There’s been a lot of discussion lately about just what online strategies could be most effective for political parties in getting their message across to the voters. I’ve run across a lot of interesting views, and thought on them (in between reading chapters of HP7) so here’s a summary of major points.
Disclaimer: I’m not a member of any political party, but I do want the Liberal-National coalition to lose government, or at least lose control of the Senate.
Political parties in Australia don’t have to “get out the base” i.e. motivate them to turn up at the polling booth. The voters already have to turn up or face a fine - so the message isn’t about making them want to get out the door, it has to be tailored to where they’re actually going to put their mark, and tempt them into being an active supporter who volunteers time and money. Thus the recent efforts from pollies of all stripes to suddenly get themselves pages on the social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube, some more impressively than others.
So how do the high-profile parties in Australia (i.e. the parties who already have successfully elected federal parliamentarians) stack up in attracting the attention of the casual political websurfer, and how do they rate in funnelling them towards a firmer voting intention and maybe a donation of time and/or money?
All images below are taken directly from the websites of the parties, and are what you get if you make a 100 pixels wide thumbnail of the banner-logo image which highlights the party’s name. Some web-designers have obviously thought this through more than others (though none of them provide a handy little graphic widget that can be easily embedded in online content - why not?).
Need a majority, either alone or in coalition, of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives.
Liberal Party of Australia75 House MPs, 33 Senators
Fairly clean layout, poor navigation. Easy to sign up for e-newsletter/e-bulletin.
So. Much. Howard.
The content presentation is not welcoming, but they do make it easy to find out how to volunteer or donate money.
Australian Labor Party60 House MPs, 28 Senators
Excellent layout. Easy to navigate around the content. Easy to find the donate/join stuff. Easy to sign up for e-newsletter/e-bulletin.
But when your party’s face is Kevin Rudd, should your webpage really be that grey? Reassuring business that you’re not a raging red is one thing, but looking drab is quite another.
Australian Nationals12 House MPs, 5 Senators
Uncluttered, bright and friendly-looking site. Animated graphics and text annoy me, these aren’t too intrusive. Information is easy to find. The obligatory party face, Mark Vaile, is used to good effect.
No obvious link to e-newsletter/e-bulletin.
Need to block either LibNats or Labor gaining a majority of the 76 seats in the Senate. Would welcome any seats they might pick up in the House of Reps as well, of course.
Australian Democrats0 House Members, 4 Senators
The Democrats seem to have the only site which truly reaches out to an e-savvy readership. The information layout is so easy to navigate, their Senate Watch section in particular is exemplary, as it should be when it appears to be the major focus of their re-election campaigns. Easy links to e-newsletter/e-bulletin.
They have direct links on the front page to Lynn Allison’s YouTube channel - the only party whose website acknowledges the social networking flurry of recent weeks. The grassroots emphasis of the party is reflected with less elevation of a party “face”.
Australian Greens0 House MPs, 4 Senators
Crisp template, clear layout of content and navigation. Easy to find donate/volunteer/join, also easy to find main campaign points. Less emphasis on the Senate than the Dems, as the Greens push harder on running candidates for state legislatures and local councils whenever those elections arise. No link to e-newsletter/e-bulletin.
The Greens emphasise Bob Brown more than the Dems do any of their Senators, but it’s still at a much lower level than any of the government-seeking parties.
Family First,0 House MPs, 1 Senator
Outdated template with amateurish graphics (very annoying main page animation). Clear info layout, easy to navigate to areas of interest, not too much Steve Fielding. News releases are kept up to date, but very poor content turnover for getting out the buzz online: there is only one entry on the blog, from September 2006. No obvious link to any e-newsletter/e-bulletin.
All the party sites make it easy to find more information about donating, volunteering or joining the party. They’re not all so successful at making it easy to engage with the policies and candidates for those who are sympathisers but not yet firmly intentioned voters, and this is exactly the information needed to bump firm voters up into the donor/volunteer/member tier as well.
