Another welcome development in the task of making it easier for the public scrutinise the work of their parliamentarians, with the launch of the Project Democracy website by the folks at GetUp! The Project Democracy site taps into the Open Australia site which I wrote about in this post. Jason Wilson, who previously worked at QUT…
Continue reading →Supporters of the Obama campaign have set up a website aimed at giving the public a chance to put forward ideas, and comment and rate each other’s ideas. It’s billed as an “unofficial campaign thinktank”. Of course, a lot of it is about providing yet another way to draw potential supporters in and build on…
Continue reading →I’ve mused a number of times about the potential impacts of blogging on politics and politicians, and the differences between various countries. One longstanding blogging politician is Peter Black, a Liberal Democrat member of the Welsh Assembly, who has been at it for over five years. He has written an interesting piece on the impacts of blogging…
Continue reading →Some interesting statistics in the latest issue of The Tally Board from the Australian Electoral Commission which show how important the internet has become for basic information about elections. During the 2007 federal election, there were more than 3.2 million visitors to the AEC website and over 14.4 million page views. This compares to over 800…
Continue reading →I participated in a panel of speakers at the Microsoft Forum on Politics & Technology earlier this week, along with Antony Green, Joe Hockey, Kate Lundy and Matt Bai. It was an interesting discussion, although I did get a bit irritated that the debate seemed to keep turning inwards into a discussion about how politicians…
Continue reading →The potential of the Open Australia site that I linked to in this post has clearly raised the hopes and interest of a range of bloggers (like Peter Martin, The Podcast Network, Public Polity and LP). Kim at LP notes the site is based on a similar site in the UK. Another good example of an independent effort to open up access to the…
Continue reading →A website with great potential for opening up the happenings in Parliament has gone online. The Open Democracy site is just in the beta/testing stage, but it has the potential to serve a really valuable role. You can sign up to get an email alert every time your local MP speaks in Parliament, or every…
Continue reading →On June 25, during my final sitting week in Parliament, I’ll be speaking at a Politics & Technology conference organised by Microsoft. You can see all the speakers and panellists at this link. The keynote speaker will be US political writer, Matt Bai. I guess it will sort of mark the point I make a…
Continue reading →More by accident than design, I happened to be near a television when it was screening the summations of the 10 groups in the 2020 Summit. From what I heard, and from looking through the initial report from the gathering, there seem to be a fair few reasonable ideas in amongst it all. Some other parts…
Continue reading →There was plenty of cynicism voiced by many people about the 2020 Summit held in Canberra this weekend. I can understand why some might tend to feel that way, but I think there is less reason to feel cynical about it than the average Parliamentary sittings which provide the usual political activity in Canberra. I believe…
Continue reading →There was a piece in the Sun Herald last weekend suggesting the Liberal Party is “preparing a major internet blitz to reinvigorate itself”. The article contained a juvenile little snark from an unnamed Liberal Party source suggesting that “Christopher Pyne, Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey were the only senior former Howard government ministers who could use…
Continue reading →I was going to do a post pointing to a couple of papers looking at the use and role of the internet in political campaigning. However, in doing so I can across some far more interesting sites which reminded me that social activism is far more interesting, so I’m pointing to them instead. I think…
Continue reading →There have been a few elections held in different parts of the world in the last week or two. They have been extremely varied in content and style, which is a reminder of how many different ways democracy can manifest itself, and that there is more to freedom and democracy than being able to vote…
Continue reading →A very important election for our region was held over the weekend, with the poll for Malaysia’s national Parliament occurring, along with elections for twelve state legislatures. I don’t profess to be an expert on this country, but the prospect of a significant weakening in power for the ruling coalition, who have held office for…
Continue reading →Media reports are giving some positive indications that the federal Labor government will be making some major improvements to the laws covering political donations. Reports suggest the government is not only going to make increase the requirements for disclosing political donations, but also to put a limit on the size of individual donations from corporations…
Continue reading →Writing in the Courier-Mail last week, Griffith University academic Paul Williams strongly put the case for Queensland to move to four year terms for our state Parliament (and in effect for our state government as well). I used to also be in favour of shifting to four year, fixed terms at state level as well as…
Continue reading →A recent front page story in the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Frank Sartor, the Planning Minister in New South Wales, “hosted a fundraising dinner attended by more than 30 property developers which raised more than $500 000 at the same time the government was set to make decisions on development applications by some of…
Continue reading →Super Tuesday in the USA is almost upon us, where a major step will be taken in the process of choosing the next President of that nation. The result will affect us all, not least in regards to the successful candidate’s foreign/military policy and the approach towards climate change. Opinion polls (which have had a…
Continue reading →This year’s Presidential election in the USA is getting an enormous amount of coverage in Australia, but there’s an election a bit closer to home happening tomorrow in Taiwan (sometimes called the Republic of China). Its implications won’t be anywhere near as big for Australia or the globe compared to what happens in the USA,…
Continue reading →Some time ago, I wrote a piece about the issue of people living outside their country of citizenship being able to vote, pointing to the example of the system which had just been adopted for the Italian Parliament, which provides specific seats for Italian voters who live in other countries. (As it turned out, those few…
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