Transcript
Prepared by
Peter Chen
Research Associate
National Centre for Australian Studies
Monash University
Rachel Gibson
Professor of New Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Leicester, UK
Karin Geiselhart
Visiting Research Fellow
University of Canberra
Electronic Democracy?
The Impact of New
Communications Technologies
on Australian Democracy
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Previous reports in this series:
How Well Does Australian Democracy Serve Immigrant Australians?
James Jupp
Australian Electoral Systems – How Well Do They Serve Political Equality?
Graeme Orr
Corruption and Democracy in Australia
Barry Hindess
Australian Political Parties in the Spotlight
Dean Jaensch, Peter Brent & Brett Bowden
Representing the Disadvantaged in Australian Politics: The Role of Advocacy Organisations
Bronwen Dalton and Mark Lyons
for the
Democratic Audit
of Australia
Political Science Program
School of Social Sciences
The Australian National University
Report No.6
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FlccIronìc 0cmocracv!
]hc ImpacI oI Ncw
CommunìcaIìons ]cchnologìcs
on AusIralìan 0cmocrocv
Prcparcd bv PcIcr Chcn
Research Associate
National Centre for Australian Studies
Monash University
Rachcl 0ìbson
Professor of New Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Leicester, UK
Karìn 0cìsclharI
Visiting Research Fellow
University of Canberra
Ior Ihc 0cmocraIìc AudìI
oI AusIralìa
Political Science Program
School of Social Sciences
The Australian National University
Report No. 6
PAGE ìì Cover: ‘Blue City’ by Paul Rapson, www.PabloPaul.com
The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be taken to
represent the views of either the Democratic Audit of Australia or The Australian National
University
© The Australian National University 2006
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data
Chen, Peter.
Electronic Democracy? The Impact of New Communications Technology on Australian
Democracy.
Bibliography.
0 9751925 8 2 (pbk)
0 9751925 9 0 (online)
1. Information technology - Political aspects - Australia.
2. Information society - Political aspects - Australia. 3.
Communication - Political aspects - Australia. I. Gibson,
Rachel Kay. II. Geiselhart, Karin. III. Australian
National University. Democratic Audit of Australia. IV.
Title. (Series : Democratic Audit of Australia focussed audit ; 6).
303.48330994
An online version of this paper can be found by going to the Democratic Audit of Australia
website at:
http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au
PAGE ììì
Tables v
Figures vi
Abbreviations vi
The Democratic Audit of Australia
—Testing the strength of Australian democracy vii
Executive summary ix
Declarations of interest xii
1. Introduction 1
Technology and its relationship to democratic practice 2
Information and communication technology 3
Key implications and trends 5
Political impact of ICT 7
Conclusion: A balanced audit 10
2. Political parties go online 12
Informing, educating and socialising 14
Party websites 14
Party databases 17
Who is the audience? 18
Citizen mobilisation 21
Connecting with the public 21
Connecting with the party base 24
An ìmmìgranI socìcIv
]ablc oI conIcnIs
PAGE ìv
Issue articulation 25
Pluralisation and the growth of parties 25
A great leveller? 27
Aggregation 31
Conclusion 33
3. Political representatives and new technology 36
Representatives’ use of new technology 37
Elected representatives as content creators 38
A new relationship? 41
Conclusion 43
4. Elections and ICTs 45
ICTs and the campaign 46
Use of ICTs in the campaigning process 46
Levelling the playing feld? 48
Internal use of ICTs in electoral competition 50
Alternative voices online 52
Sites of public debate and socialisation 52
Alternative political websites 55
Regulation of alternative websites since the 2004 election 59
Electronic and online voting in Australia 59
A brief technological overview 60
Risks and fears 61
Democratic implications 61
Activities to date 63
ICTs and the electoral roll 64
Conclusion 65
5. Civil society: Fighting the good fght? 68
Background issues, trends, and constraints 69
Digital divides 69
A limited right to speak 70
Skills and infrastructure 70
Open sources and ‘social software’ 71
Activities and examples 72
Infuence of overseas ICT democracy projects 72
Who runs our civil society ICT projects? 73
PAGE v
Major Australian civil society projects online 74
Minor Australian civil society projects online 76
New relationships or social noise? 78
Uncivil uses of ICTs 80
Conclusion 81
6. Public service: Open government or big brother? 83
Access and the digital divide 84
Some examples 85
Institutional impacts 86
Future directions and issues 87
Transparency and accountability 89
Online publication 90
Democratic quality? 91
Accessibility 92
FOI in an electronic age 94
‘Your’ ABC: Innovation at the fringe of the public service 96
Human rights and electronic surveillance 97
Declining privacy in electronic communications 97
Integrated data, a human rights concern 98
A countervailing view 99
E-consultation and e-participation 101
Activities to date 102
Performance criticisms 103
Future development 105
Conclusion 106
References and further reading 109
The Democratic Audit of Australia Research Team and Committees 114
Tables
1. Functions of party websites and dates of establishment 15
2. Functions of website (questionnaire data) 17
3. Voter use of the internet for election news and information, 1998-2004 19
4. Characteristics of visitors to party websites, 2004 23
5. Number of de-registered parties 1988 to 2005 27
6. Party website design and delivery 28
7. Mainstream news coverage of Australian parties, 1995 and 2005 30
8. Parties, states and website adoption 40
9. Candidates’ use of new media channels 49
10. ‘Backend’ ICTs use by candidates 51
11. Communication types in online political discussion lists 54
12. Diversity in online political discussion lists 54
13. Candidate participation in the ‘dome of conscience’ 58
Figures
1. Party website content 2003 16
2. Media use during election campaigns, 1993 to 2004 20
3. Design and delivery features of party websites 2003 28
4. Elected representatives and the web 38
5. Elected representatives and e-mail 38
6. Content of candidate websites 2004 39
7. Features of candidate websites 2004 40
8. Online consultation and elected representatives 42
9. Popularity of alternative political websites, 2004 federal election 57
Abbreviations
ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation
ACA Australian Consumers’ Association
ACOSS Australian Council for Social Service
ACT Australian Capital Territory
AEC Australian Electoral Commission
CD ROM compact disc read-only memory
DVD digital video disc
FOI Freedom of Information
GMS Government Members’ Secretariat
ICTs Information and Communication Technologies
IPA Institute for Public Accuracy
ISPs internet service providers
MP Member of Parliament
NGO non-government organisation
SMS short message service
UK United Kingdom
USA United States of America
VEC Victorian Electoral Commission
WAI Web Accessibility Initiative
PAGE vì
]hc 0cmocraIìc
AudìI oI
AusIralìa – ]csIìng
Ihc sIrcngIh
oI AusIralìan
dcmocracv
Since 2002, the Democratic Audit of Australia, at the Australian National University
has been conducting an audit to assess Australia’s strengths and weaknesses
as a democracy.
The Audit has three specifc aims:
(1) Contributing to Methodology: to make a major methodological contribution
to the assessment of democracy—particularly through the study of
federalism and through incorporating disagreements about ‘democracy’
into the research design;
(2) Benchmarking: to provide benchmarks for monitoring and international
comparisons—our data can be used, for example, to track the progress of
government reforms as well as to compare Australia with other countries;
(3) Promoting Debate: to promote public debate about democratic issues and
how Australia’s democratic arrangements might be improved. The Audit
website hosts lively debate on democratic issues and complements the
production of reports like this.
Background
The Audit approach recognises that democracy is a complex notion; therefore
we are applying a detailed set of Audit questions already feld-tested in various
overseas countries. These questions were pioneered in the United Kingdom
with related studies in Sweden, then further developed under the auspices of
the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance—IDEA—
PAGE vìì
PAGE vììì
in Stockholm, which recently arranged testing in eight countries including
New Zealand. We have devised additional questions to take account of differing
views about democracy and because Australia is the frst country with a federal
system to undertake an Audit.
Further Information
For further information about the Audit, please see the Audit website at:
http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au
Funding
The Audit is supported by the Australian Research Council (DP0211016) and the
Australian National University.
PAGE ìx
The aim of this focused audit is to review the impacts that new computing
and communications technologies have had on democratic processes and
participation in Australia. The review includes consideration of ‘obvious’ new
media technologies, like the popularisation of the internet, World Wide Web, and
electronic mail, as well as the more pervasive use of computer technology in
political and government institutions and organisations.
This bundle of systems and services represents a signifcant change to the
technological backdrop of Australian society. The past 20 years have seen
the acceleration and intensifcation of the use of computers and other digital
communications technologies, with signifcant impacts on the economic and
social life of Australians, as well as having considerable implications for political
participation and democracy.
Within this broad area of public debate two strong theoretical positions can be
located. On the one hand, there are arguments that these tools have specifc
structural impacts such as increasing access to information at low cost—a
technologically determinist point of view. On the other hand, there is the social
shaping of technology view—that technologies refect the people and politics that
create them. While these debates are ongoing, the impacts of information and
communications tools on democratic cultures can be both positive and negative,
refecting the nature of Australia’s wider political culture, logics of political life, and
the creativity of individuals and organisations in the application of these tools.
To assess these impacts this audit focuses on four key areas of democratic life
in Australia and the implications of new technology therein: Australia’s system
FxccuIìvc
summarv
PAGE x
of party and representative rule; elections and campaigning; non-government
organisations and civil society institutions; and the public sector that serves
government and the citizenry.
A complex pattern emerges in relation to each of these areas, drawn from
quantitative and qualitative studies, and the use of case analysis. Overall, the
audit demonstrates that new media technologies have not, in themselves, led
to a dramatic opening up of democratic institutions or organisations in Australia.
Key aspects of the political system such as parties, parliaments and the public
service, are no more open to public participation following the introduction of
these technologies than they were prior to their advent.
In part, this refects the fact that, in themselves, computers and communications
technologies have no direct political implications. Whereas these systems provide
numerous possibilities for greater, wider, or deeper public participation, parties,
parliaments, and government departments have not been particularly proactive
in taking on these opportunities to enhance participation. This represents the
relatively conservative nature of the Australian political system and culture, rather
than a necessary failure of the technologies to deliver some promised new era
of openness.
Again, however, it must be recognised that this generalisation is only part of
the overall—and ongoing—process of adaptation to what has been called the
‘information age’. Numerous examples are presented in this audit of actions
taken to open up the political system: either through increasing the amount
of information available to individual citizens about the views, operations, or
decisions of major political institutions, or in the direct provision of new points of
access into the political arena.
Thus, a balanced fnding of the implications of technological change is presented,
and in each of the fve focal areas explored, we can see positive and progressive
use of new technology, as well as cynical or anti-democratic activities. Some
particularly positive examples include:
• Innovations in political parties, particularly the minor parliamentary parties,
to facilitate greater participation in their operations and greater exposure to
their views outside the mainstream commercial media;
• New forms of direct communication between the public and individual
representatives and candidates;
PAGE xì
• Enhanced forms of participation by government organisations through the
provision of information online, explicit use of online systems that allow the
public to comment on policy making processes, electronic voting systems,
and the development of community access projects to enhance the wider
availability of new technologies to the community; and
• The active and innovative role of some parts of civil society in developing
alternative news and media vehicles, virtual protest and pressure groups,
and the mobilisation of citizens into political action.
Negatives include:
• The general avoidance of direct communication by government and
government agencies with members of the community, particularly
in processes of policy development. While new media represents an
opportunity for the political elite of Australia to engage the community in
new ways, this opportunity has been largely unrealised;
• The limited role that new communications technology has had on electoral
competition and the ongoing dominance of political communication by
large, but highly concentrated mass media;
• The resource barriers preventing greater use of new technology by
Australia’s civil society in fostering grassroots participation and access to
the policy processes (their own, and to government);
• The increasing use of technology to monitor citizens’ behaviour (online and
offine), and the recent tendency towards Australia becoming a ‘surveillance
society’; and
• A general reluctance in the wider Australian community to engage politically
using the variety of new communications channels available.
Overall the audit notes that the process of developing an information society
remains an ongoing project. Many Australians still remain relatively excluded from
the new opportunities brought by technology, and political actors (in and outside
of government) continue to learn and experiment with the technologies and the
possibilities they bring. Given the high speed of change in our digital age, there
remains the distinct possibility that we are on the cusp, rather than in the midst,
of more signifcant democratic implications.
PAGE xìì
Declarations of interest
Dr Peter Chen, primary contributor to the chapters on the Australian public sector
and the electoral impacts of ICTs, currently serves as a non-paid community
representative on the Victorian Parliamentary Subcommittee on Information
Technology and has previously acted as a paid consultant to the Victorian
Parliamentary Inquiry on Electronic Democracy.
Dr Karin Geiselhart, primary contributor to the chapter on civil society, currently
serves as an advisor with Computing Assistance Support and Education
Association (CASE) and has previously been employed by the Commonwealth
Government’s National Offce for the Information Economy (NOIE).
Peter Chen and Karin Geiselhart have had some formal involvement with the On
Line Opinion website / National Forum organisation discussed in this document.
PAGE xììì
PAGE xìv
PAGE 1
The aim of this focused audit is to assess the democratic impacts that new
communications and computing technologies, like the internet, digital media, and
advanced mobile telephones, have had on the quality of democratic life in Australia.
The introduction of these technologies into the community over the past 15 years
has had dramatic impacts on the social and economic life of Australians. Digital
technologies, global connectivity, and the raft of information and communications
services they have provided have been instrumental in accelerating the general
trend towards integration of Australia into the global community. They have
devalued some forms of industrial production while creating new industries
around content and online services. They have introduced new modes of work
and employment, social relationships and philosophies of life.
In the 1990s there was widespread anticipation of revolutionary changes to the
nature of human economic and social organisation—changes that have not, as
yet, been realised. Nonetheless, it is important to consider the pace of change
and the extent to which these technologies have become modern necessities
of life and work. As with the advent of any disruptive technology with signifcant
social implications, there are bound to be direct and subtle impacts on the political
process of Australia.
1
These impacts have the prospect of advancing or reducing
the quality of democratic participation and governance.
This report will examine the impacts of new communications and computing
technologies on the overall character of democracy in Australia by looking frst at
the unique characteristics of this technology and then focusing on the four core
1
Clayton Christensen, 1997, The Innovators’ Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Boston MA,
Harvard Business School Press
InIroducIìon
PAGE 2
focal areas of the Democratic Audit:
1. Political equality
2. Popular control of government
3. Civil liberties and human rights
4. Quality of public debate
The audit is completed by looking, in some detail, at major aspects of the Australian
political landscape: from political parties and elected representatives, to the impact
of digital media on the public sphere and citizen discourse and participation.
Technology and its relationship to democratic practice
Technologies of all kinds have both direct and indirect impacts on the democratic
life of a nation. On one level, technology serves as the substance of political
dispute and negotiation—over technologies that create and destroy industries,
over the ethics of technological applications, or over the appropriate level of
government involvement in fostering new industries. On another level, technology
serves as an essential (but only partial) tool in facilitating democratic government
and its supporting administrative functions and institutions.
As technologies develop, these changes have impacts on existing political
processes, assumptions, and practices. This is particularly true in mass society,
where a large amount of the day-to-day interaction we have with the processes of
government and decision-makers is mediated – communicated and interpreted
– through our mass and select media industries. As these media evolve, they
change the relationship between policy-makers and their constituents, and the
way policy-makers are perceived and their performance evaluated.
Thus, as an example, the advent of the telegraph in the late 19th century, changed
political process in a variety of ways:
2
• Elected representatives were more easily contactable when they were
away from their electorates and could consult with staff and constituents
during parliamentary sessions. This led to an acceptance that elected
representatives—even when absent from their electorates—would be
responsive to the views of their constituents outside the formal process
of election;
• Information could travel faster than people, providing decision makers with
greater access to information of immediate importance, and transmitting
the decisions of MPs faster and wider than ever. Elected representatives
2
Bruce Bimber, 2003, Information and American Democracy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press
PAGE 8
were increasingly seen as people who should be able to access and
assess information quickly and with skill, and who would be increasingly
accountable for their actions as reported by the news media
Each successive technology, therefore, has a political application and implication.
These can support, undermine, or restructure the specifc work of formal policy
makers (party offcials, members of parliament, key bureaucrats), and informal
ones (media, academia, opinion leaders), while at the same time changing the
popular relationship between the public, their leaders, and political institutions.
The advent of television, for example, and its incorporation within the parliaments
of Australia, has changed the operations and focus of parliamentary business
towards the short exchanges of question time, which provide the nightly news with
good material for broadcast. This refects the structural impacts of technological
change and the new realities of the production and distribution of knowledge.
3
Information and communications technology
The focus of this analysis is the democratic impact of a bundle of technologies
that are commonly referred to as Information and Communications Technologies,
or ICTs. The notion of focusing on ICTs in general, rather than just one specifc
technology, like the internet, addresses the tendency for the introduction of
digital technologies to bring together a range of communications and computing
technology into multi-purpose and inter-operable devices.
Discussion about political change has been stimulated by the advent of the World
Wide Web, as a specifc submedium of the internet with characteristics making it
relatively open to participation and access. The analysis here, however, recognises
a range of changes associated with ICTs that need to be taken into consideration,
from desktop computing to the spread of personal digital devices through our
community. At the same time, we recognise that the information processing and
storage capabilities of large organisations like government departments and
political parties have increased greatly over the past two decades, and so the
capability of government and other political institutions to hold, store, analyse, and
synthesise political information is given special consideration in this analysis.
Technological characteristics of ICTs
Our emphasis on ICTs relates to the interoperability and interconnectivity of a
range of technologies. This refects the extraordinary expansion in networked
3
Marshall McLuhan, 1964, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London, Taylor & Francis
PAGE 4
communication systems, and the shift from the use of analogue to digital
technologies to store and transmit information that can be rapidly and perfectly
duplicated for redistribution.
The result of these two core characteristics of ICTs, commonly referred to as an
ongoing process of convergence, can be seen in:
• The rapid development of the internet in linking together computers that
once served only as ‘stand alone’ devices with limited ability to share and
exchange information;
• The evolution of personal computers, from complex, but limited ‘adding
machines’ and ‘word processors’, into multimedia entertainment devices
and general communications tools that provide access to all forms of
media (text, images, animations and video) and an increasing array of
communications such as e-mail, Web browsing, telephone and videophone
calls, and fax transmission;
• The increased incorporation of computing power into all manner of
household and workplace devices such as mobile telephones, photocopiers,
refrigerators, television sets, washing machines and cars;
• The portability and pervasiveness of information services throughout our
environment (portable consumer electronics); and
• The rapid expansion in the professional training and demand for the range of
technical experts, such as computer programmers, digital content creators,
information architects, web designers, etc., required to develop and service
these technologies.
This notion of convergence does not imply that one specifc device will emerge
that will contain all the functions that we want from our electronic tools,
4
but that
digital information will become highly portable across a wide range of products,
and that citizens and consumers will be increasingly immersed in, or reliant upon
the support of, these virtual environments.
This process of convergence remains ongoing, however, and while it is often
assumed that this will lead to greater and more powerful personal computers, it
may take different forms: such as increasingly redefning personal technologies
like mobile telephones, or changing the type of relationship we have with media
companies from one of passive consumption towards highly personalised
packages of tailored news and entertainment.
4
Marc Saltzman, 2004, ‘Convergence is king with today’s devices’, USA Today, 16 September
PAGE 5
The signifcance of the combination of technologies has been most apparent in
recent years with the advent of the world wide web as a popular media form. The
web typifes the power of computerisation and digitisation in that:
• The capacity of web-based information to be exchanged in digital
form makes the transmission of this content very fast, low cost, and
infnitely replicable;
• The computers used to display web content allow for interactivity between
the user and the content, and interactivity between different computers.
This not only allows content to be dynamic, but also for more complex and
intelligent information services to be developed; and
• Whereas other media such as broadcasting or print are usually one-way,
the internet can be a fully interactive medium. Users can be consumers,
editors, publishers, commentators, and audiences all in the same session.
One consequence of these characteristics is that users of networked digital
technologies have access to a massive global library. Perhaps more important,
the capacity to participate in interactive content, and be a simultaneous producer
and consumer of content, redefnes our view of what media consumers do. While
traditional theories of reception always considered media audiences active, in that
their background and points of view shaped their relationship to ‘push’ or non-
interactive media, the new media environment fnds that consumers are highly
active—either in terms of expressing strong preferences through the choices they
make, or demanding the right to reply to content provided through comments
and online virtual communities.
In addition, the comparatively low cost of production and distribution has
dramatically changed classic business models associated with selling content.
While some mainstream media organisations have been effective in making
the transition online using a range of tried and true business models (like
subscription services, or advertising), those in the traditional content industries
are having some diffculty adjusting to the new realities of information abundance
and substitutability.
5
Key implications and trends
The process of technological change and development has been, and will continue
to be, profound. Some critical social and economic changes have been:
5
Doug Brown, 2003, ‘Searching for online gold’, American Journalism Review, June.
PAGE 6
• Shifts away from manufacturing towards creative and innovation-based
industries such as the creation of media content, online and other services,
programming and software development, and knowledge management.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) estimated in 2002 that nearly 40
per cent of the Australian workforce were engaged in knowledge-based
industries, up from 33 per cent in 1989;
6
• Shifting work and social relationships.
7
These are particularly evident in the
ability of people to maintain relationships (social or economic) at a distance
and both work and play online. Individuals are spending time interacting
with each other using new technologies, as well as engaging in wholly
new forms of interaction through the technologies themselves. Recent
surveys show the amount of time Australians are spending online has been
increasing, related to diffusion of technologies that deliver pervasive and
rich media content;
8
• Changes to the relative economic importance of technologies. The
production, sale, programming, and maintenance of digital technologies,
has become a signifcant part of many developed economies. The export
of ICT-related goods and services from Australia increased 34 per cent
between 1999 and 2001 with corresponding increases in employment.
9
This
has relevance for the political power and social status of those engaged in
this marketplace; and
• Convergence in the market structures of organisations that produce,
distribute, and sell digital information and content.
10
In line with the technical
convergence witnessed in recent years, it is possible to identify a matching
convergence (mergers, acquisitions, and collaborative business ventures) in
the media and communications industry around the world. This aggregation
of media ownership and production has important political, economic, and
cultural implications.
This, of course, raises questions about how societies access and use information.
