The Outsider: Probing the federal election
Today, The Outsider’s campaign diary looks at Twitter twerps, battles over “bias” in the news and Labor’s go-slow on the seat of Grey.
Tweeting to victory
Political operators are having trouble coming to grips with the sad reality that swing voters in places like the western suburbs of Sydney and Adelaide’s mortgage belt are unlikely to be swayed by their devastating Tweeting.
The ultra-brief social media tool is much loved by political types and journalists, but a lot less so by the average punter.
Which makes State Labor adviser Tim Picton’s spectacular faux pas this week even more baffling.
Picton, keen readers will recall, works for State Health Minister Jack Snelling, along with Annabel Digance, Labor’s candidate for the seat of Boothby – the Liberals’ most marginal seat, held by Andrew Southcott.
Using a slightly opaque user name, Picton tweeted suggestions that Southcott was in Fiji – a claim that proved wrong and forced a clearly peeved Premier Jay Weatherill to apologise to Southcott.
You might like
Picton used his Twitter account yesterday to offer this soft-in-the-middle apology: “Appears that rumours were untrue and Andrew wasn’t in Fiji. Apologies @asouthcottmp for the mix up!”
Mix up? Suuuuure.
Meanwhile, Australia’s premier news wire service AAP was left red-faced yesterday when it used a quote from a fake Joe Hockey Twitter account in a serious news story about the Reserve Bank’s interest rate cut.
Anonymous and fake Twitter accounts are used – mostly without wit or intelligence – by staffers on both sides of politics.
Our bet is that Picton won’t be the only staffer to come a cropper during this campaign.
Grey skies
Four days into the campaign and Labor still doesn’t have a confirmed candidate for the geographically ginormous seat of Grey.
Labor did try to sort it out yesterday, but instead the candidate will be confirmed late this afternoon.
Stay informed, daily
The delay has observers scratching their heads, but there are other seats across the country that also don’t have Labor candidates lined up.
Expect them all to be sorted today.
Grey was once a Labor stronghold, but no more. The huge seat takes in most of South Australia’s landmass – more than 900,000 square kilometres – including the outback and far west, the mid-north, the Eyre Peninsula and the iron triangle.
Leave Rupert alone!
News Corp is outraged at suggestions that it is waging an anti-Rudd battle on behalf of prominent former Australian Rupert Murdoch.
Labor got the crazy idea that some agenda was at play when Sydney’s Daily Telegraph published a front page editorial this week exhorting readers to kick Rudd out of office.
But apparently this was just being “honest” and “upfront” with readers who, in any case, are intelligent enough to make up their own minds.
The Advertiser wouldn’t be so crass as to do something like that, instead giving its front page today to the good news about Tony Abbott offering a company tax rate cut (in 2015), and publishing not one but two opinion pieces about how Kevin Rudd is a dill.
For those who’ve hit the pay wall, FM radio “personality” Amber Petty says Rudd has “damaged our nation’s self-esteem”. Economics writer Jessica Irvine says Rudd “can’t fight the urge to bribe voters with their own money”, avoiding the ironic juxtaposition of the paper’s page one splash.
Meanwhile, Murdoch’s boosters at The Australian are running a daily commentary lambasting anyone who suggests their owner is intervening in the federal election.
Smarting from an article in The Age questioning Murdoch’s motives, The Australian’s Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell let loose this spray:
“Then today we find in Pravda on the Yarra, the most one-dimensionally left-wing paper in our nation’s history, a pious rant about the influence of Rupert Murdoch. This from a paper that only two months ago published as its splash in its highest selling Saturday edition an editorial demanding Julia Gillard step down so Kevin Rudd could become prime minister and save the country from a Coalition government.
“The truth is there is far more pluralism in the Daily Tele every day of the week than in a year of The Age.”
It’s getting ugly in the desperate world of print newspapers – and it’s only going to get worse.
