GetUp Campaign for Direct Democracy needs your support now!

(Belated) update (30/4/2016). Not long after this article was published, the GetUp site administrator suddenly and without warning deleted this proposal together with the many other posts, all of which enthusiastically supported my proposal, as I recall. Had we been warned at least we could have retrieved copies of the posts that were of interest, before they were deleted. Given this outrageous treatment of a proposal which is clearly consistent with GetUp's purported goal "to build a progressive Australia and bring participation back into our democracy", GetUp cannot be what it claims to be.

To vote on this campaign go to http://tinyurl.com/3nmwwjq . Yesterday, I made a proposal on GetUp that GetUp launch a campaign to have the Australian constitution changed to include provisions for Direct Democracy similar to what is practised in Switzerland. Whilst the response has not yet been overwhelming, I see no reason why a campaign for Direct Democracy now in Australia should not be able to gain sufficient support to force the Government make it law. But to succeed the campaign needs your support. To find out what you can do, please read this article and the previous article, particularly, that article's What You Can Do Section.

Could I first express my thanks to Jill, Vivienne, Menkit, Sheila and others for your support for my Direct Democracy campaign?

But so far, now at 2.20pm, 18 hours since I first launched my campaign with e-mails to several dozen contacts at 8.10PM last night and over a day after I posted my proposal to GetUp, I have to say, I am underwhelmed at the response. Although the response is a long way short of what I had hoped -- only six votes in favour so far [#fn_1" id="text_1">1] -- I don't think that that is yet cause to be disheartened. Given that it was Sunday night when I posted the e-mail and that so many I e-mailed would have immense constraints placed upon the time and energy that they needed to deal with my e-mail (which Sheila has advised me is somewhat more verbose than needed) it is hardly surprising that many recipients weren't immediately convinced that it would have been worth the effort to read my e-mail.

However, I still feel confident that at least a small number of those I e-mailed will take the trouble to read my e-mail, come to see that it would be well worth their time and effort to follow some of my suggestions and do what they can to broaden support for Direct Democracy.

Once only a few extra become interested, it should only be a matter of (not too much more) time before they should be able to convince others around them that my proposal has merit and would be well worth any time and energy they could put into it. When this occurs, I believe we will have achieved a critical mass of support.

Once this campaign has a critical mass of supporters, we should face little difficulty in getting enough votes to have it officially launched it as a GetUp campaign.

Because Direct Democracy essentially takes the concept behind GetUp to its logical conclusion, I think that it is likely that this proposal will be read by a considerably greater number of recipients than most GetUp proposals. I think that few who take the trouble to read it will not become convinced of the merits of Direct Democracy. Once this occurs the campaign should have achieved a sufficiently high profile to attract support from much broader sections of the Australian community.

Past campaigns from the GetUp archive include:

• Fund Hope For Mental Health
• Ban Live Export
• Save Tassie Forests
• Support Victorian Human Rights
• End Mandatory Detention
• Save the (Murray-Darling) Basin
• No Child in Detention
• Pokies Reform
• No Pulp Mill
• No Compulsory (aboriginal land) Acquisition In the Kimberly
• Don't Let Them Stop You From Voting
• Our Rights
• Climate Action Now
• Clean Up Tasmanian Politics
• Political Donations
• Economic Fairness
• (Increase essential aboriginal) Homelands funding
• Save the Net
• Save Our Heritage
• Do it for the Children
• Make this (song about the apology to the Stolen Generations) a Hit
• Roll Back, Not Roll Out (GetUp investigation of Fraser Government intervention in Northern Territory)

One very worthwhile outcome was the outcome of the "Save the Net" campaign which succeeded in stopping of the Federal Labour Government from subjecting all Internet traffic to mandatory filtering for the spurious reason that this measure was supposed to help stamp out child pornography on the Internet.

Whilst the "Save the Net" campaign and a few the other GetUp campaigns have considerable merit, the vast majority of causes that Australian communities have fought in recent years, and are fighting today, are missing from these pages. This would seem to indicate that many serious political campaigners see little reason to hope that having GetUp take up their cause would substantially increase their prospects of success.

Currently, my proposal for a Direct Democracy campaign has attracted only 6 supporters on GetUp. Perhaps those on candobetter, who have demonstrated that they understand the urgent need for Direct Democracy could consider taking a little more effort to help me achieve the critical mass of interest I need in order to progress.

#WhatYouCanDo2" id="WhatYouCanDo2">What you can (also) do

• Please consider acting upon some of the suggestions I made in my previous article.
• If you haven't voted for my GetUp proposal, please vote for it now. You will need to be a member of GetUp in order to be able to vote. If you haven't joined, please do so now;
• Please raise this issue again with each of your contacts, whom I probably have already e-mailed or spoken to. Point out to each of them that if Direct Democracy were to become law in the not-too-distant future, then whatever cause they are now fighting so hard far now would have much better prospects of success. In future they can expect to have to spend far less of their own time, energy and money to achieve similar outcomes. So, whatever time and effort they put into supporting this campaign now could easily be repaid to them many times over in future.

Vivienne, in her comment on GetUp, made a very god argument which backs up the point I made in the seconf of my above suggestions:

There are too many action, lobby, environmental and animal rights groups all in opposition to government policies, and our election system does not address these multiple concerns. We need a true democratic system in Australia, not the farce we have.

Footnote[s]

#fn_1" id="fn_1">1. [#text_1">back] As of 4.00PM on 15 August, 20 hours after I launched the campaign, the support for my campaign still seems very modest: only 6 votes for of a total of 16 votes. Presumably as many as 8 GetUp members voted against my proposal, which is a cause for concen. The given 'avg vote' figure is 2.33 votes. That figure bears no relationship that I can work out with the previous two numbers I have given. The overall rank of my proposal (out of over 1,000 as I recall) is 438. (As of 6.14PM the proposal has 10 supporters and is ranked 318 - still a long way to go.)