“Many media commentators do not see much of the real campaign these days,” says the former national director of the Liberal Party, Lynton Crosby. “It does not take place on TV, on radio, or even in the newspapers. It is the local activity on the ground that counts. Letters to voters, postcards, newsletters, telephone canvassing...”

A team of volunteers in marginal seats around Victoria has been collecting direct mail material and forwarding it to us so we can get a sense of this “real campaign.” So far, we’ve received material from the first three weeks of the election campaign. Not surprisingly, the volume of material - although it varies from electorate to electorate - has not been enormous. At this stage the Liberal Party has significantly out-mailed Labor, both in the cost and number of brochures reaching households.

As Lynton Crosby says, the emphasis is on the local. In Kilsyth, for example, a letter from Labor’s Dympna Beard lists a series of local projects - including Croydon’s “new $5.1 million Police Station” and a $47 million upgrade of Maroondah Hospital - while her Liberal opponent, David Hodgett, promises projects including $150,000 for CCTV cameras “to cut down on vandalism and petty crime in Mooroolbark” and $4,544,948 - a very precise figure! - for local bridges and roads.

In Morwell, the message from sitting Labor MP Brendan Jenkins, is also local, but he devotes an unusually long letter to the government’s support for the Gippsland Water Factory and his own role in securing benefits for the local community. The message here is that a sitting member whose party is likely to remain in power is in a position to influence policy to the benefit of the local electorate. The same message comes through in other marginals.

Running alongside the local detail are brochures appearing across all marginal electorates. From the Liberals, the theme of an eight-page brochure is “Let’s Get Victoria Moving Again” - a slogan that seems to hark back to the dominant theme of the 1992 election. The unusual level of detail in this brochure (it’s hard to imagine too many voters reading it right through) is probably designed to convey a conviction that the Liberals have developed serious policies and are ready to govern. Ted Bailleau - in outdoor gear, hand pointing into the distance - appears on each page.

“Waste” is the other big theme in the Liberal material. A brochure distributed in many electorates - clearly inspired by the federal party’s visually arresting interest rate “slide rule” at the 2004 election - is in the shape of a wallet. Headlined “$494.00. It’s Your Money,” it claims that this is the amount, per taxpayer, spent by the Bracks government on “self-promotion and budget blow-outs.”News clipping and quotes from the media - overwhelmingly from the Herald Sun - feature in this leaflet and are a common feature across most of the Liberal material.

From Labor, the brochures are generally fewer and smaller, with a few notable exceptions. Typical is a postcard-sized leaflet from the state member for Bayswater, Peter Lockwood, which tells us that “Peter Lockwood and Steve Bracks are standing up for working families” and concentrates on achievements since 1999 rather than policy plans. But Dick Wynne, the Labor member for Richmond, has issued a much more arresting four-page colour brochure featuring Labor achievements in his electorate. This brochure also seems to have been inspired by the “Local Achievements and Strong Plans for Our Areas” brochure used in many electorates by the Liberals during the 2004 federal campaign. And Bob Stensholt in Burwood has letterboxed a DVD - received by one of our collectors - featuring footage of the premier and the local member extolling Labor's virtues.

Down in Southern Metropolitan Region the upper and lower house Labor MPs and candidates have taken a different approach, getting together to set up a sophisticated website, www.yourlaborteam.org, and developed some unusually oblique materials. A series of beautifully designed postcards (a contrast to the general run of election material produced by all the parties) uses quotes from H.L. Mencken, Decca Records, the Chairman of IBM and a French physiologist to underline the differences between Labor and its opponents.

The person behind this stylish material is probably the upper house candidate Evan Thornley, a former internet entrepreneur who now runs Pluto Press and is active in the Fabian Society. The material is intriguing but clearly pitched at a segment of these well-heeled inner south-eastern electorates - and may well be targeted to people who the campaign manager see as being most receptive to this approach.

Both the Liberals and the Nationals are running negative campaigns against the Greens, both via the media and direct mail. A new brochure, first spotted in this final week of the campaign, warns that the Greens “are likely to win control of the Upper House” and that their policies on drugs, the economy and property “will have a drastic effect on all Victorians.” But you’ll find no evidence in the brochure that the Greens’ policies will have any impact at all on property - unless you count the proposal to increase charges on commercial carparks. And unless you read the fine print you won’t know it’s from the Liberal Party.

For the Nationals, the threat of the Greens is more of a life or death matter, and their material dwells on the sharp differences between the two parties. “While the Nationals have commonsense, practical, family orientated policies, the Greens want to decriminalise drug use, ban recreational hunting, close down Gippsland industries and remove jobs,” according to a brochure from Jim King and Peter Hall, upper and lower house Nationals candidates.

None of this - nor the attacks on the Greens from Family First and the Shooters Party - is likely to do too much damage to the Green vote, though it might make supporters of the Nationals, Family First and the Shooters vote for their usual party with more enthusiasm.

Material from the Greens has been relatively low-key. In inner urban electorates, the party’s brochures stress two main themes: public transport and the achievements of Green councillors in local government.

It’s difficult to tell how much targeting is going on within electorates. We know that the two parties are increasingly using sophisticated databases to store information about individual voters - information gathered within electorate offices from phone and mail contact with the sitting member, local media and other sources. As a former Liberal Party staff member, Christian Kerr, has said, “Voters who phone or write to their members of parliament have no idea they are effectively phoning up the direct mail offices.”

On our evidence, the computer only seems to be choosing between families and others when it decides which letter to send to individuals. In Melbourne, for example, voters seem to be receiving either a letter headed “Standing Up for Local Working Families” or one headed “Getting Results for Our Area” from Labor’s Bronwyn Pike. But we would need hundreds of volunteers collecting material in a single electorate to get a real sense of how the databases are being used.

No one outside the political parties knows exactly how much they each spend on direct mail material during election campaigns. After the last federal election, “industry sources” told the Australian Financial Review that Labor and the Liberals had each spent about $5 million on direct mail - which was around half the amount the Liberals had spent on TV, radio, newspapers and cinema, and over half what Labor had spent on those media.

In this election, the Liberals are undoubtedly outspending Labor on letters and brochures - by perhaps two to one - which might reflect the fact that they have less money to spend on the more expensive options of radio, TV and newspapers.