“If you took everything that I had just said and turned it into one little thing,this is what you should write down and remember forever so you can tell your kids,tell your grandkids,tell your nephews and nieces:that people vote based on how they feel.”
Advance runs the leading No campaign Fair Australia,which is aligned with the Coalition’s Indigenous Australians spokeswoman,Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.
Jacinta Price and husband Colin Lillie feature in a Fair Australia ad campaign.Credit:
Advance was started in 2018 as a conservative counterweight to GetUp and counts former prime minister Tony Abbott on its advisory board. It claims it has a 250,000-strong supporter base fighting “woke politicians and elitist activist groups … taking Aussies for a ride with their radical agenda”.
It is not suggested that either Price or Abbott endorses the coaching methods outlined in the training session run by Inglis.
Scripts used by Advance’s 10,000-strong network of phone campaigners show how they are taught not to introduce themselves as calling from “the No campaign”.
Instead,they are asked to sound as if they were concerned citizens associated with Fair Australia who “heard” the Voice would push for financial compensation for Aboriginal people.
“It’s been designed purely for soft voters. If we had put[No] in the opening line … that in itself will scare people,right?” Inglis told volunteers.
“It’s not from the ‘No campaign’ … Fair Australia’s soft,it’s calming.”
The script states:“I’ve also heard that some of the people who helped design the Voice proposal are campaigning to abolish Australia Day and want to use the Voice to push for compensation and reparations through a treaty. All of these things raised a few questions in my mind and made me wonder if there was more to it all than meets the eye”.
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Inglis told supporters that phone canvassing – using a tool called CallHub employed by successful campaigns in Europe and the United States – was integral to Advance’s efforts.
If 250 people attend a phone calling session,Inglis said,they could reach 15,000 so-called “soft” voters yet to make a firm decision.
Inglis,a former ACT Liberal staffer,said in the briefing that he had worked on state and federal election campaigns for about 12 years.
His briefing outlined Advance’s “three-wave plan” through Fair Australia to defeat the Voice.
The strategy was first deployed in autumn,when No campaigners started raising awareness of the Voice as an issue of concern.
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In winter,the conservative activists began talking about the “Voice of division”.
As referendum day nears,the Fair Australia campaign has begun discussing the consequences of voting Yes and asking Australians to act by rejecting the proposal.
A Fair Australia spokesman said the volunteer briefing was standard practice across all sides of politics and the campaign’s messaging reflected the actual concerns of voters.
“We make no apologies for our volunteers being as persuasive as they possibly can be,” he said.
“Every single volunteer is asked to identify themselves as calling from Fair Australia,and any suggestion to the contrary is a flat-out lie.
“Yes campaign supporters have nothing better to do but deceptively infiltrate our campaign and provide potentially illegal recordings to left-leaning news outlets. We will be referring the matter to the federal police and taking further advice.”
Price’s office was contacted to comment on Advance’s strategies.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s office declined to comment.