So far, although Howard, Rudd, Brown and various front benchers and Senators have MySpace pages and YouTube accounts, they seem to be treating the social network sites as if with asbestos gloves - there are links on the social sites to the main websites, but not vice versa, except for the Democrats. In one way, this is understandable as the point of having a presence on the social networking sites is to drive traffic to the main sites rather than vice versa, but it’s rather alienating for someone who’s been excited by what they see on MySpace or YouTube to come to a party site which seems to be hiding their presence on those networks as if they’re ashamed of slumming or something. It certainly doesn’t help generate material that inspires blog posts and thus blog discussions in the polblogging arena.
The parties, and MSM pundits, might well ask why they would want to generate blog discussions? For exactly the same reason they want to get speeches and interviews reported in the corporate media - propogation of talking points and getting the message out there to move people more deeply into identifying with your party than they currently do, and it will make them want to come to the party’s site to get material from the horse’s mouth. Anyone who comes back to the pollies’ sites regularly will be a talking-points repeating machine, just the same way that it works with people who watch/listen to the corporate media: the talking points seep in. Whether it’s in boozy chats on Fridays at the pub, in the work tea room waiting for the kettle to boil, or holding forth in online forums and blogs, the talking points are disseminated as we are seeing right now with the discussion about the US Democrats YouTube debate.
These discussions once they’re out there are beyond the parties’ control, which is probably why Australian parties seem lukewarm on online outreach and especially interactivity. The success of a site like GetUp in generating grassroots political activism shows why this regressive control paranoia is shortsighted. If your site has engaging content and easy interactivity to generate email forwards and blog commentary, then people will become motivated, so long as they are not rigidly bound around by antiquated notions of party oversight. Who will be the first Australian political party to fully embrace the role of reliable dynamic content supplier for interactive political discussions that they can’t control?
crossposted at Hoyden About Town
Got a hint for the greens bloke who was handing out how to votes in my area last time.
Dont tie your “greens not greed” banner to a tree and the other end to your new mercedes (Im not making this up), leaving it running with the air con on, while you sat in it and expected us poor punters to walk over to you.
If you do it again this year Im taking a photo.
Sorry to be O/T but if your going to hand election stuff out dont look like a dick.
Mole, the larger point about being careful how you look is always relevant in political outreach, but can we stick to examples of politicking online for this thread?
mole
I always carry several gold coins if I know I am going to pass a railway station that day. When the inevitable urchin jumps out thrusting a Green Left Weekly or pamphlet advertising Tariq Ali, I reflexively reach into my pocket, press some coin into their hand, and beg “please have a bath” before continuing on my errand.
Johnathon Edwards certainly showed how not to do “internet outreach” a few months ago.
But wouldn’t you need to be a political junky to look up official party websites? They are never going to say anything interesting.
Love the Family First logo - bishop’s mitre with bullet holes?
TT, a point or two. I’d call the search facility on a site is the most critical point for a casual websurfer. As such for my money the Greens, Liberals and Nationals get no-balled for not having a search field at all, Family First get a bye for using Google, and the ALP and Democrats have a decent crack, having functional but ugly search functions.
It’ll certainly not be Labor, as most of its State branches have official rules against individual candidates or Party units publishing material on the internet without Administrative Committee (or eqivalent) approval. I believe the same applies in most State Liberal and National branches.
I’m not sure there are any grounds to call GetUp a success. Apart from having zero successful campaigns to date, it’s a model of political activism assuming both voluntary voting and widespread computer literacy amongst MPs. I know of too many pollies who have their staff check their email for them and print out the ‘important’ ones to idealise GetUp.
A bigger question is; why should Parties take it upon themselves to supply interactive political discussion? It preceded both their existence and the internet’s existence. The extent to which they, their representatives, and their candidates, want to get wise is a matter for them.
