A movement of relationships — The Greens in Fraser 2025

“The work we do with communities does not pre-exist our relationships”, says Huong Truong as she reflects on the Fraser campaign. Against those who dismiss grassroots organising as nothing but “retail politics”, Huong shows how electoral campaigns can move beyond “meaningful interactions” to create solidarity — transforming both our communities and the Greens. “We are in community together”.

When most people imagine the work of a candidate, I suppose they would think of ‘visibility’ tactics for gaining name and party recognition across the electorate – such as street posters, billboards, social media, yard signs on fences. Or ‘field’ tactics might come to mind, such as phoning or door knocking to reach voters 1:1 to persuade them to vote Greens. 

A third set of tactics, referred to in campaign-speak as ‘relationships’, involves making connections with local constituent groups.

Arguably, ‘visibility’ and ‘field’ tactics are the most straightforward to roll out. Each has defined and publicly regulated ways of publishing advertising materials or for directly contacting voters on the electoral roll. 

It’s the ‘relationships’ tactics that parties solely focussed on electoral and parliamentary politics, are least equipped for. And it’s these tactics that I’ve been most interested in during the Fraser Campaign because these are the most helpful for building our grassroots movement. 

For me, elections are a useful time for us as Greens to organise communities because most people, even those who aren’t particularly politically literate or interested in any type of ‘politics’, are turning their minds to the fuss and bluster of our compulsory participation in electoral politics. 

From the thousands of conversations I’ve personally had as our Greens candidate for Fraser, I know most people feel that politics is irrelevant to, or at least a distraction from, their everyday lives. Often people will apologise that they don’t really ‘follow politics’ and so don’t really feel that they have much to say about it all. 

People of organised faith, or from ethnic communities, or even issues-based community groups have a certain relationship with Members of Parliament (MPs) which makes it hard for them to imagine this relationship could be otherwise. The MP has the power, receives their audience, then decides whether or not to listen or take their concerns or suggestions or demands seriously. We enter into these interactions with MPs already knowing we don’t matter to them. And we are led to believe that the terms of our relationship with the MP is theirs to decide. 

Every election season, we may hear from them. Unless you’re a local climate action group in Fraser — all of whom walked out on the incumbent Labor MP Daniel Mulino in October 2024 out of sheer frustration that the Federal Labor Government kept approving coal mines in this climate crisis. The No Third Tulla Runway group could not get a meeting with him. The local Palestine Solidarity groups picketing his office, sometimes weekly, never saw him. Whilst Vietnamese Museum Australia and other local groups would describe him as someone who has ‘supported’ them – but only to the extent of providing grants or getting an audience with this or the other Government Ministers, or sometimes something even more vague than that. 

We, especially in nominally ‘safe Labor’ seats, never imagine that we might be able to describe a need on our own terms and work with our elected representatives to solve our problems, let alone seek the transformation and reorganising of whole systems that are critically failing the public interest (such as chronic underfunding of public schools, privatised and unintegrated transport systems, to name a few). 

We are led to believe that power is party-political and institutional, and Members of Parliament are these institutions’ representative, not ours. 

* * * 

The Greens Fraser Federal Election Campaign grew from a small group of young Greens in the western suburbs of Melbourne who’d taken up newly elected Greens MP Max Chandler-Mather’s call to run door knocks on the HAFF Bill in early 2023. The excellent response from locals at the doors in our neighbourhoods told this plucky OG crew that our working class communities had a strong appetite for how Greens politics addressed inequality. The crew started door knocking efforts to build the Fraser Campaign from October 2023. 

In November 2023, I’d lost the Senate Preselection arising from Senator Janet Rice’s retirement and that had hurt. Within the five week preselection race, I articulated what I saw was the movement building opportunity for the party with a Senator’s tenure, staffing and resources. The Victorian Greens membership was torn apart between Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists (TERF) and a younger crew of new-ish members prepared to exclude them right back. I’d heard enough through my conversations with hundreds of our members to understand that the voting membership were still reeling from the TERF wars and from the departure of our Blak Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe from the federal party room. 

