Yeah, so we're bringing together today people from local community groups all around Brisbane.
The key thing with this is for you to be relaxed and find your own voice. So you'll adapt the
questions in a way that is most suitable to you and in a way that you feel comfortable
communicating those questions and that's totally fine.
The training days have been all about working with local community groups to build their skills
and confidence to go out and talk to people in their communities.
Do you have a goal to have 20,000 conversations about renewable energy between now and the end of May?
An extra challenge, as Lindsay was saying before, is to feel like you're up for it to split up
and that way you can double your impact.
If you decide to split up it's probably good to jump either from different sides of the road
or to jump each other down the road.
So what we're about to do now is go out and have a trail run of that to get out and hear
what people in our community think about renewable energy.
On we go!
I love doing the door knocking and whenever we ran out of time because we had an hour
and a half as a set time or we were meeting back to tally up the results I always wanted
to keep going. It was such a shame to finish.
Because I had feedback even from people that were saying this is the best door knocking
we've ever had. I couldn't believe that you weren't trying to sell us anything,
you weren't trying to talk us into anything, you just wanted to listen to what we had to say.
I think it gave me a sense of hope, like the feel that something, because it seems to me
that there's very little done in Australia compared with some European countries for example
and a sense of something's actually happening here at a grassroots level.
Yes, that gave me hope.
So it's really important that us in the community who do care about these issues can go out
and speak face to face as one community member to another.
I think often people just need to be asked. Most people want to do something that's worthwhile
and sometimes they're just looking for the opportunity.
So asking people is really important.
Approaching your friends or family is a great way to get others involved in what you're working on.
There's two real objectives for the door knocking and first of all it was to build the movement
for strong support for renewable energy but the second objective of the campaign
and this is what groups really could benefit from was to build local support for their groups as well.
Well I was amazed at how many people actually really care about what's happening to our world.
I just got two folks there. They've been living in this area for a couple of years.
This woman, Japan was all on her mind. She's just going, nuclear's not safe, we just need renewables.
It just makes sense. It's great. She's really, really clear.
What else do they say?
This is all about sustainability. We need to be more focused on sustainability.
It's important because we need to get to a sustainable future.
We need to have a secure energy supply and we need to do it through renewables
so we need to make sure that we can use it 24-7, 365 days of the year
and that's been proven through the Beyond Zero emissions research that we can do that.
We've got the technology there and we need to do it in such a way that it includes everybody
and that the people get what they want which is renewable power.
The message was just do it and she really wanted Kevin Rudd to hear that.
So you're not just doorknocking and saying we want your opinion, then we're going to take it to politicians
to get them to respond but we want to bring you the results back as a local issue.
This is what your NP had to say about your views and that way we were able to build a local supporter base
where people were interested in local results, local data and to see how they were being represented by their politicians.
So that was great, gave me my email contact, wanted to know what Kevin Rudd says on this.
So we'll be letting you know once we talk to Rudd.
We had just totally positive responses.
We did have a social scientist who said, look I don't mean to be negative but as a social scientist
these questions are a little bit leading which we know, we know that they're leading
because what they really are about is a conversation starter
Some amazing conversations, we've got a talk for hours with every single person.
We picked one guy that had a 2.1 KV solar system on his roof anyway
an older guy and we slightly got into the same meeting next Thursday night for ADO
and the other lady whose son is part of the Queensland Youth Coalition Alliance
knows Alicia, all those people from the Blue House.
And they're preparing for Earth Hour next week so that was all very good.
We knocked on five doors and we knocked on six doors and got five people really happy to answer.
Everybody else is really keen to talk and that's why we're probably one of the last back
because we wanted to keep going.
People were really positive and I ended up doing three responses that were positive.
Other people didn't want to have a part of it, they just said no thank you and shut the door
but you just move on to the next house and then you find some welcoming people that are very happy to respond.
It wasn't challenging, I think it's a prominent issue that everyone wants to talk about.
Actually it was a little cursing, it was a little cursing.
We're a team, we're a good team.
So about ten minutes was the average conversation.
If we were really quick, if people just wanted to answer yes or no
but still with a smile on their face for five minutes.
You can see he didn't quite get what was about so I just said well we're from 100% Renewables
and we're just looking at trying to promote Renewables in Australia.
And he said oh yeah, fine.
The same thing, all that was laptop there on the door, did up the website, oh right,
he called me and put his laptop down and shouted yeah, young and funky guy.
We had some people asking us should we go out and say we're from the 100% Renewable campaign
and my feeling is actually for most of us it's better to say the local groups that we're from
because that's what gives us legitimacy in our own communities
and we can say we're doing this as part of a national campaign called 100% Renewable.
And that's a part of the campaign, the network of local groups known by your neighbours and things like that.
So it's done a really great job of building up our network and talking to people in the streets,
got people in my street on the supporters list now.
I think it's like the sum of the parts is greater than the individual people in it
because we create something bigger and better because each person brings even their own magic to a group
but in the process they create something new and very beautiful.