You hit the nail on the head - the big parties are treating Poliics 2.0 with asbestos gloves. The Greens are promising more of the quick-and-nimble ‘Howard & Rudd in Bed’ on YouTube. And the first US prez debates on YouTube sounded fairly lame and predictable.
Still, as soon as there’s a blunder, it’s now up for posterity, like Howard’s stumble yesterday. More here at http://kburgin.typepad.com/australian_elections_07/
Peter:
Iif you click on the imagelink and look at the Family First site you’ll see that it’s only a partial of the full logo, because they’ve broken the logo up into two parts. That was part of my point about how some sites don’t seem to have considered that people discussing them online might like to display the logos, and they won’t all have access to Photoshop to join up the broken bits of logos on banners.
Colonel Nathan R. Datto:
I didn’t suggest they should supply the interactive discussion themselves, only that if they want to have such discussions (that will happen with or without them) disseminate their talking points then they need to get into the habit of having their websites provide regularly updated dynamic content.
Obviously sometimes the talking points will be shot down rather than talked up. But if you’re providing dynamic content that is easily findable through your party portal, then the supporters talking it up should outnumber the detractors.
Johnathon Edwards certainly showed how not to do “internet outreach� a few months ago.
Are you talking about the “So Pretty” John Edwards hair thing? I watched the Dems debate live on CNN yesterday actually and they interspersed it with the candidates’ own YouTubeish videos many of which were pretty good — Edwards’ response to the hair thing is effective: http://johnedwards.com/watch/hair/
As to the larger point, they don’t need to so they won’t. Although I am Kevin Rudd’s friend on Facebook and my local MLC Penny Sharpe is making a good go of it too.
Bill, I blogged on Melmandagate at the time. Edwards’ only mistake was in underestimating how relentless the misrepresentations by wingnuts would be.
I don’t know that you have to be a political junkie to look up a party political website in an election year. Why not go direct to the source to check out their policy positions?
Oh yeah. Melmanda. I tried repress the memories as quickly as I could.
They’re totally missing the polint about “targeting”.
A “Youtube/Myspace/Ratty” sound and vision bite is not going to tantalise anyone, except maybe curious journalists and political tragics. It is bound to be a dull propaganda manifesto with an old bald bloke lecturing about how great he could have been.
Probably identical to a Tintin effort as well
Is that the sort of thing dial-up swinging voters would be bothered watching? , or spending the 25 minutes bothering to download? Even broadband, how devoted would you need to be to be even vaguely interested
The hundreds of thousands of “never voted” under 22 years? Juicy demographics those.
There are sharper, more specific ways of getting into the mainstream of what people do online and having a presence. No it’s not pop-ups or gimicry.
It’s more to do with having a relevant message conveyed in a way that is believable and internally consistent. Truth is a fairly basic way to start (there’s a problem with that, I know). Then links to unbiased research or articles that can verify the political position and then a forum that is treated with respect and honesty.
As a f’rinstance, Krudd could have a website (widely publicised) called, say, kruddy dot com. He would not come straight up blabbing about himself and how crook the other bloke is. In fact, forget the propaganda please.
“Hello, my name is Kevin Rudd and I represent the alternative Government of Australia.
On the left of this screen you will see a menu of Government responsibilities and portfolios. Please select items you wish to know more about”.
Then, ever onwards, but always a link to enable comment on the page and policy people find themselves reading
It’s the juxtaposition of issues of concern with the inappropriate and irrelevant that frustrates people.
As my daughter said, “Dad, they don’t want us to tell them what we think - they want to tell us what to think”
I think it’s interesting that the non-party based political sites seem to have the most vivid and approachable content. The major parties need to read their Mark Amerika - or at least get some grassroots media savvy consultants on board. Even though the Labor myspace stuff clearly urinates all over the coalition (The PM still has Tom listed as a friend, for gawdssake), it still comes over as stiff and staged. Peter Garrett looks like he’s trying out for a toothpaste ad or doorstop challenge.