At that point, our membership was in a defensive posture. We did not have enough collective imagination or appetite for examining our deeper purpose as a political force, nor to consider the necessity of grassroots movement building through and beyond parliamentary politics. And so we preselected a ‘safe’ (read: white, innocuous) pair of hands to the ‘safest’ seat for the Greens in the country.

A few months later, in March 2024, a bunch of us local volunteers supported by State Office staff held a western suburbs Greens all-in local government / Fraser election planning day. Some folks in State Office had suggested we only run it with a handful of key people who’d eventually form our election campaign committee. But I’m glad we’d brought together 30 or so local members after all, each with varying levels of campaign experience, to shape the campaign strategy. It meant we were able to build the foundation of region-wide inter-branch cooperation and rapport that buoyed us through growing our door knocking project and winning our best Local Government results ever. 

At the same time, I’d started noticing how powerful but increasingly stretched the local Palestine Solidarity groups were becoming. By mid-2024 I’d gathered the various local groups to develop and run the ‘We Vote For Palestine’ as a regionwide (and soon Victoria- & New South Wales-wide) campaign to centre Palestinian liberation as an election issue. Same spirit — of solidarity, learning together, and collective work, — different projects.

* * * 

In July 2024, I was preselected as the Greens candidate for Fraser. We worked hard to build scale and volunteer capacity as best as we could. I felt empowered to experiment in my grassroots organising tactics — these were my communities, the neighbourhoods where I grew up and still lived. But the pressure to run a campaign the ‘right’ way began to weigh heavily. It seemed we were ambitious beyond a smaller ‘unwinnable’ campaign, but we weren’t going to get support from the Victorian or National Party bodies to run anything as serious as a ‘winnable’ target seat campaign. Meanwhile the ‘half-a-million-dollar’ target Greens campaign, that runs electoral tactics like a machine to win, was the only benchmark available to us. 

I slowly came to understand, and radically accept, that there wasn’t really precedent or any real interest from the rest of the party for what we were trying to do with ‘relationships’ in Fraser. So I began to work with our little team to coordinate all parts of the Fraser campaign that were not field campaigning in order to clarify and create for ourselves the grassroots community organising work that would be worthwhile for a little campaign like ours. 

All the while, I was working full-time travelling across the country to develop our grassroots Greens organising practices. By the time we got to our Fraser Campaign End of Year party, I nearly fainted mid-speech on stage. The distress of this sudden breakdown of my body sent me into a sort of crisis where I’d lost any real sense of purpose in election campaigning. 

Handwritten Candidate Goals

Hour by hour, day by day, through late December and early January 2025 I rebuilt my ‘why’ from the ground up. Janet Rice reminded me that the success of any campaign is never on any one person’s shoulders, that I was still the candidate to lead us, and that we can only ever do what we can — but not without enough sleep. Monique Tovo sat me down and helped me further metabolise my distress into a two page document of my own true ‘candidate goals’, which I returned to each time the party dismissed or otherwise showed itself to be unable to recognise the wholesome and deep movement building work we were doing out here.

* * * 

Herein lies the most important work for building our grassroots Greens movement: creating a clear contrast between politics-as-usual from the major parties against our locally-embedded Greens practices of compassion, consensus, and grassroots participation in the matters impacting our communities. 

Beyond Greens-led events or stalls at community events, our unflappable campaign manager Kira Farrugia and I did all we could to seek out communities we Greens had not yet reached. We invited ourselves to Lunar New Year Tet Street Festivals across the suburbs – me turning up in my Green ao dai with our Greens volunteers handing out lucky pockets to wish everyone in the street a prosperous new year. 

