Here’s my thoughts on the new media aspect of the Australian elections. The liberal media in the UK was thrilled that nasty old John Howard was thrown out and Labour’s Kevin Rudd got in. But what I found interesting was how the Internet seemed to play an important role

Beckett, Charlie

LSE Research Online

2007-12-5Aussie rules: the Internet election down underblogs.lse.ac.uk /polis/2007/12/05/aussie-rules-the-internet-election-down-under/Here’s my thoughts on the new media aspect of the Australian elections. The liberal media in the UK wasthrilled that nasty old John Howard was thrown out and Labour’s Kevin Rudd got in. But what I found interesting washow the Internet seemed to play an important role. It didn’t swing what was a deep landslide shift in Australianpolitics but it was used in innovative ways by both the Parties and the people. Here is what I wrote for Press Gazettewith the help of Australian Tim Watts:With Hillary, Barrack and the rest crowding on to Facebook and YouTube, you might think that America 2008 is goingto be the first “internet election”.But the first digitised democratic decision took place down under. Blogs and online video had a real impact onNovember’s Australian general election campaign.Hundreds of thousands of Australian voters watched footage of the opposition leader eating his own ear wax, theprime minister being portrayed as a “farting fossil fool” and some of the most surreal campaign advertisements inmemory. The close cultural ties and political similarities make Australia’s experience much more relevant to the UK.Internet video has changed the dynamics of political advertising – it is much cheaper to put propaganda online. In thepast four months, the Australian Labor Party has released 60 videos and the ruling Liberal Party 40.Lower costs mean that internet video has provided a real-life campaign test bed, where videos can either flop andfade into oblivion or strike a chord and make the jump into paid TV ads.The results have been quirky to say the least. The Liberal Party went so far as to produce a surreal vignette of PrimeMinister John Howard promising AU$500,000 (£212,000) of taxpayers’ money to protect orangutans in Indonesiaafter he was cornered on the issue by a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy in the Australian rugby union team’sdressing room.Another development has been the use of YouTube videos as an unmediated rapid response to negative attackadvertisements. At one point, a negative Liberal Party advertisement on union power provoked an increasingly weirdseries of tit-for-tat election adverts.The response opened with the final seconds of the original Liberals’ attack ad before panning out to reveal Laborleader Kevin Rudd watching on a computer screen denouncing it as a scare campaign.Just as quickly, the Liberal Party responded with a further ad showing John Howard watching Kevin Rudd watchingJohn Howard, before stating “it’s not a scare campaign to point out the facts”.This particular spiral of ads might have been enough to make viewers’ heads spin, but it showed that the internet hasestablished itself as the primary platform for responding to political attacks. All of these video ads were released first(sometimes exclusively) on the internet, attracting tens of thousands of online viewers, and significant follow-upcoverage in the mainstream media. A lot of the online video created during this campaign has been beyond the control of the political parties.Independent election satire and smears have all proliferated. This proved to be something of a double-edged swordfor the political parties.  Labor leader Kevin Rudd may have been chuffed to have been portrayed as James Bond in “The Man with the1/2Golden Jaw”, but he was less pleased that footage of him seemingly eating his own ear wax has been viewed morethan 400,000 times.Similarly, flatulence-dubbed footage of the prime minister Howard talking about climate change in the “farting fossilfool” video might have impressed the 60,000 people who watched the clip, but not the Liberal campaign HQ.The bloggers have also been running their alternative take on the election race, although much of their material ismade up of attacks or commentary on the mainstream media.In recent years, a group of Australian blogs including The Poll Bludger, Mumble, Possum Comitas and LarvatusProdeo have coalesced into a psephological blogosphere of commentators highly critical of the mainstream media’scoverage. The critique has been highly informed but bad-mannered.This tension boiled over when the Murdoch-owned Australian dedicated its entire editorial column to an assault onthe journalistic credentials of the blogosphere. Headlined “Online prejudice no substitute for real work”, the editorialaccused the blogosphere of being “woolly-headed”, “smug, self-assured, delusional”, “defamatory”, “blinded by bias”– a home to “sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper” that had“exhausted its claim to be taken seriously”.The lesson from Australia is that the internet does not (yet) decide elections, but it has a critical marginal impact. Themainstream media and political parties may despise new media but they can’t ignore it. The blogosphere is playingan increasingly significant role in shaping the political dialogue and the online videos are acting as a political forumthat did not exist before.Rupert Murdoch has famously recognised that “media companies don’t control the conversation anymore” and themessage from Australia is that those who fail to understand this new world and insist on living in belligerent isolationwill appear increasingly arrogant and shrill, and their content will appear increasingly aloof and stale.RelatedSuperMedia: the future as Networked JournalismJune 10, 2008In "International"The Iran Protests and Neda: Networked Media, Networked Politics?December 12, 2009In "International"US Elections and mainstream media: go online for the real storyJune 4, 2008In "Development"Copyright © 2014 London School of Economics and Political Science2/2

Aussie rules: the Internet election down under

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