I have to say that the obvious stuff - read your rep’s blog / comment on it / etc is a welcome addition. I notice Ross Daniels seems to be blogging his heart out in the Ryan electorate (which I’m picking to flip, by the way). Leveraging transparency of process/policy in a ‘human’ way seems to me to be the key here, rather than social networking per se.
One of the most interesting links I’ve seen in the last few days I stumbled on by accident:
http://www.ozpolitics.info/guide/fun/politics-test/
(nb: This site was up yesterday, but seems to be down at the moment.)
It consists of a several page quiz that asks you where you stand on various issues and then tells you not only where you sit on the political spectrum (center left, etc) on various clusters of interest, but also what parties best represent your personal concerns. Meme, anyone?
For me, the potential there for meme-style interactive education is quite exciting. I’m guessing that a lot of people don’t even know where they sit WRT the various parties’ policies (esp the Greens and Dems and others who struggle to get Big Media’s attention). I think that people are generally underinformed on all but the ‘kitchen table’ issues (as Rudd called them today). More detailed and accessible comparative analysis of policy etc will be fascinating to see when it comes. I’m not sure how that will translate into votes, but expect to see the smaller parties be cleverer about this than the coalition/labor.
Maybe Rudd will run his republic referendum online? Methinks not, but hopefully the process will be more transparent next time around. I remember sitting in the Beijing embassy when the last referendum went down, and boy were there some disappointed diplomats.
That was the night Alexander Downer stole my chair too, if I’m going to tenuously link this to another thread. Dolly gets more and more plummy the more he drinks
Anyway, I’m watching Politics 2.0 (or is that 1.1 beta) with interest. Nice post.
My federal (Liberal) MP has an email newsletter to which he seemed to have signed up any voter who’d ever had contact with him - anecdotally, I discovered that a few people, like me, had had to ask to be unsubbed from it. Nevertheless, even though I didn’t want to receive it, high marks to him for having an e-newsletter. I wonder how many other MPs are doing this?
I do receive the weekly e-newsletter from my independent state MP Clover Moore and find it very informative and useful.
Agreed. Partisan sites with no official party affiliation are driving much of the American blogosphere discussion in the States, but only a few of them are actually managing to be influential, and they’re the ones that have only the loosest reins on their content authors.
Agreed again. The larger parties have plenty of volunteers/donors already, online outreach is for them just keeping up with trends to not appear fuddy-duddies. The smaller parties will be the ones to fully explore their options here.
‘Blogging’ I thought was where ‘the people’ , humans who think, could get together and bitch about what’s not right with the world. The fact that it is being invaded by politicians seems sinister to me!
Their intent is clear: let’s turn ‘the people’ into ’sheeple’ again so they can be easily manipulated, lobotomized, led.
How long will it be before we have political messages flashed across our screens?
Those quote marks do a lot of work in that comment, Daniel. I’m impressed at the level of false dichotomy there.
Colonel, I’m impressed by your complete failure to understand the world you live in!
What are politicians, Daniel? Robots?
Of course some of them use computers. Oooooh oooga booga.
What are politicians? If you don’t know by now, Colonel, I can’t help you.
Meanwhile I guess that politicians have two choices: close blogging down or invade and occupy it. The latter seems to be a popular option these days.
That’s settled then, you officially don’t understand the internet. I’m calling the Department of Information Superhighway Management to have your L-plates revoked.
[runs out of sarcasm, and baffles]
Daniel, how exactly can anyone ’shut down’ or ‘occupy’ blogging?
Daniel, the Invasion Of The Blogs By the Eevil Pollitishuns is one hell of a moral panic you’re trying to stir up. How can political parties making their talking points easier for polibloggers to find and thus discuss constitute an invasion of blogs which already make a point of analysing political rhetoric anyway?