While the common perception is that the amount of available information has
increased in the ‘new media’ age—a positive democratic outcome—we also
6
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 2002, 1375.0 Measuring a Knowledge-based Economy and Society—An
Australian Framework, Canberra, ABS
7
Irene Hardhill and Anne Green, 2003, ‘Remote working—altering the spatial contours of work and home in the new
economy’, New Technology, Work & Employment, 18(3): 212-222
8
Choice, 2005, Broadband frenzy leads to more time online, Sydney, Australian Consumers’ Association
9
Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA), 2003, An Overview of the Australian ICT
Industry and Innovation Base, Based on work undertaken by the Framework for the Future Mapping Working Group,
DCITA, Canberra: 5,7
10
Edward Herman and Robert McChesney, 1997, The Global Media, London, Cassell
PAGE 1
need to note concerns, such as:
• The loss of local content production in a competitive environment where
international media have a signifcant advantage through syndication;
• Diffculties determining the reliability of information found online;
• The possibility that citizens will over-specialise in their information
consumption habits, losing a connection to wider issues or points of view
different from their own; and
• Differential levels of access to the new media environment, particularly for
people with lower economic means, with disabilities, and the aged.
Political impacts of ICT
At a personal level, the low barriers to participation in the age of digital production can
encourage the view that the advent of these technologies provides the wider public
with new tools for self expression, including political expression, that have been
denied while media access was subject to traditional barriers of cost or bandwidth.
This observation has led to new language to describe the type of society where
participation in mass (broad reach) media becomes more open and participative:
• The remixing of existing content, sometimes called ‘rip, mix and burn’,
making popular commercialised cultural products open to the general
public to take, modify and distribute;
• Breaking down of some of the traditional preserves of professionals such
as control over information (‘citizen journalism’), publishing and distribution
(‘wikis’ or collaborative publishing online), or even personal services such
as the use of the internet to access medical information or engage in online
‘self-help’;
11
• The ability to form new types of civic organisation using technology, breaking
down traditional barriers of place and time;
12
and
• The use of the technology to undertake specifc political activities, such as
voting or consultation online.
Clearly, there are good examples of this open or free cultural approach embracing
the digital age: the number of non-commercial and private journals, magazines,
11
Mary Griffths, 2004, ‘“Keeping it real” – or just an exercise in making it easier to govern? Media trainings, life events, the
bloggosphere, and the e-citizen’ Proceedings of the Australian Electronic Governance Conference 2004, 14-15 April,
University of Melbourne, CD ROM
12
Peter Chen, 2004, ‘A comparative analysis of the political email lists’, Proceedings of he Australian Electronic
Governance Conference 2004, 14-15 April, University of Melbourne, CD ROM
PAGE 8
and ‘blogs’ published online has continued to grow over the last decade. Currently
it is estimated that 50 million people around the world produce an online journal.
13
More recently, the growth of ‘podcasts’ (online serialised audio content) and
‘vlogs’ (online video diaries) has illustrated that the internet, as an open network,
does encourage active participation in this new media.
On the other hand, while these phenomena point to increasing public interest in
the ‘active consumption’ of digital media, the vast majority of global technology
users remain relatively inactive in their response to open media access. As the
Pew Internet & American Life Project revealed in 2004, large proportions of United
States (US) internet users were largely passive in their use of the technology,
browsing for news and current affairs issues, but not engaged as active content
creators—a shift in the technology of media consumption, but not the ideology of
media consumption. This view of the limited creative use of new media has been
confrmed by similar Australian research.
14
In terms of the fourcriteria of direct concern to this focused audit, the properties
of the new ICTs carry obvious promises and challenges:
1. From the perspective of political equality, new ICTs offer the opportunity for
widening the pool of active participants in politics. If information is power
then the internet clearly can act as a democratising and equalising force,
providing individuals with a vast array of alternative information sources,
accessible virtually instantaneously. In addition, it offers a forum to those
who might previously have been unable or unwilling to engage in debate
on issues of concern to them. On the downside, there is the issue of the
digital divide to consider. New channels for communication and infuence
are equalising forces only insofar as they allow for all viewpoints to be
heard. Until universal access is achieved, the potential for enhanced political
equality will be qualifed.
2. The new ICTs provide the possibility of a window into government for
citizens and for governments to engage in more extensive forms of citizen
consultation. Such forms of online consultation need to be carefully
designed, however, and there have been a number of failed experiments.
Moreover government websites do not always meet community needs
in terms of accessibility of information and the storage of digital records.
They rarely provide detailed information about how the organisation works.
Whether new ICTs serve to enhance popular control of government is still
13
Riley, Duncan, 2005, ‘Number of blogs now exceeds 50 million worldwide’, The Blog Herald, April, http://www.blogher-
ald.com/2005/04/14/number-of-blogs-now-exceeds-50-million-worldwide
14
L. Rainie, M. Cornfeld, and J. Horrigan, ‘The internet and campaign 2004’, 6 March 2005, The Pew Research Center,
www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_2004_Campaign.pdf); Parliament of Victoria, 2005, Victorian Electronic Democracy
Inquiry: Final Report, Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee
PAGE 0
open to question.
3. One area of new ICT development that has provoked some concern is in
the domain of civil liberties and rights. While overall the internet has been
seen as freeing up information and speech, especially for those living under
authoritarian regimes, it is useful to remember that the technology is not, as
has been noted above, inherently democratic. Cyberspace opens up new
possibilities for surveillance and monitoring of individuals’ behaviour. Internet
Service Providers (ISPs), as well as more malicious external forces can keep
track of one’s web browsing habits. Unauthorised copying and distribution
of private correspondence is more easily facilitated and diffcult to trace.
Issues of privacy, therefore, loom large for any democratic assessment of
new ICTs’ potential.
4. The openness of internet space invariably means that not all voices heard
will be of the measured and deliberative kind that deliver a high quality of
public debate. Indeed the issue of ‘faming’ or abusive verbal exchanges
online have become something of a well-known problem for discussion
forums and internet chat rooms. Some political parties for example have had
to shut down their discussion boards due to fears of legal action and negative
media coverage. Including a moderator, however, can also lead to stifing
and controlling of debate, particularly in the anonymous online environment,
where deletion of entries to the debate is a matter of cut and paste.
Overall, new ICTs can be seen as yielding considerable pluses against our four
criteria but also some likely negatives. Weighing up these pros and cons, scholars
have emerged with a number of both optimistic and pessimistic predictions for
the future.
The optimistic scenario focuses on the potential of the new technology to provide
open access to new and alternative forms of political information and the capacity
to engage directly in public debate. As an increasingly global medium with low
barriers to entry relative to a commercial news frm, the internet can be seen
as a new and dynamic ‘public sphere’ of educative public debate and political
socialisation, and a low-cost tool for political organisation and action.
15
The dystopic scenario focuses on the capacity for large organisations such
as governments, commercial interests and media corporations to manipulate
these technologies towards their own interests and objectives. A distinction may
be drawn between Version 1.0 and Version 2.0 of the internet: a comparison
15
Stephen S. Lax, 2004, ‘The internet and democracy’ in Web Studies, 2nd edition, David Gauntlett and Ross Horsley
(eds), New York, Oxford University Press
PAGE 10
between the anarchic open days of the early internet where user participation
was high and this emphasis upon participation focused on the ‘gift economy’,
as opposed to recent moves by governments to regulate online activities and
corporations to develop business models that commercialise the technology and
place greater barriers to accessing online information (‘walled gardens’
16
).
For those concerned with the power of authoritarian states to misuse these
technologies, examples of online censorship, the use of expansive citizen profling
technologies, and covert government attacks against democratic media or political
organisations are cited as evidence that the technology—while open in design—
is increasingly being brought back under state control. In addition, it is argued
that the new power of computing will equip governments with increased ability
to scrutinise the lives of their citizens and monitor their behaviour, either through
tracking our ‘virtual lives’ or by the synthesis and aggregation of large amounts of
disparate information government agencies hold about their citizens.
Conclusion: A balanced audit
If either of the optimistic or dystopic positions were entirely accurate, this
review would be relatively concise. Professor Stephen Coleman of the Oxford
Internet Institute recently noted that there are a number of implicit assumptions
underpinning questions related to the political impact of technologies.
17
In this
case, the assumptions are that there is a completed project called the internet
and another completed project called democracy, and the essential research
question is simply a task of assessing how the latter accommodates the former.
As Coleman observed, both of these projects remains incomplete. It is therefore
clearly possible to show how greater media openness has led to pluralisation and
new forms of political action and activity. On the other hand, governments and
large commercial interests have attempted to use the technology to manufacture
consent and suppress dissent. Both forces, democratic and autocratic, co-exist
in a complex relationship that remains ongoing and provides the landscape of
political action.
This review of the democratic impact of ICTs on democracy notes that:
• A balanced assessment of the impact of ICTs on Australian democracy
needs to look across the range of institutions and activities that make up our
democratic system;
16
Graham Meikle, 2002, Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, Annandale, Pluto Press
17
Stephen Coleman on ABC Newsradio, 17 April 2004
PAGE 11
• It needs to consider direct activities to increase, expand, or change
democratic practices using new technology, as well as the wider socio-
economic changes associated with these technologies; and
• To acknowledge that the democratic impacts may be complex, and multi-
directional.
PAGE 12
In this chapter we examine how political parties have responded to the challenges
and opportunities of ICTs, with a particular emphasis on how they have affected
the parties’ capacity to promote democratic values.
In order to do this it is probably most helpful to begin by outlining the key activities
of modern political parties in democratic society. We identify eight key functions
for political parties in this analysis:
• Voter socialisation;
• Education;
• Mobilisation;
• Leader recruitment;
• Articulation;
• Channelling;
• Aggregation of interests; and
• Policy-making.
18
While all these functions are important for parties to perform, it is arguably in
their role as aggregators of individual interests that they provide their most
indispensable and unique service to democracy. Parties are a means by which
society can reconcile conficting individual demands and unite the mass of people
behind broad policy platforms.
18
Roy Macridis, 1967, ‘Introduction: the history, functions, and typology of parties’ in Political Parties: Contemporary
Trends and Ideas, Roy Macridis (ed.), New York, Harper & Row
PolìIìcal parIìcs
go onlìnc
PAGE 18
In order to perform these functions it is clear that parties need to collect and
communicate a large amount of information. Changes to the communication
and information processing capacities of these organisations, therefore, will hold
signifcant implications for their abilities to perform such tasks.
As has been made clear in the introduction, ICTs signifcantly increase the amount
and quality of communication and information that can fow through a society. In
addition, the channel for grass-roots input is also signifcantly expanded, with
new forms of interactive communication being offered in place of the one-way,
point-to-mass style prevalent under the old media system. Finally, the more
decentralised system of management of internet-based communication devolves
much greater power to individual users over what they see and also allows them
to be publishers of information.
For political parties these shifts in communication possibilities carry a number of
major implications:
1. Their informational and educational capacity is expanded in that they have a
new channel through which they can offer much greater amounts of material
to voters;
2. Their mobilising capacity is expanded in that they can conduct a more
interactive dialogue with both supporters and members, and with the
broader public through e-mail, online consultative fora and chatrooms, as
well as specially commissioned website question and answer sessions;
3. Their ability to articulate interests is enhanced given the greater opportunities
for individuals and organisations to communicate their needs and demands
in a more targeted and specifc way; and
4. Their capacity to aggregate interests may undergo some diminution as their
capacity to articulate increases. However, the interactive possibilities of the
new media may provide new fora for debate and consensus-building.
To assess the impact of the new ICTs on parties’ roles as democratic actors we
will focus on these four aspects and seek to draw out the implications for citizens’
equality of infuence, control over government, rights and liberties, as well as
quality of civil discourse. In undertaking this task we will also seek to engage
with the broader debates about the overall health of political parties in advanced
democracies, and to what extent they can be seen to be in decline.
PAGE 14
Parties have been coming under increasing pressure to maintain and recruit new
support as they move into the new millennium.
19
How far does the introduction
of ICTs offer the possibility for breathing new life into the parties, securing if not
a transformation then a reform and re-vitalisation of their ability to connect with
voters and members?
On the other hand, are new technologies actually helping to foster the longer-term
erosion of parties? As people are offered more means to articulate their own needs,
does this ultimately loosen the parties’ grip on securing the consensus necessary
to legitimate government? While it is impossible to provide defnitive answers to
these questions only one decade after the new ICT revolution began, the evidence
that does exist can be probed for signs of where trends are heading.
Informing, educating, and socialising
20
Party websites
How are parties using new media to spread and manage information about
themselves and their policy ideas?
The frst source of evidence consists in party websites. Websites form one of
the most publicly available and widely accessible new media applications that
organisations can use to inform citizens of their goals. Table 1 shows the results
of functional analysis of party websites was conducted in 2000, and updated in
2003. Party websites were awarded scores on the basis of:
• information provision, such as the availability of policy documents, party
history, and press releases;
• resource generation, such as the appeals for donations, membership or
the availability of merchandising (the higher scores being awarded for their
extent and for the degree to which these transactions could be carried out
on the site; and
• opportunities for participation, such as email/feedback features and chatrooms.
19
Russell Dalton and Martin Wattenberg (eds), 2000, Parties Without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial
Democracies, Oxford, Oxford University Press
20
The data sources utilised here are: Rachel Gibson and Stephen Ward, 2002, ‘Virtual campaigning: Australian parties
and the impact of the internet’, Australian Journal of Political Science 37(1), pp. 99–130; Rachel Gibson and Stephen
Ward, 2004, ‘Letting the daylight in? Australian State parties and the WWW’, in Rachel Gibson, Paul Nixon and Ian Ward
(eds), Net Gain? Political Parties and the Internet, London, Routledge, pp. 139–161; Daniel Edwards, 2005, The Use
of Internet Communications Technologies by Global Social Movements in Australia, unpublished PhD thesis, Canberra,
Australian National University; Clive Bean, David Gow and Ian McAllister, Australian Election Study 2001 and 2004
and Rachel Gibson, David Gow, Clive Bean, and Ian McAllister, Australian Candidate Study 2001 and 2004, Australian
Social Science Data Archive, Canberra, Australian National University; Interviews with federal party offcials responsible
for website management: ALP, Chief Information Offcer (28/06/05); Liberal Party, Acting Web Manager (29/06/05); The
Nationals, Offce Manager (29/06/05); Australian Greens, National Manager and National Convenor (23 June 2005).
PAGE 15
]ablc 1: FuncIìons oI parIv wcbsìIcs and daIcs oI csIablìshmcnI
0aIc wcbsìIc
csIablìshcd
InIormaIìon
Provìsìon
Rcsourcc
0cncraIìon
ParIìcìpaIìonl
ìnIcracIìvìIv
ParlìamcnIarv parIìcs
ALP 1994 11 6 2
Liberals 1996 5 1 2
Democrats 1997 10 2 3
Nationals 1998 5 1 1
One Nation na 4 2 6
Greens 1998 6 6 4
Mean 6.83 3.0 3.0
Non-parlìamcnIarv parIìcs
Unity 1996 3 1 0
Christian Democratic Party 1997 5 1 1
Communist Party na 3 2 2
National Action na 3 2 0
Mean 3.5 1.5 0.75
Overall Mean
Score range
5.5
0 – 13
2.4
0 – 9
2.1
0 – 7
Source: Gibson and Ward, ‘Virtual campaigning’
These results show frst that the ALP were well ahead of their counterparts in
setting up a site in 1994, most parties following two to three years later. In addition,
the ALP also offered more information on their site, scoring in the top third of the
information provision scale. Only the Australian Democrats performed as well. The
other parties, particularly those without parliamentary representation, performed
very poorly, averaging only around one third of the information features.
In 2001, a follow-up analysis of State sites for the ALP, the Liberals and the
Australian Greens was conducted. These results showed that while most State
branches maintained a site, the ALP did not dominate at the State level. Indeed,
at the State level, neither of the two major parties offered highly informative or
content-rich sites and did not clearly outpace the Greens in this regard. However,
on more delivery-related features such as multimedia add-ons and accessibility
and navigability, the two major parties performed better.
PAGE 16
While the focus of analysis in the 2003 study was to compare parties’ use of
ICTs to other non-governmental actors, it did separate parliamentary from non-
parliamentary parties and report the types of news and information features that
appeared on their sites, as well as interactive features such as online discussion,
e-mail feedback opportunities and donation facilities. This analysis, reported in
Figure 1, reveals a similar picture to 2000.
Turning to the more qualitative data generated by interviews and questionnaires
administered to party offcials during this period we can draw a connection between
what the parties wanted to do with their sites and what they actually delivered.
The ranking of functions by communication staff from the fve parliamentary
parties is presented in Table 2. This table shows a clear understanding among
the parties of the web as an information tool, with a lower emphasis being placed
on its interactive and feedback possibilities.
Source: Edwards, The Use of Internet Communications Technologies by Global Social Movements in Australia
Fìgurc 1: ParIv wcbsìIc conIcnI 2008
0
20
40
60
80
100
Avg. email contacts Online poll Disc. Forum Who’s Who Archive Org. History
Parliamentary party
Non-parliamentary party
%
o
f
s
i
t
e
s
w
i
t
h
f
e
a
t
u
r
e
FcaIurc
PAGE 11
]ablc 2: FuncIìons oI wcbsìIc (qucsIìonnaìrc daIa]¯
ParIv Incrcasc
voIcs
RccruìI
mcmbcrs
Provìdc
ìnIo Io
publìc
Provìdc
ìnIo Io
mcdìa
Mcmbcr
Iccdback
voIcr
Iccdback
Kccp
pacc
wìIh I]
Liberals 4 3 4 3 3 3 4
ALP 3 1 3 2 3 3 2
Nationals 4 4 4 2 2 2 2
Democrats
Greens
4
1
3
1
3
4
3
2
3
0
3
1
1
0
Mean 2.5 2.8 3.5 2.5 2.1 2.1 1.8
* Question: Please indicate how important the following functions of the website are for the party using the following
scale: 4 = most important; 3 = very important; 2 = quite important; 1 = somewhat important; 0 = of no importance.
Source: Gibson and Ward, ‘Virtual campaigning’
Party databases
A further application of ICTs that can be used by parties for informing and
educating the public is the construction and maintenance of databases of voters.
Across Australia, parties with parliamentary representation are given access to
the electoral roll to allow them to communicate with the public. Parties use this
information in conjunction with internal databases to develop a greater level of
personalised information about the voting public. These compound resources
allow parties to identify particular segments of the electorate for receipt of
customised political messages. This more precise means of delivery is particularly
useful during election campaigns when voters are being pursued for their votes.
It has been discovered, however, although the smaller parties do make use of
electronic data on voters in order to more effectively campaign, it is the larger
parties that are making most extensive use of these tools. Efforts by the Greens
and Democrats tend instead to be ‘…simple spreadsheets with lists of contacts’,
21
whereas the ALP and the Liberals have developed much more sophisticated
database software—that contain comprehensive and frequently updated
constituency-level information on voters that enable them to target potential
supporters. This fnding was confrmed by candidate research in the 2004 federal
21
Peter Van Onselen, 2004, ‘Electoral databases: big brother or democracy unbound?’, Australian Journal of Political
Science, 39(2): 349–66
PAGE 18
election, showing that the major party candidates were four times more likely to
utilise (draw from and add to) these resources during the election.
22
The personnel and skill requirements to update and maintain these lists at the
national level are signifcant and fow largely from the two parties’ dominance in
the House of Representatives. Through their parliamentary and electorate offces,
MPs receive a considerable amount of information about their constituents that
is logged electronically.
The one clear disadvantage of this decentralised method of compilation, however,
is that the amount and quality of data entered varies according to the extent to
which individual MPs and their staff will invest time in such activities. The Liberal
Party in particular has attempted to ensure MPs make regular inputs into their
database. In addition, being the governing party, it has further resources to draw
on in the shape of the Government Members’ Secretariat (GMS). Thus, although
the web may be open to all, when it comes to the more strategic and electorally
relevant uses of ICTs for information gathering and dissemination, the balance is
much more clearly in the favour of the bigger parties.
Who is the audience?
Party offcials largely view their websites as a means to convey information.
However, the audience focus appears to have narrowed somewhat. While the
results in Table 2 indicate that it was the general public that was regarded as one
of the main recipients of the information offered online during the establishment
phase of party websites, fve years later offcials from the two major parties, as
well as the Greens and the Nationals, all identifed members as a major focus of
their online efforts.
The ability to offer a continuous and easily accessible updated source of
information for the party faithful as well as staff across the country was regarded as
a stand-out feature of the web. In addition, e-mail and particularly the distribution
of e-newsletters to members were regarded as a great advantage. The Greens
in the ACT reported that less than 10 per cent of their membership have opted
to receive their newsletter in printed form. The ALP reported plans to move the
party’s publication The Labour Herald into an online only version. Finally, the
Liberal Party reported that a change to the 2004 election site was to archive the
sites from 1998 and 2001, this move being seen as signalling the websites’ value
as an information depository or resource.
22
Peter Chen, 2006, ‘e-election 2004? New media and the campaign’ in Mortgage Nation, Marian Simms and John
Warhurst (eds), Bentley, WA, API-Network
PAGE 10
Of course it is one thing for the parties to use ICTs such as webpages to
impart information. The success of such initiatives, however, clearly depends
on individuals actually seeing their sites. Results from the Australian Election
Studies of 1998, 2001 and 2004 offer insight into questions about the audience
for the party sites as well as those seeking more general political information.
As illustrated in Table 3 below, the proportion of those surveyed during each of
these elections that had used the internet to get news and information has grown
slowly over the three elections surveyed.
]ablc 8: voIcr usc oI Ihc ìnIcrncI Ior clccIìon ncws and ìnIormaIìon 1008-2004¯
1008 2001 2004
Use of internet All (%) Internet
access (%)
All (%) Internet
access (%)
All (%) Internet
access (%)
No internet access 73 / 41 / 33 /
Access, didn’t use 20 84 50 84 55 82
Used at least once 7 16 9 17 12 18
Visit party site na 5 5
Visit Australian Electoral
Commission site
na na 8
Visit mainstream news site na na 12
Total 100 100 100 100 100 100
(N) (1,827) (501) (1,763) (1,045) (1,739) (1,160)
*Question: ‘Did you make use of the Internet at all to get news or information about the 2004 federal election?’ and
‘During the 2004 election campaign did you visit any of the following websites?’
na = not available
Source Bean, et al. Australian Election Study 2004
As this table reveals, the level of interest in online news and information is not
startlingly high. While it has been creeping up, it still compares rather unfavourably
with those claiming to have accessed other forms of media for news. In a related
study over 60 per cent of respondents reported some use of TV sources for news
on the election. However, while use of the internet for news is rising, the usage of
other mediums, particularly newsprint and radio, is declining (see Figure 2).
23
23
Rachel Gibson and Ian McAllister, 2005, Does Cyber-Campaigning Win Votes? Online Communication in the 2004
Australian Election, Center for the Study of Democracy Paper 05–09, University of California, Irvine
PAGE 20
Thus, the importance of the internet as a disseminator of information can be
expected to rise in subsequent elections. In terms of where users are going to
get their political information, the evidence from the 2004 election reveals that
mainstream news sites were among the most popular destinations for those
online. The party sites fare relatively well, however, being the third most popular
destination among those polled, after the Australian Electoral Commission’s
(AEC) site.
