Editorial: introducing the Promise Tracker
Check out the promise tracker.
At the recent student elections, the two main tickets vying for office — Stand Up! and More! — both started the week handing out How-To-Vote pamphlets festooned with competing (although, in the cold light of morning, quite similar) claims about what they would do if you gave them your vote. Pamphlets from other tickets did the same, to varying degrees.
At one point in the week, More! upped the ante, publishing on its Facebook page a twenty page document, entitled “More! 2016 Election Policy” and featuring no fewer than 178 individual bullet points.
More!, as we reported, won the election convincingly — resulting in our headline “No excuses if they fuck it up”.
In that vein, in 2017, Parkville Station will track each promise made during the election online and in print. We will do this for all four tickets that won Officebearer positions — More!, Activate, Independent Media and the Biggest Blackest Ticket — but due to their overwhelming win, More! will be in the hot seat the most.
The main driver for embarking on this endeavour is this: holding student politicians accountable for the tall tales they tell during elections has historically been done very poorly. It’s virtually a (sometimes unfair) trope: student politicians are very very visible for one week of the year (election week) and then are no-where to be seen every other week of the year.
(It should be noted that one of More!’s election promises — one we intend to track — is to produce a promise tracker of their own. We’d claim that they stole the idea from us, but of course, we stole the idea from the ABC, who in turn took it from the public domain.)
Let’s be clear: we think that bringing a clear policy to an election is a good thing, and we don’t want to discourage a policy document like More!’s laudable (if quixotic) attempt. If Team A goes to an election saying “We stand for accountability”, and Team B goes to an election saying “We will improve accountability by doing X, Y and Z”, then we think Team B is doing a better job (even if they only manage to do X and Y).
(We’re intentionally saying “Team A” and “Team B” rather than naming names because, as discussed below, all tickets made promises that were both vague and specific.)
But we also think that if you go to people and say “vote for me, I’ll give you the Earth and Moon and a diamond car with platinum wheels”, then we damn well expect something like it—and you’re absolutely doing students a disservice if you conveniently forget about your promise for 51 weeks, and wheel it back out for the next election.
Methodology
Anyway, we thought we’d take this opportunity to explain exactly what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it.
We’ve decided that More!, Activate, Independent Media and the Biggest Blackest Ticket won officebearer spots (and, in most cases, majorities on relevant committees) and so should be held accountable for what they’ve said they’ll do. Other tickets also won positions but, while we imagine they will push for what they promised to do, we’re happy to accept “we didn’t win the election” as a good reason not to achieve them.
In order to work out what the tickets actually promised, we’ve referred to their published campaign material. This means their official policy statements, their how-to-vote pamphlets, and their websites and social media. We also asked those four tickets if there was anything else they’d like on the list; there were no takers for that option.
More!, with their infamous 178-point plan, dominate the list, so it’s worth spending a bit of time on how we treated their policy promises. We have distilled them further than they did — for example, we consider something like “We’ll work over the long term for more parking racks for your bike and cheaper parking for your car” to be two promises, rather than one, each individually assessable for completion or otherwise.
We also consider the timeframe over which something is to be promised: if something will happen over the next three years, it’s not a broken promise if it’s not done by the end of 2017 (although we’d be inclined to look at it sceptically if no progress had been made). Where a timeframe isn’t given, we’re assuming that means by the end of the 2017 term of office.
When assessing particular promises, the idea is to provide a concise and coherent analysis of what was promised contrasted against what was done — to provide you, the reader, with enough information to come to a decision about the status of a promise (for example, a promise might not be met, but you might think the excuse you’re given is good enough).
However, we do intend to summarise the state of all promises in a few separate categories:
- not started — as far as we know, no action has been taken
- in progress — things are happening, people are talking, cogs are whirring
- stalled — things were happening, but no real progress is made over a timeframe reasonable for delivering the promise
- delivered — they said they’d do it, and they did (something like) it
- delivered late — they did it, but they were slow (as usual, they lose 10% per academic day)
- broken — they said they’d do it, but they didn’t
- tracking — the opportunity hasn’t arisen to break or deliver this promise, so we’re just keeping an eye on it
This summary will make it possible to check, at a glance, how things are going, but it’s important to understand the limitations. For example, promises can be of vastly different scope and difficulty.To promise to examine live broadcasting the Students’ Council, run a campaign to encourage people to start clubs, and set up a tax help, workplace rights and budget advice program, is to promise three separate things. We imagine that achieving the first should take hours, whereas the last would be a substantial accomplishment in its own right.
Lastly, we reserve the right to totally and without warning change our methodology (particularly if someone tries to game it). If we do, we’ll write about what the new methodology is and why we’ve adopted it. That’s our only promise.