Colonel, I’ll write slowly so you can understand. The Government could, if it wanted to, force everyone who blogs to be registered using the claim that blogs offer a potential threat to national security. They could then get rid of those who, like me, offer them criticism.
As to occupying, I guess if they got political partisans to invade all the rebellious websites and flood them with pro-government propaganda that would certainly throw a spanner in the blogging works, wouldn’t it, Colonel?
Colonel, if you were to visit websites around the world (especially those in America) enlightenment could be yours!
P.S. I am not interested in entering into a war with you, Colonel. There is enough war and conflict in the world already.
They’ve been doing that unsuccessfully for years and the worst offender is Google, consequently I have not used Google for years and recommend any other search engine if possible.
.
I believe the benefit of text is that end-users can use it any speed they please. I like to read quickly, but if you want to type with your mouth moving, that’s fine by me.
That’s a. bizarre, b. paranoid and c. self-centred. You’re not an Austrian school libertarian, by any chance, are you?
If you define ‘political partisans’ as holding political views less valid than yours, yes. And if people suddenly weren’t able to delete comments from blogs they administer, as you so proudly threaten to do on yours, yes.
Hah. You’re doing a fine job of showing disinterest
“That’s a. bizarre, b. paranoid and c. self-centred. You’re not an Austrian school libertarian, by any chance, are you?”
Lol, Colonel. This whole exchange is highly amusing.
Daniel, I agree with tigtog, I don’t really see how making their own material more easily accessible to bloggers and the net-savvy constitutes an invasion on the part of ‘politicians’. If anything such a move could indicate that bloggers had won small gains in mainstream politics. I’m also not convinced that politicians are, as you seem to be implying, an alien species.
Check out this for the illusion of Control.
Adam, surely the post is mainly about how they are not making their material or themselves more easily accessible. I don’t really expect this to change much in my lifetime either. Dysfunction actually thrives on secrecy.
Colonel, Sir, George Orwell wrote a book called 1984. Perhaps you and others should read it, open your minds to what can happen so easily. Some in America argue it is happening there already!
Tigtog, what is happening currently appears innocuous enough, the government discovering the internet. But then things are not always as they first appear, are they?
Steve, rapid change is happening already. Look at the new laws which more and more cut across our freedoms and rights. Look at Hicks, Haneef, etc.
Some on this thread (like me) argue that the passive voice allows unsustainable statements to pass without question. In the US as in Australia, political blogging thrives freely. Ingsoc remains as yet unimplemented.
No, it’s pretty much as it appears. Politicians have websites and some even blog. It’s not going to turn into the Reichstag fire if you look away for ten seconds, Chicken Little.
Daniel, as one who is keen on promoting a balanced Senate in order to maximise the checks against untrammelled government, I’m happy to see that the smaller parties concentrating on the Senate seats are using the ‘net to greater effect to convey their message. Such parties are not government now and are not likely to ever be, but their role can be very important in a representative democratic system.
So, this thread’s topic is discussing how internet strategies can be more effectively used by political advocates in the upcoming election. Your broader conspiracy theories are off-topic and are derailing the thread. Please desist now.
“surely the post is mainly about how they are not making their material or themselves more easily accessible”
Exactly, steve, and I’m responding to the suggestion by Daniel that pointing this out and suggesting this needs to improve is somehow facilitating their ‘invasion’ of intertubes.
Colonel N Datto, Sir (I salute smartly not wanting to end up in the brig)! Please, I understand that your military mind is trained to follow orders. Lateral thinking or thinking for yourself is not encouraged. That is a pity.
Your comments about America are ill-informed. Many in the States are scared of their Government, of its extreme right wing agenda. I communicate with them all the time so I’m in a position to know.
I would urge everyone to get involved with websites outside of Australia so that some kind of balance is achieved. The local scene tends to be somewhat parochial!
Quick idea: go b3ta. Photoshopping contests, javascript/macromedia games, comment sites. You don’t just want the punters visiting your site - you want them wasting a lot of hours there.