The comparison with 2001, however, reveals that the parties’ efforts over the
past few years have not yielded any signifcant increase in audience size, with
fve per cent of internet users choosing to visit party sites during both elections.
In addition, compared to other countries these fgures are somewhat low. In
particular, reports from the US Presidential election revealed 52 per cent of
internet users had visited either George Bush or John Kerry’s sites during the
course of the campaign.
24
Overall, therefore, it would seem that parties in Australia are not currently using
new ICTs to engage in widespread efforts to educate and inform voters to any
24
See Rainie, Cornfeld, and Horrigan, ‘The Internet and Campaign’
Question: ‘How much attention did you pay to reports about the election campaign in television/radio/the news-
papers?’ (per cent say ‘a good deal’). ‘Did you make use of the Internet at all to get news or information about the
[1998/2001/2004] Federal election?’ (percent say ‘yes’).
Sources: Australian Electoral Survey 1993-2004.
Fìgurc 2: Mcdìa usc durìng clccIìon campaìgns: 1008 Io 2004 (pcr ccnI]
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
2004 2001 1998 1996 1993
41
31 32
26
28
29
15
21
15
16
21
18
14
18
4
9
12
Internet
Television
Radio
Newspapers
PAGE 21
great extent. The audience for the sites is relatively small. However, from the
parties’ perspective it appears that use of the technology to reach a narrower
audience is not seen as wasted effort, with members and activists being seen as
increasingly important targets for sites. Increased accessing of information by any
citizens is, on the face of it, a laudable development. However, if that information
acquisition is concentrated largely in the existing pool of activists then one can
argue that the internet presents a more worrying possibility of shoring up and
consolidating the existing power relations in society.
Citizen mobilisation
In this section we consider what the parties are doing to use the new media to
promote citizen engagement and participation.
Connecting with the public
Based on the evidence from Table 1 and Figure 1 it is clear that parties have
not made participation and feedback as strong a priority for their websites as
the downward provision of information. While parties appear to give the ‘nod’ to
using the technology for some interactive purposes (largely e-mail contacts), in
general their sites do not feature many interactive features that promote dialogue
with the grassroots.
On the whole, the parliamentary parties, and particularly the smaller ones, perform
better on this feature than the non-parliamentary players. Further support for this
fnding is revealed in State-level analysis which has found Green party sites to
be notably more interactive than those belonging to the ALP and Liberal Party.
25
Thus, it does not appear that party size and resources are critical to the operation
of more dynamic facilities such as online question and answer sessions or chat
rooms, at least outside the real fringe players.
Given these results, it is not surprising to fnd the parties ranking functions, such
as voter and member feedback, lower in importance than information provision
(see Table 2). However, the particularly low scores given by the Greens to these
features is rather more challenging to reconcile, suggesting that while they offer
these features they do not see them as priorities within the site. Conversely, whilst
the major parties may say they value facilities for feedback using new ICTs, the
evidence does not suggest they have put those values into practice very strongly.
Interviews with party offcials during 2005 largely confrm this view. The idea of
25
Rachel Gibson and Stephen Ward, 2003, ‘Letting the daylight in? Australian State parties and the WWW’ in Net Gain?
Political Parties and the Internet, Rachel Gibson, Paul Nixon and Ian Ward (eds) London, Routledge
PAGE 22
web-based initiatives as a means to promote broader public engagement in
policy-making was not prominent among the parties. Projects like the UK’s Big
Conversation started by the Labour Party in 2001 to foster national debate, for
example, were not in evidence.
26
The Greens were among the most experimental
of the parties running daily opinion polls on policy issues (and fending off malicious
attacks designed to subvert the results). Some State parties had also operated
open Bulletin Board Systems but had to close them down when the postings
became too vitriolic.
Short Message Service (SMS) was also utilised by most of the parties during the
2004 election, but largely as an alerting and updating service rather than to try to
reach younger voters (as the UK Labour Party tried in the 2001 General Election).
This is not to say that the parties were entirely static in their approach to the
web. Most of the parties reported receiving around fve to ten e-mails per day
via their site, the Greens again being the stand-out party in this regard, reporting
between 40–50 e-mails per day. Those that proved relatively simple were dealt
with by the website/national offce staff. Those requiring more in-depth responses
were forwarded to the relevant individuals. In addition, a steady stream of queries
about joining, donating or volunteering help were also reported by the parties,
these being dealt with indirectly and passed onto the State branches.
We turn now to examine the question of online mobilisation by parties in more
depth. Specifcally, we look at the types of voters visiting the party sites. By
examining the demographics, party affliation and a range of attitudes and
behaviours of those individuals, it becomes possible to draw some more informed
conclusions about the extent to which parties’ use of ICTs largely reinforces
current participation biases among the electorate. Table 4 reports the fndings
from a breakdown of the 64 surveyed individuals that visited party sites during
the 2004 election.
26
http://thebigconversation.org
PAGE 28
]ablc 4: CharacIcrìsIìcs oI vìsìIors Io parIv wcbsìIcs ìn 2004
vìsìI parIv sìIc (%] 0vcrall samplc
(%]
Socio-demographic characteristics
Gender
Male
Female
56
44
48
52
Age
18-24
25-34
35-44
45-54
55-64
65+
8
2
8
14
27
42
11
9
14
21
19
26
Education
Tertiary (p-grad/bachelors degree)
No qualifcation since leaving school
50
18
25
35
Employment
Full-time
Student
65
11
41
3
Political attitudes
Good deal of interest in the election 56 30
Partisan identifcation
Liberal
National
ALP
Democrat
Green
Other
No Party
Very strong party supporter
30
2
28
0
20
5
16
36
42
3
32
1
5
2
16
21
(N) 64 1,769
Question: During the 2004 election campaign did you visit any of the following websites? …Party website (i.e. Liberals,
ALP, Greens etc.)
Source: Bean et al. Australian Election Study, 2004
PAGE 24
It is clear that the parties are certainly connecting with more committed and active
individuals. While around 30 per cent of the sample overall express a great deal
of interest in the election, just over half of those visiting the parties’ sites did so.
In addition these people are more likely to be male, older than 55 and possess
a tertiary education or full-time job. Given that such individuals are typically more
likely to participate than most other groups in society, the story does not sound
encouraging for parties mobilising new people to engage with politics through ICTs.
The fact that a greater number of strong supporters visit the party sites also indicates
that the parties are preaching to the converted, if not members specifcally.
In breaking down which parties are scooping the greatest audience for their
sites online, however, the fgures provide a somewhat more positive story. The
minor parties are clearly using the technology to great effect to connect with their
supporters. Twenty per cent of those visiting party sites reported identifying with
the Green party, a fgure distinctly out of proportion to the one in twenty in the
wider population that identify with the Greens and a fgure comparable with that
for the two major parties.
Thus, it may be that while the technology at the individual level may be promoting
the interests of those who are already active politically, the causes they support and
the organisations they promote tend to be non-mainstream. At an organisational
level, a mobilisation may be taking place through technologies such as the web
and e-mail that is challenging existing power bases. Overall, therefore, this could
be leading to a degree of redistribution of power and infuence toward the smaller
parties, which may result in a shift in how the political system, as a whole, is run.
Connecting with the party base
The evidence reported thus far concerns efforts by parties to use the new ICTs
to reach out and engage the general public. However, intra-party networks, or
intranets, can also be established by parties, allowing them to replicate these
benefts internally, providing greater information and opportunities for input from
their members. Information on the internal uses of the new ICTs is of course
somewhat more diffcult to obtain than data on websites. Interviews with offcials
from four of the parliamentary parties, however, indicates that at present none has
formally established a system for internal electronic debate between members
and party offcials over matters of policy.
The most common feature is a members-only section of the national website
which for the Liberals and Nationals is designed for offce-holding members at
PAGE 25
the State and federal levels, not the broader membership. The facility is thus a
means of enhancing administrative effciency within the party organisation, rather
than increasing transparency for rank and fle members or giving them a greater
say in the running of the party.
The Greens operate a more open members-only section of their federal website,
accessible to all, not just those with offce-holding roles. In addition, the Greens
also reported a series of listservs established by members with commercial
hosting services such as Yahoo! These lists bring together a defned sub-group
within the party such as State councillors or parliamentary staff. Such lists are
clearly important to party operations although they do not appear to have an
offcial role in party affairs, being managed by the groups individually.
The parties did report maintaining some type of e-mail database of interested
individuals who signed up via the website for e-newsletters or to lend their support.
In addition, parties expressed interest in developing member-specifc e-mail lists,
although none appeared to have a comprehensive list. The Greens in particular
voiced strong concerns about the privacy implication of maintaining a national
list, since membership was at the State level. Also the need to avoid ‘spamming’
members with unwanted e-mails was mentioned by the Greens as a downside
of maintaining national lists. The Liberals reported sending a bi-weekly national
newsletter via e-mail to members and interested individuals using a database of
the addresses collected from those visiting the site (i.e. non-members).
Issue articulation
In this section we examine the extent to which the new media are allowing parties
to articulate new demands that would otherwise not be heard in the political
system. While this can occur through existing parties taking up new issues, it can
also take place through the formation of new parties.
Pluralisation and the growth of parties
One simple way to examine this proposition is simply to count the number of
voices in the system, as measured by the AEC registration of political parties.
Thus, the frst question we examine here is whether there has been a rise in
the number of parties competing in elections since the mid-1990s when the
technology frst entered the public domain.
PAGE 26
Using data from the AEC on party registration,
27
it would appear that there has
actually been a decrease in the number of parties operating since the mid-1990s.
As at May 2005 the fgures reported in Table 5 from AEC statistics show 61 parties
to be formally registered. Fifty of those 61 are recorded as having competed in
the November 2004 federal election. The fgures for 1996 report a total of 72
parties as offcially registered at the time of the election. The AEC also provides a
list of the de-registered parties dating from October 1988 to February 2005.
De-registration, whether done voluntarily by the party itself or imposed by the
AEC,
28
can be seen as a clear indicator of party failure or extinction. Using these
fgures we can usefully compare the incidence of de-registration during the years
1988-1996 when internet use was minimal among the parties (as shown by
website adoption in Table 1) and the period, 1997 up to 2005, when its use was
more widespread.
What this comparison reveals, as shown in Table 5, is that more parties failed or
were de-registered in the later nine-year period, with most of these occurring in the
years from 1999 onward, when parties had wider access to the technology. Such
results of course cannot prove conclusively that the internet failed to assist new
parties in articulating their concerns (indeed, it may indicate the formation of other
types of associations). However, this does challenge claims that the technology
has helped to bring a host of new smaller players into the party system. Just at
the time when parties were in a position to make use of the web and e-mail to
spread their message, it would seem that record numbers have been collapsing.
One cannot even claim that the increased number of de-registrations results
from an increased number of parties forming, since as noted above, registrations
across the period have not increased.
27
www.aec.gov.au/_content/who/party_reg
28
As a result of failure to endorse candidates or retain suffcient members.
PAGE 21
]ablc 5: Numbcr oI dc-rcgìsIcrcd parIìcs 1088 Io 2005
SIaIus ParIìcs
RcgìsIcrcd
Federal Election 1996
Federal Election 2004
0c-rcgìsIcrcd
Total 1988 – Feb 2005
Total de-registered 1988 – 1996
Total de-registered 1997 – 2005
72
61
82
39
43
Source: AEC List of De-registered Political Parties (Feb 2005)
http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/who/party_reg/deregistered/
A great leveller?
While the new communication technologies may not necessarily be increasing
the number of new parties in the party system as a whole, it may still be the case
that they are enhancing levels of interest articulation by levelling the playing feld
among existing players. The data reported earlier (Table 2) does shed some light
on this question, with a divide emerging between the parliamentary and non-
parliamentary parties in terms of the level of site functionality and content.
Table 6 reinforces this picture, reporting the delivery and design features of the
party sites, as well as some measures of their popularity and visibility. The columns
report summary scores on a range of aspects of site design ranging from the
use of visual images and multi-media features (‘glitz’), the presence of text only
options, translation tools and software to assist the blind (access), site maps,
search tools and menu bars (navigability), frequency of updates (freshness) and
connectedness of the site to the wider web through in and out-bound links.
PAGE 28
]ablc 6: ParIv wcbsìIc dcsìgn and dclìvcrv
0lìIz
Indcx
Acccss NavìgaIìon Frcshncss Inbound
lìnks¯
0uIbound
lìnks¯¯
ParlìamcnIarv parIìcs
ALP 5 1 6 6 130,000 39
Liberals 2 1 1 1 91,900 21
Democrats 2 0 5 5 191,000 29
Nationals 2 1 2 2 116,000 na
One Nation 1 0 1 1 32,400 1
Green 2 1 5 5 967,000 21
Mean 2.3 0.6 3.3 3.3 254,717
Non-parlìamcnIarv
parIìcs
Unity 2 0 1 1 16 na
Christian Democratic Pty 3 0 0 0 75 1
Communist 1 0 1 1 16 20
National Action 1 0 1 1 na na
Mean 1.8 0 0.8 0.8 35.7
Overall Mean
Score range
2.1
0 - 6
0.4
0 - 5
2.3
0 – n
2.3
0-6
156,823
Source: Gibson and Ward ‘Virtual campaigning’
* Data collected July 2005 using Google search engine
** Data collected by Ackland and Gibson July 2004
In addition to the content analysis of sites, Edwards also updated the 2000 party
website analysis to include design and delivery features. Selected fndings are
reported in Figure 3.
PAGE 20
These fndings show that while the major parties had moved away from offering
glitzy sites, the fringe parties were actually become slightly better performers in
this regard, although clearly none was particularly active in using the multimedia
features of the web. When it comes to features promoting site accessibility,
however, the established parties appear to still have a strong advantage, being
much more likely to offer search facilities and site maps.
In addition, it is also useful to look at other more objective measures of prominence.
One obvious means to assess the relative visibility of the party sites is by calculating
the number of links into the party sites according to Google and also recording the
number of outbound hyperlinks made by the parties themselves.
These fgures are reported in the fnal two columns of Table 6 and show that again
while the minor parliamentary parties are as well or even better connected than
the two major parties, the fringe parties are very much less visible to the average
internet user. While the parliamentary parties have an average of a quarter of a
million sites linking to them on the web, the non-parliamentary parties only have
about 35 links. In terms of linking outward, while the major parties are among
Source: Edwards The Use of Internet Communication Technologies by Global Social Movements in Australia
Fìgurc 8: 0csìgn and dclìvcrv IcaIurcs oI parIv wcbsìIcs 2008
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Site Map Search engine Text only option Video Flash graphics
Table 2: State anti-corruption bodies
State Anti-corruption body Year established
NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption 1988
Vic -
Qld Qld Criminal Justice Commission* 1989
Qld Crime Commission* 1997
Crime and Misconduct Commission 2002
WA Anti-Corruption Commission# 1996
Corruption and Crime Commission 2004
SA -
Tas -
* Merged in the Crime and Misconduct Commission
Parliamentary party
Non-parliamentary party
PAGE 80
the most likely to make connections to other sites through their homepages, it
appears that this tendency is most pronounced among parties on the left. The
ALP, along with the Greens and the Communist Party of Australia, emerge as the
most enthusiastic in terms of offering hyperlinks from their websites.
In addition to using online data to assess the extent to which the new media may
be affecting parties’ role as articulators of interests, it is also important to examine
data relating to changes in their prominence in the offine environment. Have
certain parties, and particularly the smaller ones, developed a stronger public
profle during the period in which their use of new ICTs has increased? To examine
this question we use the Lexis Nexis database of Asia/Pacifc newspapers to
search several key Australian and regional news sources across two time periods
for references to selected parties. The time periods used were one week in 8-14
July 1995 and again in 2005, i.e. a time when internet use was limited among the
parties and the public, and a later time when it had become a mass medium.
Attention focused on four parties in this section of the analysis: the two major
parties—the ALP and the Liberal Party, and two minor parties—the Democrats
and the Greens. The same search terms were used in each time period. Where
the party name was non-unique, i.e., the Liberal Party, references were checked
to ensure it was the Australian organisation that was being reported on. Otherwise
the terms ‘ALP’, ‘Australian Greens’ and ‘Australian Democrats’ were used.
29
The
results regarding the level of mainstream news attention to the major and minor
parties is reported in Table 7.
]ablc 1: MaìnsIrcam ncws covcragc oI AusIralìan parIìcs ìn 1005 and 2005
ParIv
No. oI arIìclcs
1005 2005
Changc ovcr Iìmc
ALP 191 150 - 21.5%
Liberal Party 69 72 + 4%
Australian Democrats 26 33 + 27%
Australian Greens 6 21 + 350%
Mean 73 69
Source: Lexis Nexis Executive www.lexisnexis.com Asia/Pacifc news sources
29
It is acknowledged that this approach may have reduced the total number of references reported for the minor parties
since some stories may have referred simply to them without the ‘Australian’ prefx. In addition, the Liberal Party is often
referred to as the Liberals or the Coalition, which may also mean the overall number of references to them is reduced in
the dataset. However, given that our focus is on comparing the change in the extent of news coverage given to each the
parties over time (rather than the absolute amount), these numbers are considered to provide valid data.
PAGE 81
This table interestingly shows a distinct increase in the amount of mainstream
news coverage achieved by the minor parties across the ten year period, along
with no change and even a fall in the attention paid to the major parties.
Thus, although the major parties have continued to dominate news coverage since
ICTs have been more widely used, it is certainly clear that they have to work harder
to gain centre stage. The Greens, in particular, have secured an enhanced media
profle. Of course it is acknowledged that such results cannot prove any direct
or causal role for the new media in generating these shifts in mainstream news
attention. However, on the basis of these results, the possibility of such effects
cannot be entirely dismissed, particularly given the much stronger presence of
the Greens online compared with other smaller parties. Certainly had the results
shown a continuation or strengthening of the relative prominence of the two major
parties over the time period the claims for any internet effects would have become
implausible. Thus, while it would seem that new ICTs are not necessarily leading to
a range of new organisational voices entering the party system, it may be that they
are readjusting the volume levels of those already present.
Thus, overall it would seem that ICTs are providing a basis for an increase in the
parties’ role as articulators of interests, although this is not happening through
wholly new organisations emerging in the system. The Greens in particular stand
out as highly effective users of the web, if one considers connection with an
audience and the wider web world. Green supporters are online in large numbers
and also visiting the party site. The Greens website also draws in a comparatively
large amount of web traffc through its links to other sites. While such activity
may bring an increased profle for the party as a whole, the move toward this
more individualised message delivery and direct relationship with voters of course
brings with it the prospect of greater conficting voices and fragmenting of party
message. We return to this point in the summary and conclusion.
Aggregation
In the face of these trends in articulation, what can be said about the extent to
which the new media are affecting parties’ capacity for interest aggregation in
Australian politics? As well as promoting the possibility for more individualised
communication by party actors, can ICTs provide new channels by which parties
can ensure that a better aggregation of demands can take place?
PAGE 82
Addressing such questions means that we move away from our focus on the
party organisation and party in the electorate, and look more at parties in their
institutional setting; that is, within parliaments and also government itself.
Given that further chapters of this report deal with the role of representative
structures in the information age in much greater depth, we touch only briefy on
such developments here. In order to start to examine this question, however, it is
necessary frst to identify how ICTs might be harnessed by parties to help them in
their aggregative role. What activities could they undertake or promote online that
would help to foster the type of dialogue and discussion between groups and
individuals that would lead to a genuine consensus-building in society?
While not an exhaustive list, some initiatives that could help to fulfl these
goals include:
• The promotion of e-consultation events between key stakeholders on
matters of signifcant public policy;
• Party members on legislative committees could establish e-forums whereby
submissions could be made and matters discussed within a secure and
moderated environment;
• More ambitiously, now that broadband access is expanding across the
country, parties could host e-conferences or forums on various topics
of national interest that would bring together interested individuals and
organisations to present discussion papers and exchange views. Dialogue
forums could be instituted whereby input from interested parties could be
collated and used to feed into actual policy development within the party,
and government more broadly; and
• On a more limited scale, parties could also offer moderated online debate
forums on their own sites or within the party whereby views could be
debated. Of course, the key here would be for the parties to ensure that
constructive debate took place and that such features did not become
venues for ‘faming’ or verbal abuse – developments that are actually more
likely to undermine than foster consensus building.
In terms of party initiatives in this area, however, it seems that it is not a particularly
active focus of development. Certainly at the federal level it does not appear that
there has been a concerted push by any of the parties as a whole to develop
PAGE 88
new parliamentary or governmental structures to generate dialogue with the
public or key interest groups, such as business, unions or non-government
organisations (NGOs).
Green parliamentarians and their staff were active in pushing parliament to open
up and put more information about its workings on the web. At the State level,
parties report a few very active individual representatives that have pursued
interactive, consultative opportunities with voters via the web. Victor Perton, the
Victorian Liberal MP (retiring in 2006), is one obvious innovator, his site offering
forums for debate to registered users.
Conclusion
Overall, ICTs have primarily become a means for parties to carry out their informing
and educational role. They are utilised in a largely static manner as a tool for
downward rather than interactive communication of a participatory or mobilising
nature. In addition, while the websites provide a broad ‘open all hours’ shopfront
to the interested user and an archive of information, this section has revealed that
parties have an increasingly specialised audience and purpose in mind in using
the Web and e-mail—to reach their members and activists. Given that this group
is clearly already more active and participatory than most of the population, such
fndings do not appear to bode well for the audit values of equality of infuence
and citizen control of government.
However, while it may be the case that no radical or even moderate redistribution
of power is taking place between individuals in society as a result of the arrival of
the internet, this analysis has shown that such shifts may be taking place at the
organisational level. While there does not appear to be a dramatic upsurge in the
number of new parties formed since new ICTs became more widely used, the
internet does appear to have offered some of the smaller parties an alternative
means to reach their supporters and publicise themselves. Moreover, there is
some evidence from the ‘real world’ that they are succeeding on both counts.
Rather than offering a direct means to secure greater equality of infuence and
control of government, therefore, it would appear that new ICTs work in a more
indirect way, offering an organisational building capacity to smaller parties that
shores up their position in the system as a whole. The extent to which the party
guides this development from a ‘whole-of-organisation’ perspective, however, will
be a crucial factor in determining whether parties can continue to use the medium
PAGE 84
effectively. Or to put it another way, articulation of interests by individuals and local
groups or factions within the party may increase while collective expressions of
the parties’ viewpoint may get lost in the process. Any developments along these
lines would represent a signifcant loss for the current system of parliamentary
rule. Strong mass-based parties underpin the model of democratic governance
that currently exists in Australia, providing the ‘people power’ to counter-balance
the narrow interests of commerce and specialist interest groups. A weakening of
this traditional role without any corresponding shift in the system of representation
and parliamentary democracy could lead to fragmentation and disaggregation of
the polity.
