head for most of the year, there were still a lot of things that couldn’t progress until the date was set, so Week One saw a lot of behind the scenes admin work.

But counting back over the week, this is a thumbnail sketch of what happened, with most of the boring bits removed.

Saturday 13th October: T-1, the day before the election was called – I spent a few hours as a polar bear trying to reclaim democracy – as I outlined in this post.

Sunday -from 10am it was pretty clear the PM was going to ruin my weekend – so I was putting some things together and making a slew of phone calls, before going across to the Multicultural Festival at Roma Street Parklands, much later than I hoped. I was a bit too on-edge to really appreciate it. Deborah Conway was great, though.

Monday – again, working for a Senator facing re-election, there were all the other things that needed to be locked into place, now we had an official date. After work, we had an emergency meeting at my house of my campaign team.

Tuesday – meetings about advertising, more drafting of ads for YouTube, trying to keep ahead of candidate’s surveys, on top of my day job.

Wednesday – carousing with the Australian Republican Movement (as described here).

Thursday – started off with the launch of our Indigenous policy (as outlined in this post),

– then had a lunchtime meeting about the Bill of Rights campaign, then bolted out of the office at about 5.45 to get to a meeting that I found had been postponed. So that was one early night – at least I was home home – but was up working until late.

Friday – finishing off a script for our Rights & Freedoms ad – and the first of our ads to be completed were released, which included this one about Andrew Bartlett, that I’m pretty happy with –

Then spent a couple of hours phoning all my volunteers in the evening. Stupidly thinking about my life and assuming people would be home on a Friday night, we only got about a one third response rate. From that I went out to the Rock for Refugees concert at The Zoo in the Valley – to raise money for the Brisbane Refugee Claimants Support Centre

Saturday - Letterboxing for my next Meet the Candidate forum at Keperra. The Keperra region offered a happy medium between New Farm’s dense population and flat terrain with the Ashgrove/Bardon widely-spread highly-sloping grounds. And I was eyeballed by a scrub turkey for a good quarter of an hour.

Saturday night I went to the commemoration of the 6th anniversary of the loss of the SIEV X – the heavily-laden refugee vessel that sank during the 2001 election campaign with 397 people onboard. Of those, 353 drowned – including 146 children and 142 women – most of whom wouldn’t have been aboard except for the changes to Australia’s refugee laws that prevented family reunions.

A multi-faith memorial service was held at the Peace Pagoda at South Bank and followed by the screening of a short documentary on the tragedy.  

Sunday – got up at the crack of dawn to film our YouTube ad on Rights & Freedoms, after stupidly having the idea for a backdrop that’s usually surrounded by traffic, except at the eye-wateringly early hours.

Thanks to various technical hitches, it seems like this footage will probably have to be re-shot.

Went back to bed for 45 minutes, then went out for a press conference on multiculturalism and the need to defend diversity at West End, which was timed to segue into a picnic in support of the African community in the face of attacks from the government, and Pauline Hanson.

After that I had dinner at my mum’s – before she leaves the country (conveniently returning on polling day, but too late to help out. Hmmm)

And then I went out to see Ben Lee. The tickets were booked well in advance, but I was pretty sure it would fall within the election campaign. And he was great – it’s the third time I’ve seen him live, and I think all three were at the Tivoli. I guess technically it wasn’t a campaign event, but I did wear an Australians Against Capital Punishment t-shirt, just so I didn’t hurt myself re-acclimating to civilian life too quickly.