The danger is that you might end up with a lot of NSFW content - just like the link above. It would be a “courageous” (in the Sir Humphrey Appleby sense) move to organise one’s party site in the matter above.
Any discussion forums that were directly sponsored by the parties themselves would have to be moderated to avoid both NSFW and slanderous content from contributors tainting the party by association.
But look at the huge popularity of privately sponsored partisan websites in the States. The Dems and Repubs, both the party machine and the individual candidates, ensure that there’s talking points memos galore on their official sites for the unofficial partisan websites to riff off. The US Libertarian party does the same, so do various lobbying coalitions. That’s what the parties in Australia are mostly failing to do.
Tigtog, unfortunately when I made my last post your edict wasn’t there. I had no intention of derailing your thread and was merely extrapolating from it.
No worries, Daniel. It’s easy to follow a tangent when it’s something you’re passionate about - we all do it now and then. I merely ask for a bit more consideration of topicality.
Anyway, why aren’t more Australian pollies blogging themselves? Or having a staffer blog about the pollie’s activities? I hesitate to hold up the current crop of USAn presidential campaigners as high-faluting examples of much, but they are nearly all presenting websites with blogs by the candidate and/or staffers, moderated discussion forums directly linked from the candidate’s website, photo-groups etc etc. All this produces a great deal of dynamic content for political tragics like LPers to read and it does generate reactions, both pro and con, in all sorts of discussion forums.
The more discussions there are going on about politics, the more likely it is that a reader/participant will become emotionally engaged with a particular political argument. Continued engagement with political discussions makes people more passionate about politics, and thus more likely to talk to others about it as well, and thus it goes on.
Our big parties have a lock on the corporate media, so I don’t expect them to fully utilise the strategic aspects of online communication in an innovative way: they don’t perceive that they might need to, and they probably don’t as yet. But generating buzz online could make a big difference for the smaller parties, which we need for checks and balances in our government system, so I want those smaller parties to innovate and do it effectively.
Steve Fielding from FF signed me up for his e-newsletter, which I promptly unsubscribed from. It took some time to discover how he had our email addresses. He’d got them from the Electoral Commission, who never mentioned that our email address would be made available along with our home address. We were under the impression the AEC wanted our email so that they could communicate with us (confirm our enrolment etc).
I reported it as spam, but politicians are exempt from that legislation.
kate, the AEC does not use email addresses for enrolment or voting purposes and does not pass such information onto politicians. In fact, the Privacy Act should preclude this happening unless it was done with your permission. Sounds to me like someone is telling porkies. Suggest you double-check with the AEC and find out what really happened.
Tigtog, Dead Roo seems to think twittering is the go.
I agree that the idea of politicians blogging is problematic, but probably not as problematic as it seems. Either they open themselves up to outright flaming / spamming / flooding, or they moderate.
I’d posit that the latter, done moderately (moderate moderation?), isn’t such a bad thing. It’s what the newspapers do at the moment, for example, with their online columns. Most comments on Big Media blogs are moderated, edited for possible slander/libel and so on (anything that the paper might be sued over facilitating) and then passed through. Sometimes with letters-from-the-Somme style holes cut in them
For me, though, this isn’t a kiss of death on Truth, Justice and the Idealist Way. I’m with Habermas in that I think for dialogue to happen, dialogic boundaries need to be in place. And I think the internet is a vastly more Darwinist ecosystem than any big brother/invasion etc commentator would have it. If someone is moderating a blog too heavily, you can bet you’ll read about that on another blog somewhere (as whoever looks after Rudd’s myspace page found out). Nothing exists in a vacuum on teh web. The web itself IS dialogic, even if its various component lexia aren’t. Unidirectional messages tend to eat themselves online as they just generate eyerolling rather than persuasion. The nature of rhetoric is massively in flux (and it occurs to me that there’s probably a nice paper or series thereof about online rhetorical philosophy versus traditional rhetorics - “Socrates in Cyberspace”).