What this chapter of the audit has shown is that currently there is at least the
potential for these trends to gather momentum. Parties need to work hard,
therefore, to ensure that they maintain a collectivist approach to message
formation and delivery when making use of the new media technologies given
the decentralist tendencies of the medium, tempting as it may be for the smaller
players to try to put as many ‘voices’ out there as possible.
While such an approach might seem to run somewhat counter to the promotion of
rights and liberties that forms a third main value within this audit, or the promotion
of inclusive deliberation that forms its fourth, one can argue that parties, in their
essence, function through organisational logic, and one that promotes the
individual through collective action. Finding an appropriate balance between the
internal devolution of power that is allowed by ICTs and the consolidation behind
a national message may prove to be one of the key democratic challenges facing
Australian parties as they move further into the digital age.
PAGE 85
SIrcngIhs
• Australian political parties were among the earliest adopters of the new
technology in the shape of website establishment.
• No obvious gap has emerged between the major and minor parliamentary
parties, at least in terms of their website production or use of internal discussion
networks.
• Parties are conscious of the need not to move faster than their supporters are
ready for with regard to communication via new ICTs. Caution is not necessarily
apathy or inertia.
Wcakncsscs
• Parties are not embracing innovative participatory elements of the new media but
focusing largely on websites as static information repositories.
• More creative or interactive uses of the new ICTs focus more on internal elite
communication rather than debate with the wider membership or informed public.
• Parties do not appear to have developed an integrated or coherent strategy
with regard to the organisational use of new ICTs, with use among individual
candidates and representatives as well as local parties highly patchy.
• Parties and the electorate in general appear to have plateaued between 2001 and
2004 in terms of interest in e-campaigning with the numbers of candidates online
remaining stable, and no obvious growth in levels of voter interest in the sites.
PAGE 86
Despite the increasing tendency for major parties to generate policy at executive
levels, the role of MPs and local government Councillors remains an important
part of the democratic system.
The role of MPs and other elected representatives is not defnitively agreed in
Australian political life; the role of elected representatives may be seen as:
• representing parties and voting in accordance with direction from party
managers (e.g. parliamentary whips or local offcials);
• serving as a pool from which talent can be drawn to fll management
positions in parliament or Cabinet;
• acting as autonomous actors between elections, following their personal
views and opinions on policies to be evaluated only at the next election;
• mediating public and party opinion, forming a conduit between the formal
policy systems of the parliament/council, party, and the community or
electorate; or
• forming direct conduits of local views to the party and parliament, serving as
advocates of local concerns or weathervanes of public opinion.
Overall, the specifc individual views of elected representatives as to their function
is generally determined by three factors: the structure and culture of their party
and/or factional position, their level of security of tenure (which can encourage
greater autonomy from the party if the individual considers their position highly
secure, or inversely highly susceptible), and the personal outlook or philosophy of
the individual as to their role in the democratic system.
PolìIìcal
rcprcscnIaIìvcs
and ncw
Icchnologv
PAGE 81
In addition, it must be recognised that Councillors and MPs have limited staff
and fnancial resources, and therefore their level of use of new technology tends
to be heavily infuenced by either their own personal interest and experience
with technology, or the skill levels of staff and volunteers that support their work.
Thus, in research undertaken in 2002 into the adoption of new communications
technologies by elected representatives around Australia, the combination of
offce resources and individual skill levels was identifed as being highly infuential
on their use of new technology in general terms.
30
In considering the use of ICTs by elected representatives in democratic terms,
therefore, the core questions under consideration are:
• To what extent are elected representatives utilising ICTs?
• Does the use of these technologies increase or undermine the level of
democratic participation by members of the community, and/or support the
work of elected representatives in their role as policy makers?
Representatives’ use of new technology
Given their roles it is unsurprising that elected representatives in Australia are more
likely than the rest of the community to use new technology for communication
and information gathering. Australia’s political representatives are highly ‘wired’
with regards to the use of technologies like the World Wide Web and e-mail.
As illustrated in Figures 4 and 5 below, elected representatives, and particularly
those who receive electorate offces as part of their employment package, are far
above the average Australian citizen in their use of internet-based technologies.
This is particularly true of the quintessential communications tool of the digital
age: e-mail: the implications of this, in terms of democratic outcomes, are diffcult
to quantify specifcally, however it is possible to state that:
• Elected representatives in Australia can be considered to be technologically
aware and active, and thus their understanding of the capacity and utility of
these technologies should not be understated, and
• As active users of these technologies, these individuals have greater capacity
to gather and synthesise information relevant to their political function, and
sit within the reach of Australians who utilise technologies like e-mail on a
regular basis.
30
Peter Chen, 2002, Australian Elected Representatives’ Use of New Media Technologies, Research Monograph, Centre
for Public Policy, University of Melbourne
PAGE 88
Elected representatives as content creators
While the use of ICTs by elected representatives is a positive development, it
is important to delineate between relatively passive use of technology, and the
potential for elected representatives to be active in the production and distribution
of new information relevant to their political function.
Source: Chen, Australian Elected Representatives’ Use of New Media Technologies
Fìgurc 4: FlccIcd rcprcscnIaIìvcs and Ihc wcb
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
More than once
a day
Daily Weekly Monthly Less than
once a month
Never
Parliamentary
Local/Regional
Average
Frcqucncv oI WWW 8rowsìng
Source: Chen, Australian Elected Representatives’ Use of New Media Technologies
Fìgurc 5: FlccIcd rcprcscnIaIìvcs and c-maìl
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
More than once
a day
Daily Weekly Monthly Less than
once a month
Never
Parliamentary
Local/Regional
Average
Frcqucncv oI FlccIronìc Maìl usc
PAGE 80
Thus, we need to examine how far individual candidates and MPs from a range of
parties are making use of new technology as the instigators of content creation.
ICTs, and particularly the web, offer an alternative and independent platform for
party representatives to send their own messages out to the public and engage
in a dialogue with those citizens they represent.
In content analysis undertaken on a sample of individual candidate sites from the
fve largest parties during the 2004 election (ALP, Liberals, Nationals, Greens,
Democrats), we can see that these sites tended to focus on personal biographical
information and policy statements, with little supporting information about their
electorate, how to vote, etc.
31
What should be noted, however, is that, while having highly variable quality and
depth of content, these sites did not simply push messages, but also included
greater means of accessing the candidate than the offcial party sites. Looking at
the features or functionality of the websites evaluated, we can see that these sites
heavily featured personal (one-to-one) methods of contacting the candidate, with
e-mail and web-based forms favoured, even more than telephone contact.
31
Based on a random sample of 53 websites.
Source: Chen, ‘e-lection 2004?’
Fìgurc 6: ConIcnI oI candìdaIc wcbsìIcs 2004
81
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Contained on another site (link to)
Extensive (6+ paragraphs)
Some (2-5 paragraphs)
Limited (paragraph)
No
Polling
locations
Voter
registration
Campaign
diary / blog
Electorate
info
Policy info Candidate bio
Contained on another site (link to) Extensive (6+ paragraphs)
Some (2-5 paragraphs Limited (paragraph) No
PAGE 40
This is rational and logical in that e-mail provided candidates with a better means
to manage communications with constituents during the campaign, with many
candidates responding to e-mails at times of the day (such as late in the evening
and early in the morning) when they were not booked for other tasks, such as
rallies or door knocking.
The above data deal largely with the question of how far candidate are using
the technology to articulate their concerns and policies to the media and wider
public during a defned period of the political cycle. What about after the election
is over? How does the party in government operate? Are those candidates who
are elected continuing to utilise the new media?
Evidence from a recent study of Australian MPs’ use of the Web reveals an
interesting similarity to the fndings for candidates. Table 8 reports the proportion
of MPs with their own website prior to the federal election in 2004. Just less than
half of Labor and Liberal party members were found to operate personal sites,
and well over two thirds of National MPs. The ‘Other’ category, consisting of
Independents and the solitary Green member, while small in number, also reveals
a proportionally high level of activity.
Source: Chen, ‘e-lection 2004?’
Fìgurc 1: FcaIurcs oI candìdaIc wcbsìIcs 2004
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
100%
Chat or
discussion
board
Email
a friend
Multimedia Publication
-grade
photographs
News Events or
appearances
Subscription
function
Search Media
releases
Contact
- telephone
Links Contact
email
or webform
94.23
85.11
77.36
67.44
18.00
21.15
21.57
11.32
17.65
6.00
3.77
0.00
FlcmcnI (0cncrìc FcaIurclFuncIìon]
PAGE 41
]ablc 8: ParIìcs, sIaIcs and wcbsìIc adopIìon
MPs with
websites (%)
Difference from
average (%)
ParIìcs Liberal 43 - 4
ALP 45 - 2
Nationals 69 + 22
Other 75 + 28
Source: Rachel Gibson, Wainer Lusoli and Stephen Ward, 2004, ‘Phile or phobe? Australian MPs and the new
communications technology’, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association,
Chicago, www.esri.salford.ac.uk/ESRCResearchproject/output.php
Such results suggest that representatives without a high-profle party affliation are
more eager to use the web to establish an identity for themselves. Those coming
from the larger parties where more rigorous party discipline operates, however,
appear to be less enthusiastic. This greater reticence among the major party
members toward independent articulation via the web is confrmed by the discussion
of content of sites by Gibson et al.,
32
which notes the adoption on the part of MPs
of neat, functional sites which do the party the least possible damage.
A new relationship?
The passive and active use of ICTs by elected representatives shows that
Australia’s political class is not adverse to their use. The interactive aspects of
ICTs also provide the possibility for MPs and local Councillors to form new and
deeper relationships with their electorates over policy issues.
While MPs and Councillors have always used a variety of technologies to
communicate with constituents, from informal walk-and-chats to the use of
telephone and fax machines (and now e-mail), ICTs can transform this information
gathering and socialisation activity from a one-to-one process to a one-to-many
process through a variety of polling or consultation techniques, such as:
• The development of online discussion lists associated with MPs’ websites;
• The use of voting mechanisms online to aggregate views and opinions; and
• Audio- and video-conferencing systems.
However, as was seen in Figure 7, the tendency for candidates and MPs to use
32 Gibson et al, ‘Phile or phobe?’
PAGE 42
these types of systems appears low. In addition, from data collected in 2002
on the use of online consultation techniques by serving elected representatives,
we can see that the activity in this area has been very limited. Only a very small
minority of elected representatives across Australia have engaged in online
consultation, and very few exhibit an awareness of the possibilities of the use
of ICTs for this purpose. This is illustrated in Figure 8, which reports on MPs’
awareness of different forms of online consultation and their ability to cite
personal examples (such as ‘lobbying’ email) or awareness of other forms of
online consultation (such as online consultation undertaken by parliamentary or
bureaucratic institutions).
In addition, it should be recognised that while candidates themselves are not
being proactive in this area, they remain subject to proactive approaches from
people in their community (and the wider political environment) through the receipt
of e-mail on policy and political matters. Thus, the risk appears high that, rather
than taking the initiative to form a new relationship with their stakeholder groups,
elected representatives may retreat from engagement with the technology.
This trend is starting to emerge, and can be seen on two fronts:
• The increased use of organisational fltering systems
33
to pre-flter e-mails to
prevent MPs receiving mass e-mail postings. This technology is limited in its
accuracy and can therefore unintentionally flter genuine messages; and
• The relatively underdeveloped internal processes in electorate offces for
33
For example, the Parliament of Victoria recently adopted a general fltering service for all MPs following a number of
cases of bulk e-mail. This problem has been noted around the world, and various jurisdictions have taken different
approaches to it: from removing e-mail addresses from the web, to placing web-forms online that attempt to limit the
capacity of ‘spam robots’ fnding these addresses.
Fìgurc 8: 0nlìnc consulIaIìon and clccIcd rcprcscnIaIìvcs
Source: Chen, Australian Elected Representatives’ Use of New Media Technologies
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
Specific example
of institution
Specific example
of other
representative
Specific personal
example
General technology
awareness
Reciept of
lobbying or
constituent email
Table 2: State anti-corruption bodies
State Anti-corruption body Year established
NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption 1988
Vic -
Qld Qld Criminal Justice Commission* 1989
Qld Crime Commission* 1997
Crime and Misconduct Commission 2002
WA Anti-Corruption Commission# 1996
Corruption and Crime Commission 2004
SA -
Tas -
* Merged in the Crime and Misconduct Commission
10.2
1.66
3.25
3.56
8.77
PAGE 48
holding and replying to electronic mail. Thus, while most electorate offces
maintain a clear system for recording and responding to physical mail,
many MPs have limited or no systems to allow them to manage electronic
communications in an effcient manner.
While capacity is one barrier to greater levels of interaction between elected
representatives and the community, the ruthless logic of current party politics is
also a signifcant barrier to the establishment of new forms of interaction between
Members and their constituencies.
One apparently atypical (and yet ultimately typical) example is noted by Bishop,
34
who identifed an online polling system used by the (then) Labor backbencher
Mark Latham. Latham established a series of propositions on his personal
website for members of his electorate to vote upon (approximately 1,000 signed
up and about 250 voted per proposition). At frst sight, this seems to show that
some elected representatives are attempting to reconsider the way in which they
stay engaged with their electorate over matters of public policy, but it should be
noted that examples like this are particularly rare in Australian public life.
While many MPs and candidates include online polls on their websites, most
of these tend to be restrained to ‘safe’ or loaded questions that could not be
construed in any way to have a meaningful impact on policy outcomes. In the
case of Latham’s experiment with a new form of representative democracy, the
immediate outcome was responses from his electorate that ran counter to formal
Labor Party policy, and the online polling system was quickly abandoned.
This case example simply serves to highlight the tension between the representative
function as embodying a conduit function, and the realities of party politics and the
ruthlessness of party discipline in the current Australian political environment.
Conclusion
Overall, the use of ICTs by elected representatives in Australia refects the modest
application of technology by the parties they represent. While the role of parties
in disciplining MPs and Councillors would suggest that elected representatives
would shy away from these technologies, the limited uptake tends to refect a
combination of party logic and limitations on the resources available for individual
representatives. This is played out in the case examples provided above, as
is the tendency for State and local government representatives to lag behind
their federal counterparts in the establishment and use of new media, both for
interaction with individual constituencies and as a publishing vehicle.
34
Patrick Bishop, 2002, Democratic Equivocation: Who Wants What, When, and How?, http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/
pubs/pops/pop39/c03.pdf
PAGE 44
The limited use of ICTs refects the limited value of static online sources like websites
in drawing voters to the representatives in question, but can also be attributed to
the institutional framework in which MPs tend to operate. With some of their budget
allocations aimed at specifc forms of media such as printing and postal budgets
there are clearly incentives towards use of these traditional forms of communication.
In addition, given the busy work schedule of MPs, and the limited remuneration of
local Councillors, there are restricted opportunities for elected representatives to
develop literacy in new information technology once in offce.
While most parliamentary Information Technology departments offer increasingly
sophisticated hardware and software (such as modern, highly portable laptops
with remote internet access), elected representatives tend not to develop new
skills while in offce. While the outlook for greater levels of online interactivity
between offce holders and the public remains limited, a generational change
effect will occur over time, as younger, more IT-literate representatives enter the
political stage, bringing skills and comfort in new media with them.
SIrcngIhs
• Political representatives in Australia readily employ new technology to distribute
policy and political information.
• Politicians are largely accessible via new technologies like e-mail.
• Politicians are using new technologies to inform themselves and their decision-
making activities.
Wcakncsscs
• Political representatives, like Australian political parties, have tended not to use
their websites and other channels to engage the public in policy dialogues.
• Political representatives suffer organisational and fnancial limits on their use of
new media technologies, particularly because parliamentary allowances emphasise
printing and postage.
PAGE 45
One of the most obvious places to examine the impact of ICTs on democratic
practice is the electoral process itself. As the focus of political competition, the
way in which ICTs have impacted on elections, both positively and negatively, is
a good measure of the democratic value and infuence of these technologies in
Australia.
As communications tools, ICTs have clear applicability to political campaigns,
providing alternative communications tools for the electorate to gather information
relevant to casting an informed vote, but also as a means for parties and
candidates to communicate within the campaign organisation itself. In addition,
as an alternative ‘space’ which permits free communication and the aggregation
of individuals, ICTs also have a potential role in creating new forms of political
campaigning (‘virtual campaigns’) or means to overcome traditional barriers for
organising support or alternatives to the entrenched parties.
In examining the role of ICTs in elections, it is therefore important to consider
three likely areas of impact:
• The use of these technologies by pre-existing political actors as means of
promoting political organisation;
• The use of ICTs by alternative actors—such as civil society or protest
groups—to infuence campaign outcomes; and
• The direct application of ICTs within the electoral process itself: electronic
and online voting.
FlccIìons and IC]s
PAGE 46
ICTs and the campaign
As indicated in the two previous chapters, the uptake of ICTs by political
parties and sitting MPs has been dramatic over recent years. However, even
for the major political parties—which have access to considerable resources to
fght election campaigns from public and private fnancing and electoral offce
allocations—it must be recognised that the use of ICTs in electoral campaigns
in Australia has been very modest over the past ten years. Thus, while the major
parties initially saw the internet as a low-cost communication tool (and a way to
ensure visibility as modern, technologically-sophisticated political organisations),
the disappointing use of these sites by the public has reduced party interest in
web-based information over the past ten years.
A good indication of this shift has been:
• The tendency for the number and frequency of improvements in the depth,
design, and complexity of party websites to decline over the past fve years;
• A decline in the use of campaign specifc websites in recent years (reliance
on the standard website system during the campaign);
• A decline in the use of customised, audience-specifc websites during recent
election campaigns (last seen in the 2001 federal election campaign
35
); and
• Limited use of ‘new’ technologies, such as mobile ICTs in doorknocking, or
the development of sophisticated internal systems to manage candidates
and volunteers, both of which have been a signifcant feature of election
campaigns in the US in recent years.
36
Use of ICTs in the campaigning process
This shift in focus is not surprising, nor does it present any particular democratic
impacts upon the status quo (positively or negatively). Overall, the tendency for the
major parties to focus on mainstream mass media, either through public relations
or via paid advertising, refects the difference between new and old media forms:
namely that new media tend to be ‘pull media’ which require the audience to
actively seek out information, whereas broadcast media (television, radio) are a
form of ‘push’ media form, able to deliver campaign messages broadly and to
that large proportion of the population.
35
The ‘Political Big Brother’ website of the ALP, which was modelled on the popular television program of a similar name
and targeted towards younger voters.
36
For example, in the 2004 US Presidential election, the group ACT for America felded door-to-door canvassers armed
with Palm Pilot personal digital assistants which were used to collect database information and show citizens short
promotional videos supporting the Democrat challenger.
PAGE 41
As discussed in the sections above, ‘pull’ media have limited value in reaching
undecided and disinterested voters who are conventionally seen by parties as
being core to electoral success, due to their lower levels of party identifcation
and therefore higher tendency to ‘swing’. Party websites, therefore, tend to be
mainly provided for the party faithful, or as sources of press releases and contact
information for mainstream journalists.
In addition, where ‘push’ elements of new media are available (such as e-mail
or instant messaging), parties have been cautious in using these channels
extensively, due to both strong community distaste for ‘spam’ (unsolicited bulk e-
mail), and also limitations in developing the types of extensive coverage available
from broadcast media and the lack of individual contact information available for
online communications (e.g. limited numbers of valid e-mail addresses stored in
party databases).
The one signifcant exception to this general rule has been the use of recorded
‘advocacy calls’ (automated telephone dialling systems) by the Liberal Party
in the 2004 federal election campaign to target some electorates with mass
telephone messages. While the Liberals claimed this approach was effective, its
utility is diffcult to assess. The party has said it will be reused in the future, so it is
one emerging area of political campaigning that will deserve additional attention.
This is not simply because of its possible utility in mobilising voter support, but
also because of the tendency for this high-cost communications method to be
dominated by the entrenched major parties.
Overall, political parties and candidates tend to use ICTs in a limited number
of ways:
• The establishment (or maintenance) of websites during the campaign;
• The use of the internet as an updated archive of information generated
during the campaign including press releases, advertisement videos and
radio spots;
37
• Provision of online contact information, such as e-mail contacts;
• The limited use of interactive website elements such as debt or tax-cut
calculators; and
• As ‘back end’ organisational support tools, largely based around desktop
publishing, internal communications with the central party campaign
management team, and the use of the respective party database systems.
37
|Whether they were actually aired or not. During the 2004 federal election campaign, the Democrats and Greens pro-
vided online advertisements that were not aired on television, presumably because of the cost.
PAGE 48
It should be noted that the Victorian Electoral Commission has historically
published candidate statements online for local government elections, where the
ballot was being conducted by electronic mail. This practice was discontinued in
2004 following legal advice received by the organisation. It appears, at the point
of writing, that the State government will introduce new legislation to ensure the
practice is reinstated and possibly expanded to all local government elections,
and even State government elections as well.
The democratic impact of this is hard to measure, but, in the contested space of
local government elections, the online publication of these statements will provide
greater exposure for the candidates, both to electors and the media.
38
Levelling the playing feld?
An important democratic question is the extent to which ICTs lower the barriers to
participation in the political process by groups outside the major political parties.
As with alternative and community media online, we can hypothesise that the low
barriers to participation in online publishing should have benefcial outcomes in
terms of democratic competition.
Yet as indicated in the two sections above, the low level of public interest in
partisan websites tends to undermine this hypothesis and any attempt to
compare mainstream and non-mainstream political actors’ use of new media
may lead to deceptive conclusions.
Take Table 9, for example, drawn from an analysis of the 2004 federal election. In
this table we can see that:
• The use of new media technologies (websites and e-mail addresses) is
higher for the two major parties; and
• The minor parties (in and outside of government) have lower use of these
two technologies overall.
This fnding is problematic, however, in terms of a descriptive presentation of the
respective communications tools used by political candidates, and refects:
• The different resources available to insider groups (the ALP, the Liberals)
versus the ‘parties of perpetual opposition’; and
• The limited value of these channels in the electoral process, where media
tends to be saturated with coverage of the election, albeit disproportionately
slanted towards the major parties.
38
This has created tensions, however, with the VEC expressing concerns about whether the need to vet these statements
will impair their role as non-partisan administrators of the electoral process. In 2005, the VEC released new rules regard-
ing the content of local government candidate statements that attracted considerable criticisms because of the strict
nature of the provisions included.
