On mutual aid, electoral politics and building community

‘Our Home’ a light installation on a public housing tower, Naarm/Melbourne

This is what the new wave of Greens campaigning looks like: mutual aid, community meals, and public housing solidarity. Campaigning as community-building work, even when electoral wins aren’t guaranteed. But this is how our movement grows – through reflection and skill-sharing across loss and victory, embedding community building in all we do.

The Macnamara 2025 electoral campaign was one of the largest in Australian Greens history. We knocked on more than 90,000 doors and had more than 16,000 one-on-one conversations. We built a volunteer letter delivery service that was capable of delivering more than 75,000 letters in four days. At the heart of it all was our incredible candidate, Sonya Semmens, the campaign manager, Caitlin Barlow-Groomes, and lead organiser Hana Arai, whose commitment to building a movement, not just running a campaign, was an anchor for all of this work. Despite these efforts, our vote went backwards 4%. Losing ground stings. It’s devastating that we didn’t get the outcome we hoped for, and we have and are interrogating our campaign. But, we still think it is important that we keep sharing experiments, failures as well as successes, to continue to grow and expand our movement, especially experiments that materially improved people’s lives.

We have been inspired by the innovative work in our movement right across the country – from Michael Berkman’s renters rights workshop that inspired ours, to Elizabeth Watson-Brown’s Free Community Pantry, to Remah Naji’s incredible free community events and discussions. Internationally, Zohran Mamdani’s scavenger hunt is also a real inspiration. In his words events like these show that “politics is not something that you have, but rather something that you do. And it is something where you can meet new friends, you can rediscover old ones”. As we take stock in this post-election period, we thought it would be useful to share some of the ways we “did politics” in our federal election campaign in Macnamara. Please share your work in the comments. Let’s keep building a culture of skill sharing! 

Inspired primarily by the work spearheaded by Greens in Queensland, we sought to demonstrate how a Greens MP and local volunteer networks could work alongside the local campaign team to materially deliver outcomes for the community. We attempted to not only tell people that voting Greens would improve their lives through flyers, doorknocking, and ads, but actually show the way that the Greens political movement was capable of tangibly delivering today. Building strong communities and raising people’s expectations of what politics can deliver go hand in hand – because when people see that connection, care, and collective joy are possible, they also hopefully begin to expect more from those in power.

Throughout the campaign we focused on meeting people where they were at. This was both at their door with doorknocking, and in their local park with free community events. We wanted to connect with people to reset their expectations of what an MP can be, and to show them that we can expect more from our elected representatives. We know that the political establishment has systemically and intentionally lowered their expectations of what electoral politics can achieve. We wanted all of these tactics to help connect people’s immediate interests with a broader political vision. The community campaigning and mutual aid activities were only possible because of the massive field campaign we ran, where we were on the ground with our community, their concerns and lived experience. 

We know that politics is shaped not only by who wins elections but by what people expect from politics in the first place. Right now, those expectations are at rock bottom. After decades of privatisation, austerity, and major parties narrowing the scope of debate, people have been trained to believe that the government can do little more than tinker at the edges. Politicians and political parties are also more disconnected than ever from the people they represent, and many people are understandably tapping out from politics. We hear this on the door a lot as “I don’t know, I don’t pay attention”, or a “why would I bother”.

At the same time, we are also more disconnected from one another than ever. We are in a loneliness epidemic. Sonya, our candidate for Macnamara captured this best, when she said:

The social infrastructure of communities is falling off a cliff. Club membership is down. Being a committee member is down. Sitting on the Parents & Friends Committee is down. Church attendance and prayer groups are down, belonging to any religion is down (which is an estimated half of social capital, and the origin of civic leadership). Dinner parties, picnics and street parties are down. 

It is more important than ever that we spearhead the work of rebuilding social movements under the umbrella of a political party and actively create community space in all of our work. Not only are people less socially connected, they’ve also been trained by both major parties to expect very little from the government, and when you aren’t connected to community or collective politics, you become more disconnected from political struggle itself. This is a massive crisis that the left needs to confront if we want to build a mass movement capable of creating a better world. 

We want to discuss a series of tactics we experimented with in an attempt to begin to tackle these issues in our local area. Our vote didn’t reflect the scale of what we built, and that tells us clearly that connection at this scale alone isn’t enough – we need to better understand how to bridge the gap between community engagement and electoral power. Nonetheless, we thought it was useful to reflect on these tactics. 

It’s important to note that while Macnamara is broadly a wealthier electorate, stark inequality runs through it, and this social dislocation shows up differently across the area. More than half of the residents are renters, the seat includes five public housing towers, and there is significant community housing and homelessness throughout the electorate. Young families especially are under pressure, with many spending more than 30% of their income on mortgage repayments, putting them in financial strain. Our community engagement strategy and these tactics were built with these groups in mind– the people most excluded from the current economic settlement, who often have low expectations of politics yet stand to gain the most from Greens policies.