So, were pollies to blog more actively (and some are doing that now) I don’t think that dissenting voices would be culled from the comments or that it would be some kind of assault on the web. Jockey though they might, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and so on haven’t been able to own the web yet and aren’t likely to. Howard, bless his little cotton eyebrows, isn’t likely to do much better.
In the end, over zealous policing of comments on political blogs backfires bigtime. Too many we users are far too savvy for that to fly. Rather, I would expect that these spaces, should they arise in any truly pervasive sense, would allow for an (albeit potentially lopsided) dialogue - if only between commentators rather than the bloggers themselves - and I’d peg even that as being a seismic shift from how things are currently done.
Daniel, the dangers of Orwellian homogeneity of message are principally present in Big Media active dissemination / passive consumption systems. They’re also principally present in scary bedtime stories told to 1950’s Idaho schoolchildren or the kinds of science fiction novels whose covers feature women in loincloths. That kind of unidirectional flow of information content is done and dusted. That’s why Packer the little is busy buying casinos and shedding media outlets, and it’s why I’m not likely to buy shares in any media conglomerate (or film, or music for that matter) any time soon. I think your take on the powers of government are a little simplistic. They could order that “everyone who blogs be registered using the claim that blogs offer a potential threat to national security”. I suppose they could also order that we all dance naked by the light of the harvest moon, but I’m not sure anyone would pay much attention, or that any government who didn’t want a major constitutional or civic crisis on their hands would even think in that direction.
Tigtog, as always, you’re a delight to read.
Why thank you, CDB.
My own interest here is how might political parties more effectively engage people like I was a few years ago: moderately politically aware and opinionated, but without much detailed policy knowledge etc for using in rebuttals of other political arguments. Reading political blogs is what radicalised me politically, made me seek more knowledge about political maneuvrings, and has made me actively seek to shape political discourse as much as I can.
I’m very much an independent voter (can’t really call myself a swinging voter if I’d never vote Lib/Nat) who’s unlikely to join any party as they currently stand. That doesn’t mean that I would never volunteer to leaflet or man a polling booth for a particular party at a particular election. Just persuade me (and others like me) that it should be your party, partisans!
“I suppose they could also order that we all dance naked by the light of the harvest moon,” says CBD. Now there’s a good idea. Could we wear daisy chains?
Most of the folk who visit my blog are Americans and they seem to be in great fear about what their government can do. Given that our Government seems to be closely allied with America, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that, if Howard is re-elected, it could follow suit. Registration of bloggers is definitely a possibility.
Regarding the move by the Government into blogging: once it realizes the potential that it offers to influence opinion, well…read 1984!
P.S. This is my last comment on L.P.!
See ya, Daniel. I clicked on your name to jump to your blog and guess your reasons for leaving are explained there. As for parochialism, well I guess although I do have a broader view (having worked for the United Nations and several NGOs over the years) at the moment I’m quite interested in engaging with local systems. The personal is political, and all that. As for being pointyheaded, a useless academic, well mea culpa.
Anyhoo, TigTog writes:
“My own interest here is how might political parties more effectively engage people like I was a few years ago: moderately politically aware and opinionated, but without much detailed policy knowledge etc for using in rebuttals of other political arguments. Reading political blogs is what radicalised me politically, made me seek more knowledge about political maneuvrings, and has made me actively seek to shape political discourse as much as I can.”
Yeah, ditto on that. And I daresay it wasn’t so much _reading_ political blogs but rather being able to engage with them and their readers in dialogue that was the stimulating factor. Would that be right?
But to link back to an earlier point you made about the power of privately sponsored partisan websites - I wonder where a grant or some seed funding might be found to start such a thing? Anyone have any ideas? I’d love to see a hub where policies were compared and contrasted as well as discussed. Non partisan would be neato, but partisan would be cool and probably easier to find someone to pay for.