Pondering contacting local Australian politicians

[sqbr]

This post on tumblr suggested contacting local politicians whenever you're in the mood to shout at someone online for being wrong on the internet, and it occurred to me that might actually work for me, if only as a way to divert my occasional FIGHT ME mood away from getting me in trouble. I've tried contacting politicians before when I was feeling like Being Productive and it felt overwhelming and depressing.

I haven't actually done it yet but I looked up some information! So I'll summarise what I've found here for anyone who might find it useful, further advice/info definitely appreciated!

I found my local Federal and State MPs and their websites by looking up my suburb on Wikipedia.

I plugged the Federal MP into They Vote For You which keeps track of how politicians vote in parliament. Except Labor politicians never vote against official party policy (outside of rare free votes), and Australian politicians of any party almost always follow the official party line, so it's not actually very useful information. (Except for about Independents, I guess)

I'm not aware of any easy way to know how the state MP has voted but sounds like it's not worth looking into anyway.

So, there goes the idea of affecting how they vote. But it might be possible to affect what they advocate for in unrecorded backroom discussions about what official policy should be.

I plugged some likely seeming terms into google, I've included a few specific examples to steal ideas from, but I haven't looked into whether I actually agree with these specific policies or if they're out of date etc.

General guides:

• How to Write an Effective Letter to your MP
  
• Tips for calling MPs

Specific templates:

• A refugee program called CRISP
  
• Covid-19 response for people seeking asylum and refugees
  
• Contact your MP about the NDIS
  
• Supporting Palestine, also suggests other relevant politicians to contact