January 16, 2005

Too Hidebound Down Under?

GUEST: Jack O'Toole

Writing in The Age, University of Melbourne media lecturer Sally Young and political consultant Peter Chen argue that Australia's major political parties will have to fundamentally rethink their online strategies if they want to succeed on the Web:

[T]he main parties want complete control over the timing and content of material they're connected with. Softened up by television campaigning, with slogans crafted word-by-word with focus groups, the main Australian political parties are not interested in real interactivity....

Apart from the main parties, individual candidates are also hesitant to get online in Australia. While two-thirds of US congressional candidates produced their own websites as far back as 1998, in the recent federal election fewer than 40 per cent of ALP and Liberal candidates produced a personal website. If they did, their sites mirrored their party's site: lots of policy information and biographies, but little interactivity. Opinion polls, if they were included at all, used safe, bland questions that did not clash with the party line and most of these candidates, if sent an email, did not bother to reply.

In the US, with a different political system that focuses on individual candidates rather than the party, the picture is very different. Although still the home of televised political spin, outsiders have shaken the old consensus about how to win elections.

Jesse Ventura, professional wrestler turned Governor of Minnesota, propelled the Reform Party into the national spotlight by using the internet to recruit and organise online volunteers. In 2004, Howard Dean's meteoric rise from obscure governor to presidential hopeful rested strongly on his capacity to raise large numbers of small campaign contributions online.

The Americans are hooked on "social networking", getting campaign supporters to pass along online messages and calls for contributions to their friends and like-minded people. Supporters of John Kerry organised 40,000 volunteers online who walked their local streets, talking with voters and collecting information on palm pilots. In politics, information is power and it all helps to direct campaign strategies and work out how to target the key groups of voters and the most important local areas.

This reflects the irony of the internet, that for all its global reach, it is often most effective at organising grass-roots participation. So far this lesson has been lost on the Australian political parties. Fattened by public funding that pays for their election costs, there's no pressure for the parties to innovate significantly.

The rest is here.

Posted by Jack O'Toole at January 16, 2005 03:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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