The Tasmanian election in March created history. For the first time the Greens polled over 20% of the vote in a state wide lower house election and as a result Australia has its first Greens Minister in the new ALP/Greens government.

While the media wallowed in superficial explanations – the Greens had an ‘articulate and electable leader’ and appealed to the mythical ‘middle ground’ they completely ignored the impact of the third party ‘Our Common Ground’ campaign run by Environment Tasmania and The Wilderness Society (ET/TWS) and other community organisations.

In doing so they failed to understand the strategy behind the first environment campaign since the WA Election in 2001 that has influenced the outcome of an election. Before that you have to go back to the 1990 Federal Election. In between times environmental election campaigns have generally failed to gain traction or worse backfired harming the party supporting the environment. Comments »

There’s an old saying spin doctors are like poisoners – you can have successful poisoners and you can have famous poisoners, but you can’t have successful, famous poisoners.

For this reason, it’s rare for spin-doctors to win awards, but we are proud to say that last night EMC’s ‘Keep Our Cops‘ campaign, created for the NSW Police Association, was awarded the ACTU’s communications strategy of the year.

In many ways, Keep Our Cops is a fairly standard online campaign – many companies build them these days, incorporating online actions with real world events, hosing video, personal stories and email activism tools.
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