We set up stalls or attended services at mosques, temples, and churches – always reaching out beforehand and finding ways to attend that enhanced whatever purpose people had gathered for: kilos of red lentils for the Murugan Temple in Sunshine North; Vietnamese biscuits for Iftar at Hazara Culture Centre in Ravenhall; trays and trays of watermelon slices for the weekly public lunch at the Quang Minh Temple, Braybrook. We didn’t wait to be invited, and we never came to anyone’s ‘home’ empty-handed. 

I learnt everything I could about how people talk about themselves. About how their different generations interacted with one another. Who they trusted and what they wanted for their kids and elders. What they’ll turn up for. How they find work. How they relate to politics or organise themselves to ensure community needs around faith, material well-being, legal issues, etc. are met. 

I took note of everything, learning on behalf of our movement. 

I asked hijabi women how they approached their own feminism in the schools and businesses they run. I asked South Sudanese parents about their approaches to raising their kids and what’s tough for them about mental health. And to first generation Hazara refugees, I asked where they stood on solidarity with Palestine. My genuine interest in them as people, as neighbours (whether they were voters or not, whether they supported the Greens or not, whatever their ‘position’ in their community) and the stories I shared from my time with other communities, in turn led them to approach me with their own curiosity for me and the Greens. 

Whenever asked, I was clear about who I was: I am the daughter of Vietnamese refugees. I am a single mum living in Sunshine. I am your neighbour. We are in community together. I’m interested to know what matters to you personally and as a community (and I probably know someone who can help with whatever that is). I am with the Greens and you’re invited to shape our politics that is committed to putting the needs of people and the planet, before profit. I believe in us. 

I made loads and loads of new friends this way, with the very explicit intention to keep turning up for them and continuing these new public relationships between their community group and the Greens through me, our volunteers, and whoever is willing in their community or group. 

I see now that, by instinct, I modelled being a ‘grassroots Greens’: a readiness to listen to understand, and a willingness to provide meaningful help and solidarity. The work we’ll do together with these communities does not pre-exist these public relationships. Together, we see a need, we find a way. We’ll create and shape what needs to be done as we get to know each other and build our grassroots power together. 

At its simplest, this work is an invitation for genuine relationship between our Greens movement and the very real people we’re looking to connect with and organise. It is explicitly holding space for their dignity, their humanity, their capacity to speak for themselves. (Which is very different to holding persuasive ‘voter contact’ conversations to gauge whether someone is intending to vote Greens or otherwise — unironically referred to in campaign-speak as ‘meaningful interactions’ or ‘MIs’).

Photo of Huong in the streets, Tet Festival

In everything we did in this campaign, we learned to better articulate our own “why” and to listen for the deepest “why” in others – a key ingredient to a strong grassroots movement built on trust and solidarity. Upon our shared values and in relationship with new friends, we connect the dots between the harm and disenfranchisement our communities are experiencing with the political choices being made by the major parties and their corporate masters. Then, of course, we take public political action together to get what we need. 

Over 18 months, we accessed campaign and training spaces through beautiful relationships with local grassroots organisations that also exist to radically transform institutions – such as Borderlands Cooperative, St John’s Anglican Church, Green Collect, and Baai Alkebulan African Library & Museum. 

Through every one of our events and weekly campaign nights, we cultivated our campaign practice in the spirit of solidarity and inclusivity. We made sure everyone got fed free healthy homemade vegan food, and we looked out for each other so that each of us could do meaningful work, within our capacity – no more, no less. 

We raised $150,000 from over 400 grassroots donations, all the while connecting people across different communities as we campaigned. I’m most proud of our ‘Power in Community’ fundraising dinner that saw 300 attendees from all different backgrounds across the west enjoy the music, art and story-telling of talented multicultural grassroots activists. 

Our team had learnt so much about various communities by then that we committed to making the entire event Halal, served no alcohol, made breaks in the program for prayer times, and created lots of opportunities for people and their kids to wander around and connect with each other. 

We nailed our own brief that night: to have activists and advocates from various communities — who have so often been overlooked or targeted or cynically used by big ‘P’ politics — experience and co-create solidarity amongst themselves, with our Greens election campaign as the backdrop. We were not ‘talked at’ by politicians. We were not patronised with the ‘model migrant’ trope that Labor MPs out here can’t seem to think beyond. 