PAGE 40
The fnding, therefore, does not necessarily indicate a negative view of the health
of the Australian democratic system overall. The lower use of ICTs by minor parties
refects, but does not signifcantly feed into, the ongoing disparity of access to
media and public campaign funds that minor parties have faced for decades.
]ablc 0: CandìdaIcs’ usc oI ncw mcdìa channcls, 2004 Icdcral clccIìon
ParIv Rousc
PcrccnIagc
CandìdaIcs wìIh
F-maìl addrcsscs
CandìdaIcs wìIh
unìquc wcbsìIcs
Australian Democrats
Senate 100% 16.66%
Representatives 58.82% 0%
Total: 64.17% 2.5%
Australian Greens
Senate 58.82% 0.00%
Representatives 100.00% 8.1%
Total: 100.00% 8.97%
Australian Labor Party
Senate 72% 20%
Representatives 96.67% 30.00%
Total: 93.14% 28.57%
Liberal Party of Australia
Senate 100% 16%
Representatives 98.45% 44.18%
Total: 98.70% 39.61%
Nationals
Senate 0% 0%
Representatives 100.00% 33.33%
Total: 78.26% 26.08%
Source: Chen, ‘e-lection 2004?’
Given this more general exclusion from the mainstream media during elections—
the place where parties appear to agree electoral victory is won or lost—it is not
surprising that minor parties like the Australian Greens and the Democrats are far
more likely to:
• Send party e-mail updates during the election campaign than the
major parties;
• Respond to personal e-mail inquiries than major party candidates; and
• Make a disproportionately high investment in the development of
online resources.
This last point refects the relatively low cost of online content production
compared with the extraordinarily high costs of purchasing commercial airtime
during an election. This point, however, is not related to ICTs specifcally, being
more symptomatic of a deeper cause.
PAGE 50
On the positive side this means that ICTs have fostered a new channel by which
these parties can communicate with the public—cutting through a mass media
environment that tends to be saturated with mainstream parties and personalities
during the campaign (both in terms of the amount of media coverage afforded as
journalism, or in terms of the massive advertising spending of the major parties).
Internal use of ICTs in electoral competition
However, we also need to note that the use of ICTs as a public (and visible)
communication channel is only part of their value to the democratic process. As
discussed in the frst section, the major parties’ signifcant electoral advantage
lies not only with the largesse they can bring to bear for advertising expenditure,
but also in their networked electoral database systems.
These systems—supported by party funding and continually added to by local
members’ staffers—provide a signifcant electoral advantage through the ability to:
• Supplement general market research with specifc information on the views
and preferences of electorates and suburbs;
• Target the use of direct mail, advocacy calls and door-knocking; and
• Provide the party with information that is added to and develops over time.
Thus, while the appearance of minor party websites, and their increasingly deep
and rich content provision is encouraging, the use of ICTs in electoral campaigning
is a moving target, and one where the resources of the minor parties are insuffcient
to match that of the major parties, particularly for the ‘invisible’ political activities
of target marketing and the market analysis and segmentation process.
Undermining the positive view afforded of the use of web-based communications
channels by the minor parties is the fnding presented in Table 10, which shows
that the major parties have a signifcantly higher use of their electoral database
system than the minor parties. As the use of these systems is essential to
maintaining and updating information, the high rate of use by the major parties
means that not only do they gain strategic advantage in an election, but by
continuously updating and capturing new information, they are also better placed
in subsequent elections.
PAGE 51
]ablc 10: ‘8ackcnd’ IC]s usc bv candìdaIcs
39
ParIv Pcr CcnI
Democrats 27.27
Greens 15.00
ALP 88.24
Coalition 72.73
Average 38.89
Source: Chen, ‘e-lection 2004?’
While this analysis could lead to a relatively cynical view of the capacity of
the major parties to dominate the communications landscape, it should be
recognised that the majors still have a considerable way to go in developing
online communications channels to support their candidates. Thus, while most of
the ALP or Liberal candidates’ websites in the 2004 election displayed a certain
sameness with regards to core messages and policy information (refecting
the tendency towards centrally-managed campaigning with tight information
management and release processes), the fact that candidate websites existed at
all is relatively surprising in the age of professional campaigning.
The level of freedom that individual candidates had enjoyed in developing their
own websites, the information they placed on these sites, and the wide variety
of styles and designs (for good or ill), demonstrate that this remains an area
of the mainstream parties that has evaded (so far) the grasp of the campaign
management ‘machine men’. Candidates commonly received little in the way
of easy-to-use templates for the production of brochures in the 2004 campaign
(the Australian Greens being at the forefront of the use of brochure templates),
and individual candidates often received little in the way of electronic resources to
support their campaign operations.
Thus, one of the future directions of the use of ICTs by parties in the election
campaign is likely to be the greater use of ‘controlled layout and design’
techniques to ensure that individual candidates’ brochures and websites (if they
are allowed to have them at all) share consistent branding and not just consistent
messages. This will invariably have two impacts on future elections:
• The information provided by local candidates will be increasingly professional
in its graphic design and message presentation; and
• The level of local content produced for print or online communications will
likely decline and be replaced with centrally managed messages from the
party machines.
39
Data drawn from a content analysis of message content undertaken November 2003.
PAGE 52
The extent to which the last outcome will occur, however, will depend on the
internal organisation and structure of the individual parties, and the relative
freedom of action of individual candidates. In parties, like the ALP, with strict
enforcement of discipline through the formalised faction system, higher levels of
content management can be expected.
Alternative voices online
Political parties and candidates are not, however, the only relevant sources of
political information between and during election campaigns. While the rise of
alternative news and political websites is discussed in the chapter on civil society,
some relevant points regarding these types of communications channels should
be made with regards to their role in modern election campaigns in Australia.
During the past decade, the popularity of the web has seen the growth of
independent online publications across a range of areas. In addition, the
interactive and communication capabilities of ICTs have seen new forms of social
and political interaction, including:
• Static websites similar to newspapers;
• Alternative Web publications, like daily comment journals (‘blogs’);
• Discussion lists and bulletin board systems;
• Virtual communities; and
• Online voting and polling systems.
By nature, many of these new communications tools have relevance during
election campaigns, either as specifc vehicles for the promotion of a particular
policy issue, as a source of alternative news reporting or commentary. They can
also function as ‘public spheres’ for community discussion and debate, or as
a means for members of the community to discuss (and occasionally ridicule)
mainstream political actors. In recent elections in Australia, each of these forms
of political activity has been observed, and the number of specifc and general-
purpose political websites has increased over the years.
Sites of public debate and socialisation
One of the frst political applications of ICTs has been to extend offine political
debate—the type of debate currently seen at the dinner table, or in pubs
and clubs—online. While discussions of ICTs tend to focus on web-enabled
PAGE 58
applications, electronic mail and the capacity to develop lists of participants
engaged in e-mail discussions as a group (such as Listserv, Usenet, or online
‘groups’) provide an excellent way for interested members of any community,
political or other, to come together to talk about issues. Because e-mail tends
to be asynchronous, i.e. the conversation does not take place in real time, these
conversations can be ongoing or even unending. This allows for participation of
people who may have signifcant barriers to participating in physical events, like
party or public meetings.
This process, political socialisation, has been studied in and out of the context of
Australian political campaigns. This research has tended to focus on:
• To what extent Australians engage in these ‘virtual public spheres’—how
popular are they?
• What is the quality of debate—is it informative or does it simply reinforce
prejudices or specifc partisan points of view?
• Does online discussion lead to signifcant offine action—does it motivate
people to participate in political affairs more broadly?
In taking data from three popular online political discussion lists (Australian Politics,
On Line Opinion, and Political Lobby), the frst observation is that these lists tend
to have small numbers of participants, commonly fewer than 200 subscribers,
with far fewer numbers of active participants in the debate and discussion on
list. These modest levels of participation can be read to indicate a limited impact
of these forms of online association on the political behaviour of individuals.
However, it must be recognised that in a global medium like the Internet, there
is a tendency for audiences to fragment substantially, and so the actual number
of active participants in the online political discussion is likely to be signifcantly
higher. In addition, the tendency for online discussion lists to have large numbers
of non-active members (‘lurkers’) has been noted in a variety of e-mail discussion
lists, and therefore is not unique to the political arena.
As spaces for political socialisation however, we can see that these types of
discussion lists provide a very positive democratic impact on the political awareness
and knowledge of participants. As Table 11 below illustrates, the lists tend to
be largely focused on debate and discussion, rather than places where people
organise specifc political action or activity. Thus, online electronic discussion lists
serve as a means by which citizens can inform themselves prior and during the
local process, but may not be recognised as sources of potential activism.
PAGE 54
]ablc 11: CommunìcaIìon Ivpcs ìn onlìnc polìIìcal dìscussìon lìsIs
40
Mcssagc conIcnI AusIralìan
PolìIìcs
0n Lìnc
0pìnìon
PolìIìcal Lobbv
Contains question(s) 17.64% 22.36% 20.87%
Conveys information on subject 79.41% 77.97% 80.68%
Makes reference to authority source 19.60% 47.29% 37.69%
Substantiation of Authority Source 17.44% 36.89% 9.8%
“Call to arms” – invites action 9.80% 0.74% 6.54%
Recruitment message 9.80% 0.54% 2.18%
Source: Chen, ‘A comparative analysis of political email lists’
One of the core reasons why these lists are forums for debate, rather than action
or mobilisation comes from their diversity. While there are concerns that audience
fragmentation in the new media environment may lead to an insular form of
political association, research conducted on these three e-mail lists clearly shows
genuine interaction between people with a diversity of views and opinions (Table
12, below). This fnding counters the concern that internet ‘ghettos’ may emerge
which create further divisions within the community.
This diversity is also seen in the temporally-specifc electoral discussion lists
that have emerged during formal campaign periods. For example, the www.
marklathamsucks.com website established during the 2004 federal election
attracted far ranging political debate from both sites of the political spectrum,
and attracted considerable levels of active participation in policy debate, if little
media coverage of this vibrant online community (see below).
]ablc 12: 0ìvcrsìIv ìn onlìnc polìIìcal dìscussìon lìsIs
41
Idcologìcal posìIìon oI auIhor AusIralìan PolìIìcs 0n Lìnc 0pìnìon PolìIìcal Lobbv
Left 0% 47.63% 33.32%
Centre 10.94% 17.42% 0%
Right 29.77% 22.22% 33.32%
Post-materialist 0% 0% 0%
Feminist 0% 0% 0%
Ecologist 0% 0% 0%
Nationalist 29.77% 0% 16.68%
Other 29.77% 12.73% 16.68%
Source: Chen, ‘A comparative analysis of political email lists’
40
Data drawn from a content analysis of message content undertaken November 2003.
41
Data drawn from a content analysis of message content undertaken November 2003.
PAGE 55
However, analysis of these three lists suggests that their members tend towards
a particular type of person who participates in a range of social activities, clubs,
or groups and who may or may not represent the political mainstream.
These low levels of participation may be seen as disappointing in terms of the
hope for a democratic renewal of public discussion of political and policy matters.
Whilst the absolute numbers of participants may be small, however, those who
engage in online political debate tend to be ‘joiners’ and have a wider impact on
public opinion through their own social networks.
Alternative political websites
In addition to online discussion and debate, recent election campaigns have seen
increasing numbers of non-party websites established with the intention of having
some impact on the election outcome. Given the nature of online publication,
these websites tend to be incredibly diverse in their content, objectives, and the
organisations or individuals responsible for their production. While many were
very serious attempts to focus debate on specifc policy issues, and represented
the campaign commitments of established non-party organisations, others
were generated by new or ‘virtual’ organisations, and many were produced
by individuals.
Some examples from the 2004 national election include:
• domeaus.com – An online voting website allowing candidates to vote on
issues in an ‘issue marketplace’. This site allowed viewers to see candidates’
opinions on a range of policy issues (not simply the limited number focused
upon by the mainstream media);
• www.electiontracker.net—Established by a non-proft organisation, vibewire.
net, this site provided alternative journalistic coverage of the election from a
youth perspective, using young people as reporters, writers, and editors;
• www.comparepolicies.com.au—Established by Brisbane-based design
frm Amok Creative, this site provided comparative policy information with a
user-friendly search engine;
• www.timetogojohn.com—Promotional website of a video ‘Time to Go John’,
an anti-Howard 90 minute compilation of short documentaries, animations
and political satires;
• voteenvironment.com.au—The Wilderness Society's campaign website
for the election, promoting the organisation’s policy objectives and voting
preferences; and
PAGE 56
• www.johnnybackfip.com—A parody site selling ‘educational toys’ such as
the foating bath toy Johnny Overboard.
As you can see from this list, the range of different sites is quite dramatic, and it is
diffcult to determine accurately the level of impact that the sites have had during
the election campaign. However, to provide some estimation of their democratic
value, three types of assessment will be used:
• To what extent do these sites attract visitors?
• To what extent do these sites attract participation from candidates in
the election?
• Do these websites receive attention from mainstream media?
Turning to the frst question, we can see that the popularity of these websites
is quite diverse. While there are signifcant limitations to using website metrics
to assess the number of people who have visited individual websites, Figure 9
illustrates that there were some websites that gained signifcant online traffc
during the 2004 campaign, while others received little, if any, patronage. Overall,
the sites that attracted attention tended to be those that:
• Pre-dated the election campaign, and therefore had a readership developed
over time. These sites had a clear advantage over election-specifc sites, in
that they did not have to launch and promote their activities during a period
of media saturation; or
• Sites that, for whatever reason, tended to attract mainstream
media attention.
Overall, however, the tendency for some of these alternative voices to receive
signifcant readership levels during the electoral process provides a positive view
of the democratic value of the open publishing environment of the internet.
PAGE 51
If alternative media gained some traction during the electoral campaign, it may
be reasonable to expect that parties or candidates have recognised that these
alternative channels of information may be relevant to the campaign process.
However, as with the political parties, it appears that candidates are risk-averse in
participating in online debates organised by non-mainstream news organisations.
Looking at one of the more interesting websites established in the lead up to the
2004 federal election – the Dome of Conscience – we can see that participation
in these types of online forums by the major parties was low.
As illustrated in Table 13, the Dome of Conscience, a site which allowed candidates
to express their personal policy views through a succession of identifable votes,
received some participation from the Opposition and the minor parties (mostly
from the Greens and Democrats), but with such small levels of participation, was
undermined in its desire to provide a greater level of localised information on
candidate positions. This demonstrates again how the major parties—focused
on mass media strategies—see limited value in the online environment as a
campaign channel.
* Approximate fgures only
Source: Compiled from personal correspondence; 10/11/04 (multiple sources; October fgure truncated to partial
month only in some cases)
Fìgurc 0: PopularìIv oI alIcrnaIìvc polìIìcal wcbsìIcs – 2004 Icdcral clccIìon
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
300000
350000
400000
450000
500000
AdvanceAustraliaFairly.com.au*
defeathoward.com
defendmedicare.info
johnhoward.blogspot.com*
ihatejohnhoward.com
resist.com.au
backpagesblog.com*
Oct Sep Aug Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan
PAGE 58
]ablc 18: CandìdaIc parIìcìpaIìon ìn Ihc “0omc oI Conscìcncc”
ParIv ParIìcìpanIs
No GST 1
Socialist Alliance 1
The Great Australians 1
Christian Democrats 2
Family First 2
One Nation 3
The Progressives Alliance 4
Australian Labor Party 8
Independent 17
Citizens Electoral Council 20
Greens 37
Democrats 50
]oIal 146
Source: http://bigpulse.com/whosvoting.php?sid=RGuzv2cWJN8IHCZ
Similarly, the mainstream media appeared remiss in their treatment of alternative
political websites during the campaign. While some sites did attract media attention,
this was generally limited to those sites that were parodies (attracting ‘odd spot’
coverage in some papers) and those high-profle bloggers (such as Christopher
Sheil’s ‘Backpages blog’) that could be incorporated into the mainstream media
because of an affnity with the writing style and approach of commercial journalists.
Interesting alternative views, such as the youth site ‘Election Tracker’ received
virtually no media coverage,
42
despite the fact that its analysis was of signifcant
interest to a traditionally under-represented community segment.
Media coverage of alternative news websites during and prior to the election
campaign was essential to their success, and this scarcity of coverage signifcantly
limited the impact of these channels on political debate. The mainstream media,
well contained in the carefully-orchestrated campaign travel processes of bus
trips and ‘on call’ events, could have recognised an alternative point of access
to political analysis, but largely failed to do so. In this way, it appears that the
traditional media have accepted that managed media campaigning processes
represent the extent of the modern election process.
42
Apart from ABC radio.
PAGE 50
Regulation of alternative websites since the 2004 election
While it is clear that non-party partisan websites have relatively low general
readership during the election campaign, their appearance has not gone unnoticed
by the mainstream political parties. Following the 2004 election, the Special Minister
for State, Senator Eric Abetz, called upon the AEC to investigate if the satirical
website ‘Liars for Howard’ had breached Australian electoral laws by publishing
electoral information without full disclosure of the site’s owners or publishers.
This issue, and concerns about a number of other websites during the election,
exposes some of the problems with information published online. There is a
particular problem with slanderous or untrue material published on computers
outside of the legal jurisdiction of the Australian online content regulators (the
Australian Communications and Media Authority). There were similar problems
with ‘named’ sites, for example the publication of material (falsely) accusing a
candidate of anti-Semitism by the online news site Crikey! In this case, a retraction
was published, but the possibility for co-ordinated (or even ad hoc) character
assassinations to be undertaken using ICTs is very real.
While this form of deceptive conduct is not new to Australian politics, and
represents an online version of what is traditionally referred to as a ‘shit sheet’
(a photocopied anonymous fyer), the reach of this material and its ability to be
quickly reproduced online in a variety of blogs, amateur websites, and e-mails,
adds complexity to the online campaign environment. While there is no evidence
that political parties have been tapping into this form of illicit campaigning,
shit sheets have traditionally been employed by members of political parties,
sometimes to great effect. There is no reason, therefore, to imagine that parties
will not adopt this innovation at some point in the future.
Electronic and online voting in Australia
At present most elections in Australia are assisted through the use of computers,
whether hand-written votes are manually ‘keyed’ into a computer for automatic
processing and tabulation, or whether the internet is used to display election
night results in ‘real time’.
While this activity has benefts in assisting the administration of the electoral
process (and some recommendations are being considered around Australia to
add automatic scanning of paper ballots to assist in electoral administration),
PAGE 60
one specifc area of ICT application during the formal electoral process is the use
of computers or similar technologies to record and count votes. The proposed
advantages of these systems are:
• Computers are good at calculation, particularly complex calculations (e.g.
preference allocation);
• The entry of votes into a computer reduces the processing costs of
manual keying;
• Recounts and the display of running totals can be undertaken very easily
and quickly;
• Where internet (or similar) technologies are introduced, this can allow people
to vote remotely—a beneft for people with limited mobility, carer or other
responsibilities, or who are away from their jurisdiction or out of the country.
A brief technological overview
Electronic and online voting is not one single technology, but a range of
technologies that could be used for voting purposes. Outside the formal electoral
process, electronic voting can be seen in areas as diverse as:
• The use of SMS messages to vote in competitions or ‘reality television’
programming;
• The use of internet polls on many websites (for serious or less serious
reasons); and
• The development of electronic ‘purpose built’ voting systems.
The core similarity is that these systems use computers to store and calculate
the outcome of the electoral process, but the specifc confguration can be quite
diverse, from:
• The use of internet voting through specially-developed voting pages;
• The use of private networks (such as local area networks) to allow for voting
online; and
• The use of ‘stand alone’ computers or similar machines to automate the
voting process in designated polling locations.
PAGE 61
Risks and fears
Australians have embraced electronic systems for all manner of sensitive and
personal transactions: from fnancial transactions such as banking, and paying
for goods and services, to intimate social interactions such as online dating, and
virtual sex. However, the question of placing political elections online has generally
been treated cautiously by that small section of the Australian community that
has considered the issue.
Mostly this caution comes from two sources:
• A belief that online transactions are by nature insecure or insubstantial. This
has two elements: First, a concern that electronic systems can be tampered
with by internal actors, or by external actors such as hackers, in order to
deliver a misleading result. Second, that these systems are more fallible
than printed voting ballots, and could be subject to accidental destruction
or loss. Given the nature of the internet as an open network, and ongoing
publicity over computer crime using this technology, there is concern that
any election system developed using this medium would be subject to
attack. Even if this attack were not successful in altering the outcome of the
election, it could disrupt the voting process through what is called a ‘denial
of service’ attack on the communications infrastructure.
• An awareness of signifcant limitations and suspicion of electoral fraud
associated with the 2000 Presidential election in the US. The close outcome
of this election, legal disputes over vote counting, and revelations of the
limitations of some electronic voting machines employed in this election
received signifcant negative press in Australia as well as in the US. Thus,
while the United Kingdom (UK) has employed a range of electronic and
online voting systems in a number of local government elections, there is a
widespread belief that these systems present signifcant democratic risks.
As perceptions of fraud can undermine the perceived legitimacy of the
outcome, these perceptions are as damaging as any actual tampering.
Democratic implications
The democratic implications of electronic voting are potentially quite complex,
depending on the approach taken. Approaches can include remote voting, local
networked systems, stand-alone voting machines, and the use of paper records
to supplement the system.
PAGE 62
The most commonly cited implications of the introduction of electronic and online
voting systems are:
• Positive:
o The systems provide greater levels of access, particularly for the mobility
impaired, people who live remotely or are overseas, or people who have
diffculties with the conventional ballot paper;
o They afford faster tabulation and the declaration of electoral outcomes;
o The automation of data entry and processing reduce tabulation errors;
o The system can be developed to provide additional information to
electors to improve their chance of an informed vote; and
o The systems reduce informal votes (accidental vote spoilage) and
ambiguous votes.
• Negative:
o The implementation devalues or undermines the act of voting, either
turning it into a ‘computer game’ or reducing social connectedness
through eliminating the physical community of the polling place;
o The system is inherently insecure with the potential for localised or
systematic manipulation, domestic or international. This manipulation
may never be detected;
o Online systems could encourage vote selling;
o The systems, particularly internet-based voting, systematically lower the
cost of participation for those affuent enough to access the technology,
and do little for under-privileged members of the community. This
deepens and widens social exclusion; and
o The systems are complex and place an unwarranted burden on electoral
regulators. As these organisations tend to be relatively small, given the
periodic nature of their work, this will distract from their performance in
other areas of electoral administration.
