Monday 18 August 2008

It's official according to the Parliamentary Library- the Internet didn't play a big part in the 2007 Australian federal election

According to the an Australian Parliamentary Library research paper, candidates standing at the November 2007 federal election did not make much use of the Internet during their electoral campaigns.

The Australian Centre for Public Communication at UTS reported that most candidates either did not use the Internet at all, or else used it in a very limited way. Within four days of polling day, one-third of Commonwealth MPs had not created a personal website, 90 per cent did not have a MySpace page and only a handful (6.6 per cent) had a blog. Fewer than six per cent had a Facebook site, a podcast or had posted a least one video on YouTube.[88] It was also noted that the most successful and innovative postings were those of bloggers and election commentators, such as Antony Green of the ABC.[89] All of which suggests that use of the Net by politicians has some distance to go before it is a major influence on electoral outcomes in Australia.

The research paper appears to wonder just how much new media might have affected the election outcome, but doesn't address the fact that many under 40s are now getting their political news from online news sites and blogs, if U.S. Pew Foundation survey results can be extrapolated to Australia.

Nor does it take into account the fact that traditional media in Australia is taking a hit from this apparent change of reader allegiance, with many advertisers bypassing print media according to the Australian Press Council.

The only thing proven by our politicians failure last year to widely engage with the Internet, is that political debate moved passed them and was mainly conducted without their direct input.

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