Anti-Bush Internet Activists Focus on Australia's Howard

Patrick Goodenough
International Editor

(CNSNews.com) - A pair of Australians who worked for an anti-Bush 527 group during the 2004 presidential election have set up an Internet-based initiative in their home country targeting conservative Prime Minister John Howard.

With the backing of a wealthy Australian Internet entrepreneur associated with the opposition Labor Party, Jeremy Heimans and David Madden this week launched GetUp!, "a new political movement to build a more progressive Australia."

"After nearly a decade of conservative government, our country has changed," they said on the site. "Millions of Australians don't like the direction we've been heading."

The launch has been timed to coincide with a significant shift in the Australian political scene. Next week, Howard's coalition takes control of the Senate -- the deferred outcome of last October's general election victory.

No Australian government has controlled both houses of parliament since 1981, and opposition parties worry that Howard will use the opportunity to push through policies they have long managed to block in the upper house, including labor and media ownership reforms.

A new television ad launching GetUp! sends a message to the coalition members in the new-look Senate: "The other parties can't hold you accountable anymore, but we will."

The ad includes messages to the government from "ordinary Australians."

"Don't keep putting George Bush's interests in front of Australia's," says one. "Don't even think about messing with my right to choose," warns another.

Heimans and Madden formerly studied at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. They said on the site that they "have worked at the vanguard of the new online organizing and campaigning techniques in the U.S."

"In 2004, David and Jeremy started a national campaign against George Bush's foreign policy. This campaign gathered thousands of online supporters and millions of dollars in donations to support a national television advertising campaign."

The campaign was "Win Back Respect," a 527 group whose large funders included the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and billionaire financier George Soros, and which ran campaign ads suggesting Bush would reinstate the draft.

Madden said by phone Tuesday that the group also sponsored a tour by Gen. Wesley Clark and "the Band of Sisters," a group of women with loved ones deployed in Iraq or killed during the military campaign there.

"Jeremy and I were involved in a campaign that was extremely critical of the Bush foreign policy, and so when the time is right, we intend to address issues of Australian foreign policy as well," he said.

"This initiative is very much inspired by MoveOn.org."

Madden said the Australian venture had no links to any political party.

"This is independent of any existing political parties. It's really, in part, a response to the calcification and staleness of the existing political parties.

"There are hundreds of thousands of Australians out there who care deeply about progressive issues and who are very concerned about the direction Australia is going. But that doesn't mean they want to get involved in tired old political structures. The purpose ... is to provide people with the tools to take politics back into their own hands."

In a letter being sent out to 75,000 would-be supporters -- including Australians who were already on the MoveOn.org mailing list, Madden said -- the organization said Howard's government had over the past nine years "taken our country in a direction that many of us find very distressing."

Once it assumed control of the Senate, it would enjoy "absolute power."

"We already know that the government is planning radical changes that will fundamentally change our country. We need to show John Howard's government that it can't just do whatever it wants."

Madden said the site was swamped with visitors on its first day and also received numerous donations, ranging from $10 to amounts in the "three figures."

High-profile supporters of GetUp! include Internet entrepreneur and Laborite Evan Thornley; senior trade unionist and Laborite Bill Shorten; and John Hewson, a former leader of Howard's Liberal Party who opposed Howard's decision to take Australia into the Iraq war in 2003.

Participants on conservative Australian weblogs took swipes at the new venture, suggesting a host of alternative names, including GetLost, GiveUp and GetOverIt.

See Earlier Story:
New Television Ad Trumpets Military Draft Rumor (Oct. 15, 2004)

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