However, it should be noted that unlike in the UK or the US—two jurisdictions
that have invested heavily in electronic voting systems—the motivation for
introducing these systems in Australia is very different. While the UK and US
tend to focus on these technologies as a means to increase voter participation,
PAGE 68
either through lowering the costs of voting, or providing remote voting to citizens
who are overseas, the compulsory nature of voting in Australia reduces turnout
concerns. Thus, proponents of electronic voting in Australia tend to emphasise
access by people with language diffculties, such as non-English speaking voters
or those with limited vision or mobility. The speed of tabulation has been another
argument of practical relevance, particularly in jurisdictions with complex electoral
systems, such as the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).
The democratic benefts therefore, are real, but modest, largely providing for:
• More informed participation by those citizens with limited levels of English; and
• The capacity of the vision-impaired community to cast an unassisted vote
and hence enjoy the benefts of secret ballots.
Because these benefts are modest relative to the possible costs associated
with establishing these systems, it is unsurprising that Australian governments
have been cautious in adopting the technology. In addition, the nature of the
preferential system tends to discourage the use of some forms of remote polling,
as there is a need to represent the ‘virtual’ ballot as closely as possible to the
conventional ballot paper.
Activities to date
At present only the ACT has developed and implemented an electronic voting
system for binding political elections. Internet voting systems, however, are
becoming increasingly popular in commercial and union elections, due to the
signifcantly lower costs of administration. The ACT’s approach focuses on the
development of a set of low-cost, simple to use, electronic voting computers that
are modifed versions of conventional desktop systems.
The ACT frst offered electronic voting in eight locations in 2001 and again in 2004.
The system, while subject to ongoing review, appears to have been accepted by
the ACT population with use of the system doubling between 2001 and 2004.
The ACT Electoral Commission has noted that the system appears to have
reduced the level of informal voting.
43
However this claim is diffcult to assess
given the possibility of motivated (knowledgeable) electors disproportionately
using the system over the paper version. Overall, however, it appears that the
ACT will continue to be at the forefront of this technology in Australia for the
immediate future.
43
Elections ACT, 2005
PAGE 64
The approach of the ACT government, in using open source code that can be
reviewed by the public for faws or limitations, appears to represent a greater
commitment to the openness of the electoral process than has been exhibited
in the United States, where private vendors retain the intellectual property rights
for their systems and refuse public access to review the quality or integrity of the
operating software employed.
In 2004, the Electronic Democracy Inquiry of Victoria recommended that a similar
system (with printed records) be introduced on a trial basis, specifcally for the
purposes of assisting the vision impaired and non-English speaking Victorian
community. This recommendation has been cautiously adopted, as a potential pilot
project, by the Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC). The Committee rejected the
suggestion that internet-based voting be undertaken on the grounds that:
• The technical implementation costs would be higher than the value of the
system (given high turnout rates);
• The risk of disruption to the system was signifcant, and could not be safely
mitigated by the State; and
• There was no public demand for an internet-based voting system
by Victorians.
The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters of the Parliament of
Australia, in its inquiry into the 2004 federal election, has also made a cautious
recommendation that there be consultation over experimental arrangements
(electronic voting) to assist the blind and visually impaired to cast a secret ballot
at the next federal election.
ICTs and the electoral roll
While voting in Commonwealth, State and Territory elections is generally
compulsory for all citizens, and most local government elections require the
majority of citizens to vote, the quality of the compulsory voting regime is
dependent on the quality of the electoral roll.
For many years, the electoral roll system has been computerised, making its
management (additions, removals, changes of address) increasingly swift and
accurate, when compared with paper or card-based systems used in previous years.
For electoral offcials, charged with the process of ensuring enrolment and participation,
however, the capacity to achieve universal participation has been improved through
general developments in computerisation in and around government.
PAGE 65
Traditionally, while enrolment was regarded as an obligation of citizenship,
electoral offcials engaged in a variety of advertising campaigns prior to the close
of the electoral roll to ensure that unenrolled voters were prompted to enrol, and
those who had not updated their enrolment information were reminded to provide
the electoral administration agency with their current place of address.
In recent years this ‘outreach’ approach has been supplemented by:
• Cooperative agreements between the Commonwealth and State
governments to exchange enrolment information, allowing enrolment
processes to be streamlined, and enrolment information to be verifed; and
• An increasing array of co-operative relationships between electoral
organisations and other government and quasi-government organisations
(such as Australia Post driver registration agencies, or utilities companies)
to allow enrolment information to be generated for individuals who change
their address.
The overall beneft of this inter-organisational cooperation has been to improve the
comprehensiveness of the electoral roll. While the total number of citizens who fail
to enrol in successive elections remains quite small, the continual improvement
to electoral roll management provides a positive beneft to ensuring the widest
possible electoral participation.
Conclusion
Overall, the role of ICTs in recent electoral campaigns and their impact on the
quality of Australia’s democratic system remains mixed. The response of political
parties to the development of new forms of communication with voters has
been quite conservative. The differential take-up of computer technologies in the
campaigning process refects to a large extent the existing bias in the Australian
party competition. It is possible to conclude that the uptake of ICTs by Australia’s
existing political parties has had no signifcant implications for Australian
democracy, either positive or negative.
Outside of the party system, the rise of alternative voices in formal electoral
campaigns does present modest improvement to the depth of democratic debate
and opinion available to Australian citizens. One of the signifcant barriers to the
wider impact of these alternative sources of information in shaping public opinion
has been the complex relationship between alternative new media sources of
political information and opinion, and the mainstream media.
PAGE 66
Mainstream journalism and new media have tended to highlight only those online
sources of alternative opinion that refect the style of traditional news and current
affairs. Overall, however, the appearance of new forms of political opinion and
organisation during recent electoral campaigns can be seen as quite positive,
particularly given the tendency for the number of sites to grow from election to
election. The only signifcant risks to democratic participation in Australia from
these alternative news and opinion channels is the clear risk that, maliciously or
through ignorance, some of these new communications channels will be used to
propagate slander or misinformation.
Some in the community have been disappointed that moves to modernise the
system of voting through electronic or online voting systems have been modest
in scope. However, the considerable risks (and community perception of risks)
encourage a cautious approach to the implementation of these systems so as
not to undermine the legitimacy of electoral outcomes. While the time may not be
right for the use of internet-based voting systems because of problems associated
with security, the use of electronic voting machines in strictly controlled polling
locations appears to afford a small, but real democratic beneft to those members
of the community who traditionally experience barriers to casting a private vote.
The expansion of this form of electronic voting, therefore, would constitute an
ongoing incremental beneft to democracy in Australia.
PAGE 61
SIrcngIhs
• Australia has a long tradition of relatively free and fair elections, with
high levels of public participation.
• Most political parties have provided large amounts of information,
and access to candidate details via websites.
• ICTs have been employed by electoral regulators to increase public
awareness of the electoral process and communicate with electors
about processes and outcomes.
• Innovations in electronic voting have been cautious, but aimed
at improving the quality of access and participation, rather than
lowering administrative costs.
Wcakncsscs
• Political party websites have tended to be information repositories
aimed at ‘pushing’ information at electors, rather than places
for debate or interaction between members of the public and
candidates.
• Some areas of campaigning online have violated electoral laws,
particularly some anonymous websites.
• The uptake of electronic voting systems has been very slow in
Australia, compared with similar nations (UK, USA).
• ICTs, particularly the internet, have not been employed by regulators
to facilitate informed participation in elections.
PAGE 68
This chapter describes how Australian civil society is making use of ICTs, and
how these efforts are affecting the four democratic values of equality, popular
control, civil liberties and vibrant public debate. The existence of a vibrant and
active civil society has generally been regarded as one of the core components
of a democratic society, either through active participation in formal political
processes (as political participants or ‘watchdogs’ of the public interest), or with
regard to the expectation that citizens have an obligation to inform themselves to
participate in political life in a meaningful way.
Like most democratic notions, ‘civil society’ is not an easily defned concept. In
some defnitions, it explicitly includes non-government groups like major business
interests and political parties. In others, it refers only to non-proft associations
and the actions of individuals. In this review, the term is used to denote non-
government actors, but will here be restricted to the non-mass media private
sector, individuals, and organisations (with parties given a separate treatment,
as above).
The democratic projects initiated by civil society players to engage their peers,
and to create voices that can infuence political actors and bureaucrats, represent
the active form of Australia’s civil society. In addition, this is complemented by the
ways governments reach out to civil society organisations to offer them access
to the policy process, recognising their ‘representative’ function or ability to
generate relevant policy ideas (see next section). However, because government
consultation is often absent, limited or offered as a ‘service’ rather than a
Cìvìl socìcIv:
FìghIìng Ihc good
ñghI!
PAGE 60
partnership, civil society is commonly left to fll gaps between formal political
processes and the community. These become challenges and opportunities for
non-government actors and entrepreneurs to have signifcant impacts on the
democratic process.
The following section provides a broad overview of the ways civil society is
participating in the democratic process in Australia via ICTs. It must be noted
at the outset, however, that the current dynamic is towards less interest and
involvement in the political process, a trend that technology alone cannot address.
Thus, all forms of online engagement are limited to the small minority that sees
participation as worthwhile.
Background issues, trends, and constraints
The use of ICTs by Australian civil society has been steadily increasing over the
past decade, expanding the possible impacts on democratic process. Many
impacts seem contradictory: convenient convergent technologies also bring
vulnerability to cyber attack, identity theft, and information overload. Wider
availability of technology is democratising, but enhances the gap for those who
sit on the wrong side of the ‘digital divide’. These factors are common to all uses
of ICTs, including those that are deliberately established to facilitate democracy.
Some of the Australian answers to these questions about democratic
communications are local, some national, and others are part of international
dynamics. Before considering specifc initiatives that involve civil society in
democratic processes, it is useful to provide the overall context. This will both
highlight issues specifc to Australia and show where global factors are important.
Of signifcance is an overall environment of declining civic participation in the
political process, along with diminished trust in public institutions, including the
mass media.
Digital divides
One of the principal areas of concern remains the ‘digital divide’. This is a social
barrier that restricts participation by those Australians without access to, or the skills
to employ, ICTs to enhance their freedom of action as citizens. Such digital dilemmas
are a critical factor in enabling or inhibiting the ability of Australians to access and
contribute to information and discussion concerning their own futures.
PAGE 10
First world quality infrastructure is a minimal requirement to optimise democratic
interactivity via ICTs. Given the correlation between a lack of access and wider
economic, social, and political disadvantage, civil society organisations have
often been deeply involved in attempts to address these social concerns, in
partnership with some governments (see next section).
Of concern for all four democratic values is the ability of citizens to have equal
access to means of communication. A report prepared for the Networking the
Nation Board described the disadvantages that rural people face when their
telecommunications are substandard, compared to urban Australia.
44
Another
report in Western Australia revealed (unsurprisingly) that the demand for electronic
services increases with the distance from a regional centre.
45
In addition to distance as a barrier to participation, lack of affordable broadband
services looms as another dimension to the digital divide. Both these factors are
likely to affect the ability of civil society to achieve equal participation and popular
control, given that public debate and dialogue are increasingly moving online.
46
A limited right to speak
Australia has neither a First Amendment guarantee of freedom of expression,
nor mandated public funding for community media. Thus, there is no guaranteed
right to know or speak. Moreover, the stringent laws covering defamation are
often suffcient to dampen public discussion. This is particularly true for non-proft
organisations or individuals with limited legal skills or the capacity to fght legal
actions over material published online. The quality and quantity of public debate
suffers as a result.
Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPP suits are also used to
silence public criticism.
47
Copyright law is another area that currently discourages
debate and sharing of alternative forms of information. Given Australia’s highly
concentrated media ownership, reality TV and lifestyle programming are the
favoured options for electronic audience involvement.
Skills and infrastructure
Australia suffers from limitations of scale, since its population is not large enough
to support the many critical masses that exist in the US and the UK. On the other
44
Karin Geiselhart, 2004, The Electronic Canary: Sustainability Solutions for Australian Teleservice Centres, Paper
prepared for Community TeleServices Australia, Inc, commissioned by the Networking the Nation Board, Canberra,
Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts
45
Sheryl Siekerka, Dan Scherr and Jamie Robertson, 2003, Telecommunications Needs Assessment: The
Communications Needs of Regional Western Australians, July, Department of Industry and Resources (WA)
46
Robert Jaques, 2005, ‘Americans bin newspapers and turn to the web’ www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news
47
see Sharon Beder, 2004, ‘A SLAPP in the face of democracy’, Democratic Audit of Australia, December, http://demo-
cratic.audit.anu.edu.au/
PAGE 11
hand, Australia’s smaller and somewhat more homogeneous, highly urbanised
society may facilitate the achievement of consensus. It is not yet clear how
these factors affect the ability to innovate with new media or its impact on the
democratic process.
Interest groups seeking to provide online services often face diffculties unless
they can attract supporters and volunteers (or sponsorship and/or grant funding)
to provide the technical infrastructure and maintenance. While much government
funding is aimed at assisting small to medium enterprises with electronic
commerce or intellectual property issues, relatively little goes to the many tiny
community groups and organisations that need help with these matters.
Communities of practice evolve around different democratic values, and
increasingly have an online component. There is already an extensive literature
on the role of ICTs in generating social capital, mostly from a North American
perspective. Communities of interest are most likely to support bonding social
capital, or reinforcement of existing ties and trust relations.
Open sources and ‘social software’
As ICTs have developed, the distinction between free services and paid services
has become a dividing issue. One dimension of this debate is open-source
software. This is ‘free’ software that allows and even encourages the source code
to be modifed and adapted. A more recent twist to the open source concept is
open content, or media created by witnesses and then sent on to wide audiences
through various media channels.
Because digital media opens the door to low cost content, now including phone
video, it inherently feeds the processes of public discourse via alternative forms
of information. This user-generated content, also known as ‘citizen journalism’
or ‘open source journalism’ has implications for the mass media and the political
process. Feeding information to collective websites, live internet feeds and
blogs, etc,. requires social software to manage the fow. One leading example
globally is Wikipedia. This allows amendments and additions, thereby harnessing
the knowledge of the widest possible range of sources. These open-source
approaches have the potential to foster political equality. When they are effective,
they can also support popular control of government by increasing transparency
and accountability and deliberative democracy through broadening the sources
of information for public debate.
PAGE 12
Activities and examples
This section outlines the ways that civil society is currently using ICTs to infuence
democratic process in Australia. Not all are intentional. Many ICT projects have
incidental impacts on democratic process. For instance, a retailer of music CDs
may provide a forum for comments and discussion on a website, and this may
generate substantial discussion about copyright and illegal downloading of
music. However, the forum was not designed to infuence government policy,
and therefore is not considered a democratic ICT project.
To some extent, all online communication may be considered part of the
‘background noise’ of democratic process. The scope here is constrained to
projects that overtly relate to the four democratic values, and draws on examples
where possible. In some cases, overseas examples are presented as evidence of
Australia’s less mature use of ICTs for democratic process.
Infuence of overseas ICT democracy projects
Many international online democracy projects inform and infuence activities in
Australia. These are too numerous to catalogue and have perhaps never been
counted. Two will suffce to describe their overt role in the democratic process,
and as models for what could be possible here.
The frst is the Institute for Public Accuracy (IPA), which aims to ‘increase the
reach and capacity of progressive and grassroots organisations (at no cost to
them) to affect public policy by getting them and their ideas into the mainstream
media. IPA gains media access for those whose voices are commonly excluded
or drowned out by government or corporate-backed institutions’.
48
They help
to provide progressive perspectives on issues such as the environment, human
rights, foreign policy and economic justice. While their e-mail notices are generally
US-centric, they provide information that is essential for an informed civil debate
in today’s globalised world. IPA offers commentators who can balance the often
right-wing perspectives of US mainstream media.
Another useful US project is Fairness and Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) that
corrects and rebalances coverage in the mass media. It roughly flls the niche of
the ABC’s Media Watch television program, but in more depth and with the aim of
stimulating activism. Both the IPA and FAIR have no direct correlate in Australia.
Some Australian projects are inspired by or directly modelled on similar projects
in the US. One such is getup.org, based on the highly successful moveon.
org in the US. With its much larger population, the US is more developed in
48
htttp://accuracy.org
PAGE 18
electronic engagement. Getup.org may be an exception in Australia, as it seems
to be well funded. Its board is also broad-based, and includes a union offcial,
representatives from several political parties, and an internet millionaire.
It is typical of the higher bandwidth content that is now providing more dynamic
content, and features video clips to get its message across. Getup invites
donations, encourages contacting others about the site, provides e-mail updates
and allows easy e-mailing of all Coalition members, though this becomes spam for
politicians, so decreasing its impact. Given the general low levels of engagement
by citizens, it remains to be seen whether these types of organisations can attract
this group and infuence the political process in the ways they hope.
Who runs our civil society ICT projects?
Government efforts aside, the most signifcant democratic ICT projects in
Australia have been established by business people and social entrepreneurs.
There has been little government support for either engaging citizens or funding
non-proft ICT development or initiatives, particularly at the federal level. The feld
has mostly been explored by private individuals and organisations and a few
university-funded researchers.
This does not mean that non-government organisations are ineffective in their
uses of ICTs to achieve democratic outcomes. There is, however, a fairly direct
relationship between levels of funding and ICT presence and participation for
organisations as well as for individuals. Thus, with some exceptions, larger
institutions such as the Australian Council for Social Service (ACOSS), the Labor
Council of New South Wales, and the Australian Consumers’ Association (ACA)
are better represented online than small, very local groups. They are therefore
better able to gather stakeholder views and harness their social capital to
infuence government.
These larger organisations are gradually becoming more sophisticated in their
ability to encourage online participation and action. ACOSS runs a virtual network
about welfare, and their site is able to send a personalised e-mail to relevant
members of parliament. On the other hand, Workers Online, the ‘offcial organ
of labornet’, provides an excellent news service but limited interactivity. It simply
uses the effciencies of electronic delivery to provide a service, but does not
facilitate dialogue and action.
To the extent that their resources and technological skills allow, NGOs use digital
media to reach out to their members, conduct business more effciently, make
PAGE 14
their own internal processes transparent, and gather views to ensure their growth
and development are responsive to stakeholders. Because NGOs are subject to
similar governance issues as the governments they often lobby, they are subject
to similar fallibilities of internal democratic processes.
NGO transparency or consultation with stakeholders is frequently inadequate or
absent. From the smallest to the largest institutions, the predominant values will
determine how open they will be, regardless of the tools at their disposal. A
good example of this is getup.org, which aims to mobilise public opinion on
issues, but does not provide means by which the issues selected for action can
be infuenced by its membership base. Transparency always brings a certain
vulnerability, and many organisations are unable to become truly driven by and
responsive to their stakeholders, in a process that could be described as ‘turning
themselves inside out’.
Projects that seek to enlarge civic information and debate do not always succeed.
Even given optimal circumstances of access and relevance, participation and
engagement are the exception, rather than the norm. Thus, many community
networks have few participants interested in their online forums, and the ACA
struggles to get comments on policy matters. The active phase of initiatives to
inform the community about a specifc issue tend to be short-lived, such as the
Defend and Extend Medicare website before the 2004 federal election.
49
Without
the serious funding that is needed for an equivalent commercial website and
marketing campaign, social participation projects are unlikely to be sustainable
or professional enough to make an impact on public dialogue.
Major Australian civil society projects online
Although there has been much experimentation with new media for democratic
purposes in Australia, only two projects have risen above the background noise
to become infuential. That is, they have become part of the media that decision
makers themselves notice and engage with. Interestingly, both were established
by men with a political and business background. These small ‘L’ liberals also ft
into the category of social entrepreneurship.
On Line Opinion is probably the best Australian example of a well planned (and
increasingly successful) effort to provide a wide range of views and encourage
deliberation. It is deliberately non-partisan and maintains not-for-proft status.
These features, along with software that facilitates blogging and discussion,
49
http://defendandextendmedicare.org/index.php
PAGE 15
attract sponsorships and diversity. It provides an important channel for intelligent
articles from individuals who do not frequently gain access to mainstream
media channels.
Some ‘outing’ occurs, as when the author of a feature article decrying the
existence of global warming is exposed by commentators as being in the pay of
oil companies, a classic example. In mainstream media, the exposure process
takes longer and is less certain.
On Line Opinion is run by the non-proft group National Forum. As it attracts
more sponsors and resources, often from Australian universities, the Forum
is expanding its range of citizen-oriented information services. They are now
developing a citizen consultation process as part of their What the People Want
(WTPW) project, and selling websites as a move towards fnancial sustainability.
They have done research on the troubled Queensland public health system,
resulting in a submission to two health inquiries. National Forum maintains a
high standard of transparency, and the submission and interim reports are both
available publicly on their website. They encourage discussion about this, and are
gradually reaching a critical mass of public attention. Their work is starting to be
covered by the mainstream media: a good indicator of infuence.
WTPW is based on research. For instance, they offer questionnaires about
industrial relations, and the responses will become part of their report. The quiet
manifesto of WTPW is to ‘abolish the silent majority’. Part of the National Forum’s
strength is the way it builds coalitions, by working with university researchers,
other NGOs, unions and think tanks. It also takes paid advertising for its pages,
and thus copies the approach of successful electronic services such as Google.
An interesting feature is the overlap with the broadcast media, via a fortnightly
talkback program on the ABC in Brisbane.
More notorious and risky is the Crikey project. Founded by Stephen Mayne,
media adviser to then Premier of Victoria Jeff Kennett, it has since been sold
and continues as a business venture. The motto for the site is ‘empowering the
irritated’. It is a good example of the open sources approach to journalism, as it
relies on tips and information from subscribers. The goal is more discovery and
connecting information than deliberation. Delivered daily as an e-mail, it rises
above the status of an online gossip column due to the public values it reinforces:
exposure of wrong-doing and the inner workings of the powerful, compliance of
offcials in corrupt practices, even embarrassing egoism and vanity.
PAGE 16
Mayne continues to focus on shareholder activism, and is now one of many
specialists that write for Crikey. In its early days a number of lawsuits and
defamation actions kept Crikey on the fnancial and legal edge. Australians love
to see the good family man take on big business and the mainstream commercial
media, and bought subscriptions to Crikey partly as a form of voyeuristic
sponsorship. It is a healthy indication of the state of Australian democracy that
Crikey is now on a more secure, though perhaps less edgy, footing.
While not as explicitly aimed at improving democratic process as the National
Forum, Crikey nevertheless has registered on the mass media consciousness and
contributed especially to alternative sources of information. By holding business,
media and political power brokers to account, it has at the least an indirect
infuence on popular control of government and the quality of public debate.
Mayne’s ongoing work as a shareholder activist is part of a global trend to use
proxy voting and electronic communications to pressure the corporate sector to
avoid damaging social and environmental behaviour. Crikey continues to bring
important aspects of the democratic process to public attention. For example,
it has highlighted problems with Australia’s Freedom of Information, along with
the ability of Ministers to use their discretionary powers to keep documents
from being accessed. Part of this reporting involved quoting and commenting
on editorials in the mainstream print media, contributing to the overall vitality of
public discussion.