Power in Community Dinner

We were community building community, and inspiring each other through our stories of establishing our own libraries and social enterprises from the ground up, running mutual aid and family violence support from our own homes, creating third spaces and organising to fight human rights abuses in our countries of origin. None of us were waiting for politicians to act on the issues impacting our communities. And all of us were ready to back people that we’d only just met, whatever shape their work for justice and peace took. 

* * * 

By the time early voting was open, I was feeling so deeply aligned to our purpose as grassroots Greens – and any campaign goals around MIs or swings to the Greens became irrelevant to me. Our movement-building work remained the same, regardless. 

We turned up to be a living breathing invitation for people in this electorate to be part of grassroots solidarity for grassroots change, far beyond what power they have at the ballot box. I have hundreds and hundreds of stories to share about people we’d gotten to know across our communities of colour and of different faiths, who were already getting on with action for transformative justice, grassroots mutual aid and resistance. 

Greens Fraser Team and our Palestinian comrades at the Solidarity Cup, Selwyn Park, September 2024

Here is irrefutable proof that we will free Palestine from the suburbs. We will protect and care for our youth and elders. We will provide for abused women and children ourselves. We will build mutual aid networks to feed our poor and protect students, migrants and refugees. We will get justice for our people targeted, incarcerated and killed by police and the state. And our Greens movement — powered by community — will keep elevating these grassroots efforts and community needs inside and beyond the halls of institutional power. 

* * *

So what won us the 6+% swing in Fraser? No one can say definitively (not even the various white men in our party who, over the past decade, have dismissed my proposals and actual work of movement building as merely ‘retail politics’ or ‘building swings in the wrong places’). 

The post-election noise by pundits pertains to the Greens’ communications strategy or electoral performance, and are similarly in vain. Everyone seems to be singularly concerned about how we Greens are perceived by the voting public. 

• “Are we seen as too radical?” “Or not radical enough?”
• “Could we have countered anti-Greens attacks better?”
• “How did we perform with: ‘the Muslim vote’? ‘The quiet Australians’? ‘The youth vote’? ‘Older women’?”
• “Will Labor take this majority and be more boldly progressive & compassionate?” (This is highly doubtful. And why is this even a reference for what the Greens do next?) 
• “Will the Liberals redeem themselves from their far-right tilt?” (Who cares?!)

None of this helps us learn in any real way who the people are, in various overlapping communities across our electorates. These questions do nothing to equip us to be in more meaningful relationship with the very people we’ve yet to reach and seek to organise.

Here in our Greens Fraser campaign, we know our work has been worth so much more than the electoral swing. We’ve grown a mycelial network of activists from many walks of life and lived experiences who will back each other in the impending apocalypses.  

We’re turning our minds to questions that will help make our movement even more irresistible to more people who find they share our values: ‘What can we do next to deepen trust, political imagination, and grassroots power through the communities we live amongst?’ ‘What is meaningful, helpful or worth doing as Greens that will encourage these folks to find their political home in our movement?’ ‘How will our movement need to be reshaped to ensure these folks can bring their whole selves to our collective change-making work?’ 

Perhaps we’ll be changed by what we learn, and even surprise ourselves with what we can ‘win’ outside of parliaments. Perhaps we’ll come to measure the success of Greens campaigns by the extent to which we’ve expanded the readiness of more people to act in solidarity with each other. 

Perhaps we’ll become even more intentional in reshaping our movement for all those people we’ve yet to meet, and know, and love. 

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Huong Truong is a community activist, mum of two, and a practising visual artist living on unceded Wurundjeri land of the Kulin Nation. She was the Greens candidate for Fraser in the recent federal election and is a former Greens member of the Victorian Parliament. @huongtru @huongtweets

Image credits. Featured images courtesy of Huong Truong.