Go Greener, Australia

A while back I mentioned the Smart and Green campaign against the increased price of buying renewable electricity in WA from Synergy. The price had risen to 18.4 cents per kilowatt hour compared to only 13.94c/kwh for energy from coal and gas plants. Eloise Dortch and Jasmine Horobin organised a letter-writing campaign, arranged for Synergy’s customers to be interviewed in local papers, and met with Synergy to see if they could stop the price increase. As it turned out, the price rise had to stay, but the campaign has certainly raised the profile of renewable power issues in WA. I’ve never started my own campaign before, and asked Eloise more about it.

Why did you decide to start the Smart and Green campaign? Had you done anything like this before?

No, I’d never done anything like this before. While working as a newspaper reporter, I had always steered clear of ‘showing my colours’ as someone having strong opinions on any one issue. That was simply a practical thing to do since I was always interviewing people from various sides of an issue. Since my teens I had been involved in passive forms of activism, if that makes sense, such as joining the odd protest march, donating or becoming a member of various ‘green’ organisations and signing petitions.

Jasmine and I decided to start the campaign because we were both really cross about the issue. Synergy’s NaturalPower customers were already paying more to buy renewable electricity at a time when conventional coal-fired electricity in WA was clearly under-priced. Since the price of conventional electricity for small business and households in WA is to remain capped until 2009 it seemed insane and completely regressive in terms of action on climate change that only NaturalPower and SmartPower were experiencing a price hike based on inflation.

How did you decide on your tactics?

This was a process of evolution. Very early on, Jasmine and I recognised the need to be transparent and open in our dealings with anyone who came into contact with our campaign. An initial step was to see if any other group planned to take action and to see whether we could add value to their activities or whether we would be doubling up. We also talked to just about everyone we could think of who understood WA electricity policy or could add to our understanding of the issues. Although the two of us had previously worked on an energy policy document for WA as part of a university assignment, there was still aspects of the WA electricity industry we had trouble getting our heads around. So we went to conferences, made a lot of phone calls and met a lot of people. We found most people were deeply annoyed about the decision but no one was taking action on it.

The next step was to write proforma letters to be sent to Synergy’s managing director and to State MPs, to test the instructions we developed for emailing these and then to write the covering email that would be sent to all the people we hoped would join our campaign. We double-checked and tested this a few times by forwarding it to different email accounts in our names. Having two heads for all of this helped! We then sent out the first wave of emails to friends and family, waited a few days to see if we had stuffed up in anyway and then began expanding the network of people we emailed. As we thought of more contacts, we kept emailing it out.

We asked people to cc the proforma letters they sent to Synergy and their MPs to a special ‘SmartandGreen’ email account we had set up so that we could keep track of the rate of participation. We also invited people to send us their feedback. Some people were critical of our campaign because they said it would put more people off buying ‘green’ electricity. We responded to each email with our thoughts about such issues.

What kind of response did you get from the public, and from Synergy?

Synergy responded pretty quickly – by the end of the campaign in October/November – its managing director, Jim Mitchell, had received 48 emails from our campaign direct to his email in-box. Synergy’s head of corporate relations, Andrew Gaspar, developed a standard letter which Synergy sent to the campaign participants – however many people, of their own accord replied to this, thus further engaging Synergy on the issue. Meanwhile, certain MPs, most of whom happened to be Labor and thus in Government, started to receive multiple letters from their constituents and we were copied in on their responses which were mainly promises to investigate the matter. In total, 36 letters were sent to 13 MPs that we know of.

After less than three weeks, we were confident that we had captured Synergy’s attention, so I called Andrew Gaspar who, as I was about to suggest a meeting, took the words out of my mouth. He tried to organise to have Jim Mitchell present but as it was, we met with Andrew and two senior members of their marketing team for just over an hour.

Coming out of the meeting, we felt there had been some losses and some gains. Prior to the meeting, we had sent a detailed submission to Synergy stating our position and setting out six feasible initiatives that we felt would address some of inequity and negative impacts of the price rise (these were initiatives we had thoroughly researched by talking to numerous people in government and the energy industry). The Synergy staff seemed interested in some of our suggestions and dismissive of others. Later we realised that only one of the three staff present was buying renewable electricity although all three had talked about their “passion” for promoting it!

One of our key concerns leaving the meeting was that Synergy planned to launch a major advertising campaign for ‘green’ electricity but seemed intent on promoting EasyGreen block-purchase payments to the detriment of NaturalPower proportion-of-use payments, which are regarded as better by www.greenelectritywatch.org.au. Consequently, we wrote a detailed submission to Energy Minister Fran Logan asking him to ensure NaturalPower continued to be promoted. Later, we met with his senior policy advisor Brett Sadler.

Do you think it was worthwhile, even though the price rise had to stay?

Absolutely! It did become clear, even before our meeting with Synergy, that the State Government would not change its decision to allow the price rise. We will never know for sure how influential some of the other points we made were but for one thing, Synergy has continued to promote NaturalPower alongside EasyGreen in its recent campaign (and Fran Logan’s advisor, Mr Sadler, told us that the Minister had told Synergy it must do this). In addition, while Synergy’s marketing staff seemed dismissive of our suggestion that people should only be eligible to enter the annual Christmas lights competition that Synergy sponsors if they bought renewable electricity, I notice recently that they have brought a renewable electricity component into the event, by making it part of the prizes for the winners.

Probably more important – but impossible to measure – is the fact our campaign participants engaged Synergy and their MPs on this issue and forced them to realise that the public does care greatly about this issue. The number of people who joined our campaign is not particularly high but we are convinced that the letters sent ensured both Synergy and the State Government were enough to make them realise the depth of feeling.

For good measure, we also helped to instigate six articles in different local Community Group newspapers – scoring several front pages – by identifying residents in each newspaper’s area that were willing to be and photographed and quoted in an article about this issue. I liaised with staff at Community on arranging these interviews and to their credit, the editorial staff at these papers took up the issue.

What did you learn from the experience? Would you do anything differently next time?

A lot! An unexpected benefit, from a personal view, was the wide number of people we met and the opportunities that arose, largely as a result (Jasmine and I are now both involved in an active way environmental and conservation groups). While neither of us was particularly shy to begin with, I think the experience was also a great confidence-builder because for both of us, it was new ground.

While there are not many things about the way we conducted this campaign that we regret, one area for improvement would be finding more networks to send the original email to. We headed the original email with a request for people to forward it on and most of the campaign participants turned out to be people neither of us knew personally, so this worked to a degree. However there might be ways we could have reached more people.

It might also have been beneficial if we instigated the media coverage earlier on in the campaign, so that it supported the early waves of our letter going out and added further weight to the impact of the letter campaign. However, organising all of this took time – and since I was a full-time worker and part-time student and Jasmine was in a similar situation – there was only so much we could do at once.

Finally, one thing that both of us took away from this experience – and which we will treasure – is the way people who participated in the campaign took up the issue themselves. We never asked people to be proactive and engage in ongoing discourse with Synergy or their MP about the issue, yet they did – and wrote eloquently and effectively about the matter. Likewise, their comments to the newspapers were similarly impressive. Some participants told us that they had never written to their MP before – and yet now they intended to do so more often. The experience has taught me not to underestimate the level of motivation that exists ‘out there’ in the community and the potential for one or two individuals to instigate collective action.

Eloise and Jasmine have written up some tips for starting your own environmental campaign, and dealing with the media, which I’ll post tomorrow. If you’re interested in hearing more details of what they did, they have also written a full report up on their experiences - you can email them at smartandgreen@gmail.com if you’d like a copy of the report or would like more information.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 9:00 am and is filed under activism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.