Minor Australian civil society projects online
This section gives an overview of other Australian civil society ICT projects that
have implications for the four democratic values. These are again indicative only,
rather than comprehensive.
At least one member of the Canberra Press Gallery is trying to bring a broader
range of political content to a wider audience. Daniel Bolger, founder of bytext.
com, specialises in providing audio, video and transcripts of annual general
meetings, press conferences, speeches, and other events. Given the current
structure of the mass media, most of these are treated as ephemeral and
not covered. However, the nature of the electronic marketplace means that
there is a small market for a wide range of diverse content that caters to a
wider set of ‘publics’. Bolger aims to meet this using internet streaming and
podcasting. His plan to provide MPTV would allow Members of Parliament to
update and interact with citizens far removed from Canberra. The underlying
PAGE 11
goal is to give information and thereby infuence to the public, while providing a
commercial service.
Slightly more tangential to the democratic process is the website ‘Not
Good Enough’ (NGE).
50
It illustrates the many overlaps between civil society
communications and formal processes of governance. Founded by academic
and social entrepreneur Dr Fiona Stewart, NGE is a user-supported website that
acts as an intermediary between consumers and companies. Their stated aim is
clearly related to the Democratic Audit’s four democratic processes: ‘The aim of
the NGE website is to use the power of the Internet to scrutinise and publicise
corporate behaviour - good and bad’. They overtly want to make company
behaviour more transparent and accountable, increase information sharing
between consumers, and encourage best practice.
NGE receives complaints (and compliments) about goods and services, and
offers the companies an opportunity to reply. Those who are unsatisfactory get a
serve on the site and via the associated e-mail list. The site hosts debate among
its members and subscribers, but will not tolerate false or mischievous complaints
or compliments about companies or government. Thus, it is contributing to
accountability, public debate and alternative forms of information. It is creating
a form of national community of practice (or perhaps of complaint). The only
missing element is research about how well this site (or others in a similar vein)
achieves its goals.
Several other Australian projects that share information and foster dialogue and
discussion will round out this sampler. These include:
• A mailing list run by the Internet Society of Australia, which discusses
relevant issues such as internet governance;
• Several feminist politics and policy mailing lists, including Ausfem-Polnet
(established 1996, 900 subscribers in 2003), and Pamelas-List that links
over 60 national women's organisations;
• A health fnance list, run by an academic in Victoria, that includes articles
(mostly from Australian mainstream media) about the fnancing of health
and drugs in particular;
• Global Trade Watch mailing list and website, alerting Australians to
international trade issues and national developments, such as the details
and implications of bilateral trade agreements;
50
www.notgoodenough.org
PAGE 18
• Fibreculture is a website and mailing list “for the exchange of articles, ideas
and arguments on Australian IT policy in a broad, cultural context”. Founded
by Dutch new media researcher Geert Lovink, it attracts a wide range of
academics, artists, policy makers and community activists. The group has
run a conference and published a book;
• Indymedia in Australia is part of a global network of independent media
centres that have become part of a global network of independent media;
• The Democratic Audit of Australia, under the auspices of which this report
is published. As well as publishing reports such as this, the Audit has
encouraged debate about democratic values via the papers it publishes on
its webpage and its breaking news feature; and
• The Southern Cross Group, which provides information for, and campaigns
on behalf of, Australian ex-pats.
In addition, a myriad of bloggers (including two of the authors) express themselves
electronically. Many invite the public to join in, and a few, such as Margo Kingston,
become widely known.
51
Because new media is constantly evolving, experiments are frequent and a topic
for research. ‘Smart mobs’ are sudden gatherings that send out the time and
location via SMS, or mobile phone text messaging, highlighted at the Cronulla
race riots in December 2005. As elsewhere, anti-globalisation protests in Australia
have made great use of electronic communications to organise. Other services
and software include ways to syndicate video as well as text and photos, often
using a peer-to-peer distribution rather than a centralised broadcast. This helps
keep costs of bandwidth down and provides fexibility between creators and
distributors. The Wiki approach mentioned in the introduction is also starting to
appear at more local and specialist levels, creating a store of shared philosophy
and values embedded in the topics and their agreed upon defnitions.
New relationships or social noise?
The wide range of new media allow many new players to ‘meet up’ in cyberspace,
and not just for dating services. People who cross paths online, perhaps while
debating or responding to requests for resources on a topic, are already linked
through their common interest.
51
Journalist, Margo Kingston, ran a popular ‘webdiary’. The site she established continues though she is no longer run-
ning it: http://webdiary.com.au/
PAGE 10
However, new media by itself is unlikely to develop social capital outside these
individuals’ existing patterns of political and social support. This is partly because
people overwhelmingly tend to choose communications and communicators who
reinforce their existing values and knowledge. Marriages, for example, between
people of opposing political views are notably unusual. Likewise, partnering
between organisations is more likely to be the ‘bonding’ forms of social capital
that network similar groups, rather than the ‘bridging’ forms of social capital that
forge new relationships.
However, given an existing pool of people or organisations with similar social
goals, new supporters can quickly cluster about a virtual gathering place. It may
be more problematic to sustain these enthusiasms after the policy crisis or election
day has passed. The power of these distributed technologies to allow for low
cost organisation cannot be denied, and examples of grassroots organisations
making signifcant efforts to mobilise and organise online (such as the Chillout,
children out of detention group)
52
are becoming increasingly common.
Civil society institutions are subject to the same parameters regarding new media
as the individuals within them. As discussed above, many organisations are unable
or unwilling to become truly responsive to their members. However, those that
do realise the advantages of a networked approach over a traditional hierarchical
approach can thrive using new media as a tool. Those that resist, and attempt to
maintain communications from a central hub, can fnd themselves decreasingly
relevant. This transformative pattern is being repeated in many dimensions of the
emerging information-based society.
These networking patterns take strength from their very diffuseness. They are
able to bring in people with different voices, from different backgrounds and
geographic settings. The ability to hear the bureaucrat’s perspective, if you are
an isolated woman in outback Queensland, can help generate constructive
dialogue. Likewise, communication beyond other borders of class, region,
relation, and nation can enlighten global debates. While more communication
is not necessarily (or even usually) part of the solution, in the cluttered chatter of
cyberspace, tolerance and good intentions are present in good measure, along
with the hate and stereotyping. Thus, the use of ICTs for social capital is not
limited to issues that impact directly on Australians. The internet allows ‘citizens
without borders’ to communicate instantly about anything and everything.
52
http://www.chilout.org/
PAGE 80
Uncivil uses of ICTs
A brief but salutary foray into the dark side of civil society is necessary to round
out the above discussion of the ways civil society uses ICTs for democratic
processes. It is only possible here to give a few examples and make the point
that government, the mass media and private companies often have a strong
vested interest in inhibiting public information and debate. They also frequently
act to gather information about citizens and in ways that are not conducive to
open dialogue. Like many of the topics considered in this report, the use of new
media and the internet for nefarious purposes is the subject of much research
and concern. While the specifc examples provided below are international, all
could either be replicated within Australia, or by their nature have implications for
Australian democratic process.
To begin with, there are signifcant publicly funded information projects that have
mass registration and surveillance as their goals, often under the rubric of anti-
terrorism legitimacy. Australia is at the forefront of such projects. It will suffce
here to say that keeping track of travellers, monitoring electronic transactions
and communications, cross-referencing data-bases and mining it for security
purposes is not always compatible with the protection of civil liberties. The lack of
transparency about these projects (again for security reasons) makes it less likely
that breaches of law can be revealed or addressed (see next section).
Within the private sector, the targeting of medical practitioners for fnely tuned
marketing activities involves the collection and correlation of data about prescribing
habits with doctors’ details. Large expenditures and resources are aimed at
infuencing doctors. Along the way, the quality of public debate is debased.
Finally, even the most violent of terrorists is, in some sense, part of civil society.
The latest efforts to infltrate their networks include recruiting from likely community
groups and participating and monitoring blogs and chat lines where terrorists
might lurk.
In addition to these prominent examples, many smaller issues remain to be
resolved as participation goes virtual. Most of these are not new, but new
technologies can make detection or remedy more complex. What, for example,
are the ethics of podcasting a university lecture without asking permission?
Surreptitious recording has long been possible, but podcasting means this
material, which may be copyrighted to the lecturer, can now be broadcast,
cached, and reused more easily. Other questions of accuracy and manipulation
carry over from older media.
PAGE 81
These examples reinforce the earlier assertion that ICTs are inherently neither
good nor bad for civil society, its institutions and relations. ICTs are always just
tools in the hands of actors seeking to establish their infuence. The next section
provides an integrating analysis of these threads, and includes a discussion of the
benefts and drawbacks of ICTs for each of the four democratic values around
which this audit is organised.
Conclusion
This chapter has outlined the current situation regarding the use of ICTs for
democratic purposes by civil society. As well as describing the scope of existing
projects, it provided an analysis of the factors that make such projects more or
less likely, and their potential for success. This section looks at what has been
achieved and what the future might hold, given the Australian context.
A number of experiments by social entrepreneurs such as the founders of the
National Forum, Crikey, and Not Good Enough have demonstrated the capacity
for new media to engage civil society in ways that do indeed enhance those four
democratic values. Wider sharing of information, discussion and debate, input
into policy processes and cross-fertilisation with many other civil society avenues
are some of the positive outcomes that can be observed from these and many
other smaller civil society ICT projects.
The full scope of civil society infuence is diffcult to assess, perhaps because it
is not usually measured. In Australia, there is not a lot of hard evidence that the
structure or direction of policy debates have been signifcantly altered by the
introduction of new communication channels. Without the frm commitment of
governments to become fully responsive to their citizenry, new media provides
opportunities for many people to speak largely to themselves and their like-
minded colleagues. A critical mass to change the government approach to citizen
relations could come from civil society, assisted by new media.
The quality of public debate is diffcult to assess, but measures could be suggested
and tested. One danger of new media is that a great deal of chatter and fow will
be produced, but with little cohesive action for change. There is always a risk that
empowered individuals will mistake their own voices for democratic deliberation.
Given the current domination of public policy discussion by the educated elite,
this is a serious concern.
An alternative perspective on information and citizen engagement is the
PAGE 82
‘information commons’. This concept acknowledges the need for public access
to information online as a democratic prerequisite. This access, however, is ‘being
damaged by a combination of restrictive technology, unbalanced changes to
intellectual property law, onerous licenses, and media industry consolidation’.
53
One example of these tangential yet detrimental changes is the decision in 2005
not to continue the funding of peak environmental advocacy groups. This is
expected to hobble the ability of these groups to act collectively, and this will
in turn fow on to their capacity to generate information and dialogue online.
Without policy settings that recognise and support the contribution of civil society
actors to democratic process, it is unlikely that any but the most highly funded
groups can be effective, online or off. This again highlights the importance of
integrated measures of civil society engagement that fow from the four core
values of political equality, popular control of government, civil liberties and the
quality of public debate. It seems individuals have great freedom to participate in
civil society via ICTs, but their effectiveness is limited by the legal, economic and
infrastructure hurdles that inhibit collective voices from arising.
SIrcngIhs
• Can give all citizens equal voice.
• Can document and display wide range of content from
diverse sources.
• Can develop digital literacies via entertainment and education.
Wcakncsscs
• Allows extreme voices equal space and time.
• Requires technical and economic access and skills to participate.
• Dependent on values of organisers.
• Content can be manipulated and falsifed.
53
Nancy Kranich, 2004, The Informations Common—A Public Policy Report, New York, Free Expression Project, www.
fepproject.org
PAGE 88
By its size and the extent of its technical, human, and fnancial resources, the
public service in Australia has a critical role in the democratic process. An
impartial, professional public service is critical to the effective management of
public affairs: acting at the direction of democratically-elected governments in the
implementation of their public policy. A professional public service bureaucracy
has sometimes been seen as a limitation on democracy. The argument here is
that the size of the public service, and its longevity compared with governments,
provides it with power to limit or restrict the rights of democratically-elected
governments to act in accordance with their electoral mandates. In this way, the
public service can be painted (in democratic terms) as a type of ‘necessary evil’:
too large to be trusted, but essential for the administration of modern society.
A more nuanced view recognises that public servants can have positive (as well
as negative) regard for the public interest. Recent versions of this view stem from
two distinctly different sources: political sociological studies that have highlighted
the role of ‘policy entrepreneurs’ in government who advocate reformist or
progressive policies, and the New Public Management perspective that sees
public managers as having a role in the creation of ‘public value’ through
developing democratic dialogues with stakeholders and delivering outcomes in
line with their expectations.
Each of these positions has value in considering the role of the public service
in using ICTs to beneft or hinder democracy in Australia. In addition, however,
it is important to recognise that the public service’s use of ICTs can be
divided between:
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PAGE 84
• Areas of activity that explicitly provide access to decision-making to
the community. This type of activity is what could be termed ‘electronic
democracy’ initiatives or projects, which are focused on the direct provision
of a conduit into the policy process; and
• Areas of activity that have democratic impacts, but those impacts are
implicit or generally diffused. This area is more diffcult to review, as many of
these types of activities are not easily identifable as ‘projects’ or ‘programs
of government action’ in the classic sense. Some examples of this would be
provision of information online to increase public awareness of government
decision making, facilitating general access to new media to support
the public in accessing information, and the optimisation of government
information to increase its ‘discoverability’ and readability. This aspect of
public sector activity is important, and, as we can see in the analysis below,
tends to be one of the major areas where the activities of the public sector
have had signifcant impacts on democratic life in Australia.
In making these observations, however, we must be cautious in assigning
responsibility or blame to ‘the public service’ as an amorphous organ of the
state. Many of the issues discussed are attributable both to the action of public
servants as individuals, to agencies and departments as key actors, and to the
specifc or general policies of governments.
Access and the digital divide
One of the frst areas that must be considered is the highly positive role of the
Australian public service in encouraging the use of ICTs in general terms. While
programs aimed at providing free or subsidised access to the internet and training
for citizens to use these technologies is not generally regarded as a ‘democratic’
activity per se, the signifcant investment in such programs over the past decade
has been critical in expanding citizens’ access to information, including access to
new forms of politically relevant information. This type of activity can fall under the
rubric of the development of an ‘electronically-facilitated democracy’ in that they
lay the preconditions for greater use of ICTs by citizens across a range of social,
economic, and political spheres.
These activities span the three levels of government in Australia: from broad or
specifc funding of training and community ‘telecentres’ by the Commonwealth,
to the development of proactive educational programs to support information
PAGE 85
technology literacy and fll ‘electronic gaps’ in the community at the State level;
to the role of local governments via libraries, community houses, mobile vans,
and—in some cases—subsidised bandwidth.
The extent of the ‘digital divide’ is diffcult to determine, and depends on a range
of factors that include:
• What constitutes access (possession of ICT, regular use of ICT, access to
ICT in the immediate area);
• What is included in the defnition of ICTs (some metrics focus solely on
internet access, whereas others would include access to ‘advanced’
mobile telephony);
• The pervasiveness of ICTs in our society and the capacity to access data
services indirectly (e.g. through interactive telephone services); and
• Different opinions of quantity versus quality of access.
Thus, while the proportion of Australians with frequent or periodic access to the
internet sits between 50 and 65 per cent of the population (depending on data
source), over 90 per cent of Australian homes have a landline telephone and the
penetration of mobile telephones in the community sits at about 75 percent of
the adult population.
54
It is important, however, to be cautious about drawing a straight line between one
type of technology take-up and another (i.e. that a predilection for landline telephones
is related to mobile phone use, and then internet use). Given the popularity and
portability of mobile telephony, for example, some segments of the Australian
population may begin abandoning ‘traditional’ landline access. While this could be
construed to display a declining position in raw statistical terms, it simply indicates that
a greater degree of communications choice has entered the Australian marketplace,
and a tendency for ICT purchasing decisions to be quite rational.
Some examples
To illustrate the work undertaken over the past decade, some case examples
can be provided. These are not necessarily comprehensive, but give an overview
of the type of activities the Australian public service has been engaged in within
this policy area:
• Networking the Nation: Initiated in 1997 with funds sourced from the partial
privatisation of Telstra, Networking the Nation (NTN) provided over $300
million to more than 70 projects around Australia. The projects range from
54
Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004, 1370.0 – 2004 Australia Now. Measures of Australia’s Progress, Canberra, ABS
PAGE 86
activities supporting the development of telecommunications infrastructure
(particularly rural mobile telephony), internet literacy programs, support for the
development of electronic government service delivery in local government,
and subsidised access to telecommunications and data services;
• Victoria’s e-Gaps Program: launched in 2001 by the State government,
this program committed $1.5 million to the provision of small grants to
local communities which lacked substantive access to the internet. The
distribution and management of these grants were largely focused at local
government and community groups. Similar examples of ‘targeted’ funding
can be seen across Australia, for example the ACT’s Community IT Access
Plan, which focuses on hardware and software provision, as well as training
and local content creation;
• The Tasmanian government maintains an ongoing program of recycling
public service computers into community groups on a yearly basis. This
program has been running since 2002, and provides a rolling series
of hardware grants based on applications against the pool of machines
moving out of their productive life in Government;
• Banyule City Council, Victoria, provides a mobile training facility in its
municipal borders (‘the Cybervan’).
It should be noted that these projects often involve a range of participants
from across the public and non-proft sectors of Australia, and using ‘public-
private partnerships’ as a means to deliver services through non-government
intermediaries. The benefts of this approach tend to lie in the reduction of
administrative costs to government, and the customisation of program delivery
through local administration and governance. In addition, non-government
groups act independently in this area, with GreenPC being an example of a not-
for-proft organisation that works to recycle computers into the hands of people
on limited incomes.
Institutional impacts
In the process of developing digital divide strategies in Australia some public
institutions have had to redefne their social role. A good example of this is libraries,
that—as local institutions with a traditional role in the provision of educational and
social information—have increasingly become ‘information hubs’ providing not
just books and periodicals, but a range of multimedia content (CD-ROMs, audio
CDs, and DVDs) as well as internet access. Libraries, along with community
PAGE 81
houses, have been at the forefront of the provision of free community access to
the internet. This is due to a number of factors, such as the logical ft between
their democratic role in society and internet access, but also their position as
local access points between government and the community.
In this process of access provision, local governments have been particularly active,
both as co-funders of these services, and in the development or implementation
of training services to enhance ICT use in the Australian population.
Future directions and issues
While the history of digital divide initiatives in Australia is quite positive, we need
to recognise that the divide, though shrinking, remains a social concern. This
refects not only a concern for issues of political equity (equity of access) but also
a recognition that participation in the ‘information society’ has social, economic,
and political benefts to those citizens who are ‘connected’.
55
In addition, the ‘divide’, and how it is conceived, is changing. During the early
1990s, the divide was largely identifed to refect three factors in Australia:
• Infrastructure and access issues (largely about telecommunications
service provision);
• Socioeconomic status (largely concerned with issues of education and the
cost of computers); and
• Gender (with disproportionately high numbers of men using the technology
compared with women).
56
Over the last decade, issues of gender have virtually disappeared, while
the declining costs of basic computers (now costing less than $800 in some
instances) and competitiveness in parts of the service provision area are narrowing
socioeconomic issues.
The current concerns tend to focus on:
• Poverty and unemployment;
• Migrants (particular those from non-English speaking backgrounds);
• Age differences; and
• Rural and regional access.
55
NOIE, 2003, The E-Government Benefts Study, Canberra, National Offce for the Information Economy, www.agimo.
gov.au ; Kristy Muir, 2004, Connecting Communities with CTLCs: From the Digital Divide to Social Inclusion, Sydney,
The Smith Family
56
Jennifer Curtin, 2001, A Digital Divide in Rural and Regional Australia? Current Issues Brief 1 2001–02, Canberra,
Parliament of Australia
PAGE 88
While approaches to these issues have shifted from ‘wide scale’ programs to
focused programs, often at the community level,
57
major policy concerns remain
that can only be addressed at the State or national level. These include:
• The emerging ‘broadband divide’, between those who have access to
broadband and those who do not. While the level of broadband use in
Australia has been steadily increasing, currently standing at 57 per cent
of internet users,
58
rural and regional areas continue to face problems
with accessing high speed reliable services at modest cost.
59
Given the
higher costs (and computational demands of rich media) there is a strong
relationship between levels of income and access to these advanced
services; and
• The sustainability of investments already made in local and community
access projects. While the approach to funding through small grants has
been effective in maximising the return on investment of public money in
access programs and training, the tendency for funding programs to end
just prior to the completion of a complete technology cycle (the three-year
maximum life expectancy of most hardware and software systems) leaves
many of the investments subject to quick decline if they are unable to source
new funding.
While the latter issue requires governments around Australia to maintain
their commitment to address the digital divide, the former becomes
increasingly problematic as Australia slips down global rankings on access to
broadband services.
This particular problem is a feature of two factors:
• The great distances outside the major population centres that need to
be provided with expensive infrastructure to service comparatively small
numbers of people; and
• Declining capacity of the national government, as the key regulator of
telecommunications services in Australia, to infuence market decisions.
With the anticipated complete privatisation of the national telecommunications
company, which provides the ‘basic’ level of telecommunications and data
services regionally, the Australian government is losing direct infuence over
investment decisions made in rural areas. While the Commonwealth has a long
57
The ‘wired high rise’ project in inner city Melbourne is a good example of the ‘focused’ approach.
58
DCITA, 2005, The Current State of Play 2005, Canberra, Department of Communications, Information Technology and
the Arts: 9
59
Broadband can be accessed throughout Australia via satellite, but this remains much more expensive, prohibitively so in
many instances, than via cable or phone lines.
PAGE 80
history of direct and indirect subsidy of regional services, debate surrounding
the full privatisation of Telstra in 2005 failed substantially to address issues of
broadband access in rural areas.
Thus, while the Commonwealth requires a minimum data service to be provided in
most parts of Australia, the tendency for urban areas to beneft from competition
(in the form of new investment and increasing bandwidth speed and coverage),
and the potential for rural areas of the nation to remain stuck with very slow
access speeds and poor quality of connection, remain ongoing policy problems.
At the time of writing, however, this debate is unfolding, and the long term impacts
remain unclear. It is likely, however, that increasing levels of public subsidisation
will be required to develop a rural infrastructure system to ensure that Australia’s
rural access to broadband meets global standards.
The democratic risk here is not that service quality in rural Australia will decline, but
that as the internet slowly reconfgures itself for high access speeds (integration
of greater levels of multimedia and interactive elements), increasing regions of
the online commons will become inaccessible to those on the wrong side of the
broadband divide.
