Australians do not normally take to the streets en masse, filling town squares with fist-shaking citizens who bring down governments. But grassroots power is real.
GetUp! is the best-known practitioner of grassroots citizen power, although its model of online petitions - with the occasional public meeting or demo - is essentially passive participation.
Amanda Tattersall, the author of Power in Coalition, has been working to build a coalition of religious groups, unions, community, environmental and multicultural organisations, designed to regenerate civil society.
''There will always be a need for citizens to exercise their creative expression to help themselves and to challenge major centres of power in our society,'' she told the Herald.
This is especially so in Sydney, which she says is ''the major site of political and economic power in Australia''.
Dr Tattersall, who researched citizen organising for her doctorate at Cornell and Sydney universities, said that while mass street marches had their appeal, they often failed. In 2003, she watched record numbers of people - about 500,000 around Australia - march to stop the Howard government taking Australia into the war in Iraq. ''The pollies in power ignored it,'' she said.
Far more effective, she says, was a public education campaign in NSW, which brought the Teachers Federation together with parent groups and enlisted a widely acknowledged expert, Professor Tony Vinson, to lobby for more funding. He ran an independent inquiry into the needs of public education, broadening the campaign beyond a wages push for teachers or a fight over class sizes.
The coalition succeeded in winning an extra $250 million in funding - and smaller class sizes. ''That was a tangible grassroots victory,'' said Dr Tattersall.
One example of effective citizen power is Nick Allardice and his team at the Oaktree Foundation, who have built an organisation of 66,000 young people. It aims to end world hunger and privation through the ''Make Poverty History'' campaign.
The key objective is to get the federal government to meet the United Nations Millennium Development goal of allocating 0.7per cent of gross domestic product to foreign aid. Allardice, who is the organisation's general manager, says Australia is on target to reach 0.5per cent by 2016.
The Oaktree model differs from the conventional - but not necessarily unsuccessful - template of overseas aid organisations, such as Oxfam and World Vision, which focuses on fund-raising and direct development work.
''We're focused on mass mobilisation,'' says Allardice. ''Oaktree is a specific opportunity for young Australians to live out their commitment to social justice.''
The easy stuff, says Allardice, is members signing web-based petitions and mass emails. ''At the broadest level our members engage online with advocacy,'' he says.
But Oaktree volunteers aim to become, in Allardice's words, ''absolute nuisances'' in the halls of power, personally lobbying MPs and other decision-makers.
At the 2010 election, volunteers spent five days in key marginal seats highlighting the fight against extreme poverty by doorknocking and campaigning at the same time as the major party candidates. The lobbying effort ended in Canberra when 1200 volunteers met 143 MPs at a breakfast in Parliament House.
''It was targeted community engagement, face-to-face,'' says Allardice. ''The aim is to make an absolute nuisance around the MPs, so that on issues you're passionate about, they just do not shut up.''
Email a friend