Public Housing Outreach

The way the Victorian government has systematically lowered expectations on housing is crystal clear in its plan to demolish Melbourne’s public housing towers.

Under this proposal, all 44 public housing high-rise towers across Victoria would be torn down, the majority of the land privatised, and public housing replaced with community housing. More than 10,000 residents would be displaced, at the height of a housing crisis that has left over 120,000 people on the waiting list and 30,000 people homeless on any given night.

Since the announcement, there has been a massive effort to fight the demolitions across the community. With five of these towers in Macnamara, we focused on engaging and supporting the communities most directly impacted in our local area. 

Our first campaign centred on a petition to the Victorian Parliament calling for an inquiry into the government’s demolition plan. Working with community leaders at Park Towers in Albert Park, we hosted free BBQs and morning tea to chat to residents about their concerns, and to circulate this petition.

Once the inquiry was established by our Greens state MP team, we shifted focus to ensuring residents’ voices were heard in the inquiry. We organised submission-writing workshops in four of the five towers, flyering every apartment and bringing laptops, bagels, fruit and coffee to make the process as accessible as possible to residents. We also ensured there were language translators. More than 50 residents were supported to draft submissions sharing their lived experiences and the importance of public housing in their lives.

These community organising efforts created strong connections. Many residents later greeted us at polling stations with hugs and thanks, and we’ve continued to coordinate with the State MP team to make sure they get to speak in inquiry hearings.

Free Community Meals

Taking the example of Max Chandler-Mather’s work in Griffith, the Macnamara campaign also ran free community meals in the electorate. Meeting people’s material needs is one of the most direct ways to show what politics can and should do. In Southbank, where high-rise apartments make doorknocking difficult and many residents feel disconnected, we launched free community meals to cut through isolation and rising cost-of-living pressures. We used these dinners to meet locals, create in-person touchpoints and share our policies. 

While we are fighting for real policy changes to address the cost of living, like breaking up the supermarket duopoly to increase competition and drive down prices, freeze and cap rent increases, and making sure big corporations are paying their fair share in tax, we also need to provide practical assistance like free meals to local residents who are doing it tough. 

Over four weeks, we ran six barbecues in local parks, each advertised with flyers, posters, and Facebook groups. Some events drew more than 100 people. We found that starting conversations with a clear pitch, something like: “We’re here because we have been told that lots of people in our community are feeling the pinch from the cost-of-living crisis and feeling a lack of community in apartments”  also helped to frame why we were there. 

Not every event was smooth. We found turnout was weather-dependent, and high-rise mailrooms made promotion tricky. But each meal created ways to connect with people, and chatting over a meal was extremely successful. We shared posters for locals to put up in their lifts and common areas; materials for letterboxing of locked mailrooms, and surveys and petitions to be distributed for phone number acquisition. 

On Halloween in Elwood, we paired a community BBQ with trick-or-treating, handing out dinner to kids and families along Foam Street. On hot days, we also handed out icy poles and water and different places around the electorate. These pop-ups can easily be adapted to any location and need!

We also ran a free community fun day in St Kilda, with live music, lots of games, facepainting, a BBQ, icy poles and fruit.

By connecting those practical acts to broader political demands (rent caps, breaking up supermarket duopoly, free childcare), we were attempting to show people that politics can be both immediate and transformative. When someone leaves a free community meal with both dinner and a conversation about supermarket price-gouging, they hopefully don’t just feel cared for, they glimpse how politics could be different.

Childcare Centre Clothes Swaps

We ran free kids and baby clothes swaps at toy libraries and community spaces throughout the election period, and decided to keep them going since. They proved hugely useful for parents. 

Each event is designed to be warm and welcoming: cake, fruit, free coffee, activities for the kids, petitions to sign, and flyers about our free childcare policy. Around 15 or more people come along each time, leaving with new clothes, an easy connection to politics, and some snacks.

The swaps function as both practical support and a form of political education/policy communication. They linked everyday struggles like rising living costs directly to Green’s solutions, such as free, universal childcare. By making space for parents to rest, chat, and walk away with essentials, we showed how policy can be tangible, not abstract.

Young parents are often some of the most stretched and least engaged with politics – juggling sleepless nights, mortgages, and expensive childcare. The swaps gave them a rare breather and something materially useful, while also modelling the kind of society we want to build. They kept clothes out of landfill, redirected them to families who needed them, and have helped us connect more with incredible local groups like the Elwood, Stonnington, and Emerald Hill Toy Libraries.

Promotion is very straightforward and effective for these events. We contacted local childcare providers, who shared the events through their email lists; we also flyered, put up posters, and promoted through neighbourhood Facebook and buy-nothing groups. This reliable pipeline made it easy to bring parents along and keep the events well attended.

Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May and Macnamara candidate Sonya Semmens at a Clotheswap

Renters Rights Workshops

We ran two Renters’ Rights Workshops during the campaign, as more than 50% of our community are renters, and we know that too often renters face challenges that leave them feeling powerless. Whether it’s broken ovens that never get fixed, rentals that turn into saunas in summer, bathrooms covered in black mould, or constant rent hikes that push people out of our area. 

The workshops were designed to give renters a chance to learn more about their rights and how to better navigate the current system. We covered practical issues like how to challenge a rent increase, what to do if your landlord won’t make repairs, and the current regulations around heating. These sessions were an essential way of not only helping people, but they opened up space for discussion, helping people begin to see the individual issues they face as part of something more systemic, and to connect those experiences to collective political action. 

Importantly, these workshops were a way to materially improve people’s lives while connecting their immediate concerns (like the broken oven in their rental) with a broader political vision (rent freezes and investment in public housing). Lots of people thanked us for running the sessions, and they were even mentioned in both the state Prahran and federal Macnamara tally rooms, showing that the impact was noticed.

The workshops were highly targeted to our base, and people really knew that they were happening. They also helped to strengthen our relationships with other important local organisations like RAHU, Tenants Victoria, and Southside Justice, who helped us run the sessions. It also strengthened our relationship with these organisations as we were all working towards the same goals.

Post Election

Despite running one of the largest field campaigns in Greens history and putting left-populist strategies into practice – free meals, mutual aid, renters workshops, public housing outreach – our vote in Macnamara went backwards. That forces us to ask tough questions, and the inter-election period is an important opportunity to interrogate our strategies. How do we ensure that community work translates into electoral power? What constituencies do we need to build and sustain power in if we are serious about transforming politics? 

In 2016 we came within a whisker, in 2019 we slid backwards, in 2022 we were less than 300 votes from winning, and in 2025 we lost ground. What will the 27/28 election hold? Hopefully the opportunity to continue to build on the community engagement tactics outlined in this article. We have been deeply interrogating this set back, but there are still things we don’t know. We are curious if the census will tell us if people were priced out of the inner south and have been forced to move to the suburbs? The impact of our strong stance on Gaza in a community with a large number of Jewish people? Being outspent? Was Josh Burns given a platform we couldn’t compete with? What was the full impact of Advance? 

We believe these tactics are worth sharing, and we hope they contribute to a broader discussion about how we grow, where we focus, and what it will take to win.

Regardless of our result, a heartening outcome of the election campaign is that many people are keen to continue to organise and campaign in the community. We think this is in part because of the strong community we embedded in every aspect of the campaign. 

We have  maintained the momentum and massive people power that we built during the federal election to oppose our local council’s plan to (initially) fine homeless people, which then got downgraded to breaking up encampments. We have organised stalls, submitted an open letter and worked with local allied organisations to ensure that Council does not introduce “No Encampment Zones”.  We know that these punitive measures won’t solve homelessness, they’ll just push people further into crisis and may even breach human rights.  No to “encampment zones” and yes to real solutions.

Long term, we argue in favour of the Greens transitioning from campaign-based election strategies to establishing an ongoing movement that actively engages with, and advocates for communities – offering mutual support, organising community events and fighting with our communities in and outside of Parliament right across the country. We know this work is resource-intensive. It requires leaders with deep community connections, and it should be backed and actively fronted by our MPs, who have both the salaries and the platforms to support serious community engagement strategies.

In a period of civil society collapse, where politics no longer happens through unions, churches, sports groups and community organisations in the way that it used to, it is more important than ever that we bring politics back onto our streets, into our parks, and into our community. 

Our task is not only to win elections, but to raise expectations: to show that politics should deliver more than band-aid fixes, and that ordinary people deserve a really good life. This won’t happen overnight, but we have to begin by meeting people where they are at, doing politics together, and building community.

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Angelica Di Camillo is an environmental engineer, campaigner, and pilates teacher. She was the Greens candidate for the 2025 Prahran by-election, where she campaigned to end unlimited rent increases, cheaper groceries through capped prices, 50 cent public transport, real climate action with no more coal and gas, and saving public housing. Angelica is deeply committed to embedding community work into everything the Greens do. Her approach to politics is grounded in the belief that change is built from the ground up, through community organising together for a fairer, more sustainable future. As a young person living in St Kilda East, Angelica has seen firsthand how rising costs and climate inaction are shaping her generation’s future.

Luci Nicholson is an organiser and political strategist. She has worked with the Greens across federal, state, and local elections, and in parliamentary offices linking community campaigns and grassroots organising with parliamentary work. Beyond the Greens, she has organised in both environmental and union movements for economic and climate justice. She is currently completing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics to deepen her understanding of how political choices shape economic futures – from the climate crisis to inequality in housing and secure work. Luci believes the economic and democratic crises we face are inseparable, and she is passionate about building the Greens into a mass party capable of delivering real economic transformations that put people and the planet first.

Featured images courtesy of Angelica Di Camillo and Luci Nicholson.