Transparency and accountability
Moving from the indirect impacts of government to the direct role of the public
sector in supporting popular democracy, it must be recognised that the growth
of ICT use in government has increased the level of information provided to the
community through channels like the web and e-mail. While universities were
early pioneers of online publication, the public service in Australia (and around the
world) was quick to develop a host of websites, leading to an initial explosion in
the availability of information to the public.
While the proliferation of content online has a clear democratic value, it is important
to review a number of aspects. These include:
• The quality of information provided online;
• The relevance of online information to democratic outcomes (e.g. the value
of this information in political socialisation);
• Developments over time; and
• The interactive use of ICT channels to provide additional information to
citizens.
PAGE 00
Online publication
The great advantage of the web for government departments and agencies
is the capacity for this channel to ‘repurpose’ information. As government
departments have always been prodigious producers of documents and reports,
the development of the web allowed much of this information, from long reports,
to short documents like press releases, to be posted online.
This has two advantages: frst, it increases the speed and ease to which
stakeholders and members of the community can gain access to the information;
and, second, it has changed the economics of public sector publication. It has
lowered costs in some areas by reducing demand for ‘hardcopy’ documents, or
allowing the release of specialist information that would traditionally never have
gone through the process of formal production (layout, printing, distribution).
During the mid-1990s, the public sector in Australia saw an explosive growth
in the number of websites and online publications made available to members
of the public. This growth was generally erratic, with larger, better resourced
departments and agencies more likely to produce higher quality, more information-
dense sites, and smaller agencies and the impoverished local government sector
less likely to place large volumes of information online. Because of the general
lack of centralised direction for these developments, the pattern of growth tended
to produce a wide range of variations between and within organizations. The
Australian public service, like others around the world, had diffculties in:
• Ensuring the quality of sites;
• Providing interoperability between sites; and
• Maintaining a professional management framework around the publication,
retention, and archiving of material placed online.
In retrospect, however, the years between 1995 and 2002 may be seen as a
‘golden age’ of public service openness, with regards to web publication.
While the quality of online publications was highly variable, the fact that limited
ministerial and senior management attention was paid to these channels meant
that a surprising amount of public service information was published online.
Since 2000, there has been an increased recognition of the importance of online
channels, and a rationalisation of government publications online. Whilst much
of this rationalisation is relatively value-free, the move to place online publications
under centralised management processes has led to a reduction—in some
areas—of the extent of material published on the web.
PAGE 01
Thus, like government communications in general, the presence of a government
website in Australia does not necessarily mean that information is more open or
accessible. There is a tendency for documents to be removed from the web after
a short period of time, or for some documents, like ministerial speeches, not to
be published. This refects a more general tendency for communications with the
public to be careful managed by all levels of government.
Democratic quality?
Another consideration about information published online is the thought given
to democratic aspects of communication by the public service. As governments
have moved to rationalise expenditures on ICTs in line with general concerns
with effciency and economy, online resources are generally regarded in purely
economic terms. While governments around Australia continue to invest heavily
in online systems, the vast majority of this investment tends to be in electronic and
online service delivery aspects, rather than democratic issues and concerns.
While this refects general community interest in accessing government online,
it should be recognised that public sector websites commonly provide little
information in a form usable by the community about the operations of the
department or agency. While most organisations provide general breakdowns
of management structures, and in some cases descriptions of decision making
processes, few government websites around Australia provide detailed, easy-to-
understand educational material about how the organisation functions, how to
infuence decisions in the organisation, or pathways to democratic participation.
In this area of political socialisation, the public service has missed a signifcant
opportunity to improve its democratic relationship with the public.
In addition, the quality and political utility of government websites around Australia
is highly variable. In a detailed analysis of local government websites in 2003, it
was found that, generally, local governments are not providing online information
that is useful in developing an understanding of the role or responsibilities of
the municipality.
60
Only ten per cent of Australian local government websites
provided information on their statutory functions. Thus, while these sites have
been developing in terms of their service delivery capabilities, little progress has
been made with regard to providing information relevant to political participation.
Three basic reasons can be posited for this:
• Lack of community demand for governance-related information;
60
Tui McKeown, Julian Teicher and Nina Dow, 2004, ‘Evaluating the value: Comparing local government initiatives in e-gov
in the UK and Australia’, Department of Management Working Paper 17/04, Melbourne, Monash University
PAGE 02
• Limited resources on the part of local governments in Australia (for example,
when compared with the much larger municipalities of the UK); and
• The ongoing tendency to treat this level of government (by Commonwealth
and State governments) entirely instrumentally, e.g. as service delivery
conduits, rather than democratic institutions in their own right. Recent
forced amalgamations of local governments in Victoria and New South
Wales, to encourage economic effciency, illustrate this point well.
While there can be cynicism expressed about the slow development of effective
digital record keeping in the public service around Australia, particularly regarding
the accurate and effective storage and retrieval of ‘ephemeral’ digital content,
like SMS messages and electronic mail, it should be recognised that there are
considerable diffculties in the development and implementation of electronic
record keeping systems, including:
• The wide range of systems used, and the limited capacity of some of these
systems to integrate into electronic record keeping archives to provide for
speedy cataloguing and depositing of digital records;
• Highly variable levels of IT literacy among public servants, particularly in the
area of electronic signatures;
• Ad hoc, or personal acquisition of technology by public servants, that may
not have the capacity for records to be accurately received and stored (this
is particularly true in the area of mobile telephony); and
• The massive expansion in the number of documents that are generated in
the process of public administration.
Accessibility?
In addition to the provision, or lack of provision, of information that facilitates
democratic participation by citizens, two additional factors about web publishing
in the public service should be noted:
• Questions of accessibility; and
• Questions of storage of digital information.
In terms of accessibility, the most common concern about public service
websites is speed of access. People with slow internet connections and those
with disabilities that require computer programs that convert textual content into
speech, face considerable delay in retrieving relevant information.
PAGE 08
Given the proliferation of government websites during the mid-1990s, it is generally
recognised that the public service of Australia remains at a relatively early stage
in developing (or retroftting) policy frameworks to ensure that online information
is accessible. The most commonly cited set of requirements, the World Wide
Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines contains a range
of graduated recommendations for online publication that, if followed, lower
barriers to accessibility.
61
At present, governments around Australia have a mixed record on the
implementation of these guidelines (or a modifed version thereof). While most
of the major jurisdictions (Commonwealth, States, and Territories) have adopted
policies encouraging compliance with the lowest level (level A), these are
generally:
• Inconsistently applied;
• Often framed as goals or recommendations, rather than minimum targets;
and/or
• Sometimes specifed without clear means to their achievement, such as
investment in relevant systems.
The failure to develop better levels of compliance excludes some disabled or
remote citizens from accessing large parts of publicly-available online information.
Whilst community groups have been rightly critical of government performance in
this area, it should be recognised that:
• The performance of the public service is, on average, vastly superior
to that of the private sector in Australia (even though some legal risk of
discrimination exists for organisations that are not proactive in this area);
• The replacement of existing content management systems with modern
technologies is improving performance in an incremental manner; and
• The total number of people affected is low, while signifcant in terms of the
impact on these individuals personally.
Thus, accessibility issues remain a democratic concern, but one where some
progress is being made—even if it is slower than hoped, given the age of the WAI
specifcations.
The second area of concern lies in the appropriate storage, retention, and
discovery of documents ‘born digital’. As increasing amounts of government
information never exist in a physical form, but are stored as webpages, e-mail
61
http://www.w3.org/
PAGE 04
messages, SMS text, or as raw data, governments around Australia have been
interested in means to better manage these resources. This issue takes a number
of forms:
• Development of processes to ensure electronic documents of importance
are identifed and stored;
• Development of systems to hold these records over time, and provide a fast
and accurate way to search and retrieve them;
• Education of public servants as to the importance of electronic records and
means to retain them effectively; and
• Identifcation of the right type of technologies (software and standards) to ensure
that documents, when stored, will be in a format that will allow them to be
retrieved long after the original software and hardware has become obsolete.
This issue is critical, both for the effective management of government and for
democratic governance, particularly with regards to the operation of Freedom of
Information laws (see below).
Across Australia, governments are at a relatively early stage of progression in
this area, and it is likely that large amounts of public information may never be
accurately stored or indexed in the gap between wide-scale digitisation and the
introduction of universal electronic records management. This is not the result of
sinister motivation on the part of policy makers or public servants, but refects the
tendency for electronic systems to be rolled out before the full organisational and
democratic implications (and policy requirements) have been determined. While
progress is being made in this area, it must be recognised that this issue has
not received suffcient attention from policy makers, and the area of electronic
records management has been signifcantly under-resourced in Australia.
FOI in an electronic age
The issue of Freedom of Information (FOI) and similar administrative law in
Australia has been discussed in detail in other publications of the Democratic
Audit, and the failings of these reforms need not be reiterated in this section. The
presence or absence of ICTs has little direct impact on the basic limitations of
these laws in terms of explicit exemptions employed to obscure public oversight,
62
or the manipulation of the FOI regulations to evade effective public oversight of
62
For example, the use of commercial-in-confdence agreements by government to prevent documents being released
under FOI.
PAGE 05
government decision making.
63
However, given the importance of FOI to the functioning of democracy, some
relevant comments with regards to FOI and ICTs should be made. The role of
ICTs in FOI is signifcant, at a number of levels:
• FOI is less of an issue where information is routinely published online
(as above);
• However, even in these cases, it can be facilitated (or inhibited) by
the presence (and absence) of good document management and
retention systems;
• ICTs have been introduced into the FOI process to reduce costs. Some
examples of this include: provision of information electronically and the use
of ‘electronic redacting’ systems (electronic means to remove elements of
requests that would not be granted release under the relevant Act); and
• Some agencies and jurisdictions (such as Victoria) have introduced online
application processes which have lowered the cost of an FOI request.
Overall, the advent of ICTs, and the introduction of searchable databases for
the management of electronic and physical records in the public service has not
encouraged any government in Australia to re-consider their approach to FOI.
In general, the advent of networked computers, digital record keeping, and the
capacity to allow controlled access by the public into government records using
technologies like the web have not been considered, and no government has
seriously discussed a different approach to public record keeping that would see
most public documents placed in public view as a matter of standard operating
procedure.
One exception to this is the Senate order requiring Commonwealth departments
and agencies to publish an indexed list of ‘relevant’ document titles related to
policy matters produced by the department. This order, initiated by Senator Brian
Harradine(Independent), has been complied with since 1994 in the form of a
tabled document, and since 1998, published on the respective organisations’
websites.
While this marks a positive step forward in the proactive release of information (or,
more accurately information about information), the measure is limited in that:
• The selection of document titles listed is undertaken internally by the
63
Such as revelations during the Inquiry into the Queensland health system in 2005 which revealed that Queensland Heath
Department offcials regularly took boxes of performance documents into Cabinet, with the explicit objective of exclud-
ing them from FOI.
PAGE 06
agency in an informal manner. Some departments (such as the Defence
Department) regularly publish extensive lists, while others (such as Human
Services) provide less information. Clearly, the interpretation of documents
‘relevant’ to policy making is quite variable; and
• Awareness of the titles of documents provides no guarantee that they can
be accessed.
‘Your’ ABC: innovation at the fringe of the public service
A good example of the hazy area between government, mass media, and
civil society is offered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). This
combination has good potential for innovation with ICTs, because the ABC is
relatively well resourced and its Charter includes obligations to inform and educate
Australians. While not overtly concerned with democratic process or the four
focal areas of the Audit, these tasks are nonetheless consistent with democratic
process. The ABC must be taken into account because it is an important and
trusted source (via TV, radio and the web) of information for Australians. The
caveat is that the audience for the ABC is consistently less than 14 per cent of
all audience share, at least for television. The ABC audience also tends to come
from the upper socio-economic levels. While this group includes opinion leaders
and decision makers, the narrowness and smaller size of the ABC audience limit
its role in promoting political equality.
Given these demographic constraints, the ABC does provide both vital information
and channels for civil society to participate in the democratic process through its
interactive dimension. Often the ABC covers issues that other mass media are
not interested in. While it is not possible here to provide an in-depth analysis of
the ABC, over recent years increasing criticism of the purported ‘left wing’ bias
of the ABC is reported to have engendered a climate of self-censorship and
hesitancy within the organisation.
64
As a result, its role as an alternative and non-
commercial broadcaster may have been compromised. This has diminished its
nation-building function, which has a muted role in the ABC Charter.
Over the past decade, the ABC has been in the vanguard with its use of new
media. These applications include simple mailing lists about upcoming programs,
along with web-based transcripts of programs, audio streaming, and video on
demand. More recently, the ABC has begun exploring the provision of its radio
content by syndication technology, or ‘podcasting’. Podcasting allows programs
to be downloaded for convenient listening on personal computers or handheld
64
See Robert Manne (ed.), 2005, Do Not Disturb: Is the Media Failing Australia, Melbourne, Black Inc
PAGE 01
digital devices. The ABC also tracks the response to these initiatives.
65
The ABC illustrates how civic engagement via new media is shaped by
government policy via public funding and regulation, as well as the provision
of broadband infrastructure and pricing. Government policy settings are always
central to the development of civic participation, regardless of the channel. While
such features as interactive forums and email lists are helpful in disseminating
information and providing an element of citizen dialogue, the ABC’s efforts in this
area have been modest. By comparison, the British Broadcasting Corporation
is experimenting with new media and citizen journalism on a much larger and
more ambitious scale. It does not seem to be as hampered by politically induced
timidity as the ABC. For example, they have run a Citizen Conference, aimed at
expanding public inputs to the BBC’s activities.
Human rights and electronic surveillance
One of the impacts of ICTs on the health of the Australian democratic system
in recent years has been the expanding role of security agencies (either in the
form of police organisations, or the intelligence services of the Commonwealth)
in overseeing the private lives of Australian citizens. Following the attacks in Bali,
London, and the US, and the Australian commitment to war in Afghanistan and
Iraq, the fear of domestic attacks by terrorists has encouraged the introduction
of a raft of new legal measures that have limited human rights and civil liberties,
and extended the capabilities of the security services to place citizens under
surveillance (overt and covert).
While these laws are beyond the scope of this analysis, the role of ICTs in this
process should be commented upon. This role operates at two levels: direct and
indirect, as discussed below.
Declining privacy in electronic communications
The use of ICTs by Australian citizens and residents has been subject to
increasing surveillance by the security services since the late 1990s. At this time,
the Commonwealth government introduced requirements for service providers
(such as internet service providers) to provide increased levels of access to
data stored regarding their customers’ usage patterns and the content of their
communications. The stated objective of these requirements is to allow for
‘forensic computing’ to be more effectively applied if and when a user becomes
subject to a criminal investigation, or as part of an intelligence ‘sweep’.
65
Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2003, ‘Long Way To The Top – Live In Concert Interactive Audience Survey
Report—Summary Of Findings’, http://www.broadcastpapers.com/whitepapers/ABCLongWayTop.pdf
PAGE 08
During 1999-2000, it was revealed that this power had been applied on nearly
one million occasions.
66
In addition, the year 2000 saw the introduction of
the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Legislation Amendment Act
1999 which gives the security services the capacity to covertly gain access to
computers (‘hack’) and the authority to modify information held within them.
Given public oversight of these agencies is limited (largely reporting back to the
government of the day), the concern that covert actions may place incriminating
information on a subject’s computer remains ever present.
While the Senate rejected expansive powers for wiretapping of mobile telephones in
2002 (in the form of the Telecommunications Interception Legislation Amendment
Bill 2002), ongoing pressure by the Coalition government to introduce greater
security legislation has seen the power of police and security forces to monitor the
electronic communications of Australian citizens increase dramatically. Recently,
the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment (Stored Communications) Act
2004, which rapidly passed through Parliament, greatly expanded the capacity
for electronic communications to be monitored by the government.
The current political climate in Australia, and government control of the Senate,
suggest that ongoing expansion of police and security agencies’ powers to
intercept electronic communications is likely to continue in the future.
Integrated data: a human rights concern?
A more diffused human rights concern about the use of ICTs by the public service
relates to the greater capacity of government departments and agencies to
aggregate information held on individual citizens. While this concern is not new,
67
recent developments in computerisation—wide scale computer networking and
technologies to assist systems integration—can be seen to have revitalised this
tendency in recent years.
While database integration (or post hoc data ‘mining’) is only at its infancy in
the public service, the ongoing drive for effciency and the development of
better service delivery for the community encourage discussions of aggregation.
This tendency, driven by new public management concerns about ‘whole of
government’ service delivery and the development of ‘citizen-centric’ service
delivery, is also mirrored by the interest of security services in better means to
profle and monitor the behaviour of individuals of interest.
While debate remains at an early stage, discussion by some senior Coalition
Ministers over the introduction of a new national identity card incorporating
66
Brendan Nicholson, 2001, ‘Anger at plundered phone records’, The Age, 4 February
67
This was discussed in Michael Stone and Malcolm Warner, 1970, The Databank Society, London, George Allen &
Unwin.
PAGE 00
biometric information indicates that some members of the political elite are giving
serious consideration to the underlying requirements for an integrated government
information system. Once each citizen has a unique identifcation document, this
allows the data held on them in all government databases to be tied together.
The human rights and democratic concerns are real, but unable to be quantifed
yet. Overall, however, fve basic risks should be noted with proposals of this type:
• The capacity to aggregate massive amounts of information on individual
citizens, including the most intimate information from social security,
education, and health records, could lead to the complete undermining of
notions of personal privacy for citizens;
• The expanded intelligence capacity these systems provide police and security
services lead to the intensifcation of a ‘surveillance society’ where citizens
believe, and act on the belief, that they are under surveillance at all times;
• Electronic systems, like their physical counterparts, cannot ever be
completely secure, leading to the possibility of misuse of this information by
insiders’ or ‘hackers’;
68
• Information, once entered into the system, becomes impossible to correct
or remove, even if entered in error; and
• The possibility that corrupt governments will misuse the system to provide
highly focused largesse to individuals or groups in the community with the
objective of distorting electoral outcomes. While this may appear fanciful,
the effective use of ‘preference engines’ in closely matching customers with
products in the private sector illustrates how effective profling can be, even
with limited amounts of information.
69
A countervailing view
While these technological applications raise concerns over their use for the
surveillance of individual citizens, it should be noted that governments around
Australia claim they are a necessary measure to prevent terrorist attacks on
Australian soil. The 2005 transit system attacks in the UK and previous attacks
in Spain illustrate how police and intelligence services gain value from access to
data following an incident, providing for more effcient investigation. However,
proactive use of information technology to prevent similar attacks is cited as the
most benefcial application of technology in the area of national security.
68
As was seen in 2004-5 with unauthorised use of the Victorian Police database LEAP (AAP, 2005, ‘Police database
under fre’, The Australian, 11 March)
69
Alex Pham and John Healey, 2005, ‘Telling you what you like’, LA Times, 20 September
PAGE 100
Recent government initiatives in this area include:
• A general expansion of, and the growing networking of, surveillance
cameras in public places in Australia. At present, most popular public
spaces are protected by security cameras, assisting law enforcement and
private security frms in monitoring behaviour in these areas. Their use has,
however, been much lower in the Australian context than in the UK. This may
be due to Australia’s federal structure, making co-ordination of placement
and management more complex.
70
Following the UK bombings, however,
governments around Australia have reached agreement to collaborate on
the more systematic deployment of these technologies;
• Experimentation with advanced identity technologies, such as passports
with embedded radio tags and biometric information. The advantages of
these technologies lie in addressing concerns about ‘identity theft’ (the
use of another person’s personal information) and entry into Australia of
criminals and individuals associated with terrorism;
• The introduction of new high-speed container x-ray systems to increase
the number of imported shipping containers that can be reviewed by the
Australian Customs Service;
• The integration of fnancial institutions into centralised ‘data mining’ systems
to track and monitor the movement of money. This type of data aggregation
and pattern recognition can be employed to identify suspicious movements
of funds (such as money laundering employed by criminal syndicates or
terror cells); and
• The introduction of legislation to permit the electronic tagging of suspects
(control orders) to allow their movements (or restriction to home detention)
to be automatically monitored. The advantage of electronic tagging comes
from the ability to redeploy intelligence and police personnel who would be
otherwise tasked with monitoring the movements of these people.
Overall, these applications provide law enforcement and security organisations
with two key advantages:
• Effcient use of resources (normally human) through the automation of data
capture about individuals or organisations of interest; and
• The ability to mine, aggregate, analyse, and identify data based on specifc
behavioural profles associated with specifc types of criminal or terrorist activity.
70
Adam Sutton and Dean Wilson, 2004, ‘Open-street CCTV in Australia: The politics of resistance and expansion’,
Surveillance & Society, 2(2/3): 310–322
PAGE 101
Given the evolving nature of threats to Australia (in terms of the types of strategies
employed by criminals and criminal organisations), these technologies provide a
range of advantages in both investigating crimes after the event, and preventing
crimes occurring within Australia. While effective investigation will be evident to
the wider public, the effcacy of prevention will be diffcult to establish, making a
balanced assessment of the costs of civil liberties and the benefts from security
hard to determine over time.
E-consultation and e-participation
While the discussions have tended to focus on the implicit benefts and risks to
Australian democratic life associated with the public service’s use of ICTs, one
signifcant area of activity that deserves considerable attention is the direct use of
new technologies to provide members of the public with access to the decision
making process.
This type of programmatic behaviour, electronic consultation or participation, can
be seen as a direct means by which elements of the public service and executive
can engage directly with the community or relevant stakeholders to develop
policy. These approaches have been employed across the world, but can take a
wide variety of forms, including:
• Highly informal, non-binding discussions facilitated online;
• Simple ‘electronic suggestion boxes’;
• Online collaboration and report development;
• Electronic voting, polling, or plebiscites;
• Structured discussion forums;
• Virtual meetings (audio, and video-conferencing); and
• Planning simulations and games.
In any discussion of these types of initiatives, however, it is important to make a
distinction between consultation and participation:
• Consultation is used in this context to include the collection of views or
opinions (discretely, or on an ongoing basis) which inform, but do not direct
or determine the decisions that are made;
• Participation is used to describe those consultative processes where the
PAGE 102
participants have some (complete or partial) ability to infuence the outcome
of the decision-making process.
A good (but not ICT-enabled) example of this difference can be shown by
comparing two consultation processes undertaken in adjacent States:
• In the Tasmania Together community consultation processes, discussions
were facilitated at the community level, encouraging the development by
participants of a set of performance indicators for the Tasmanian government.
These indicators (though not without some backsliding) were then promulgated
by the government as targets it was committed to reaching;
• In the Growing Victoria Together community consultation process, members of
the community were consulted over issues of concern and means to address
these issues, but did not directly develop policies or targets for implementation.
Activities to date
Given the wide range of forms that e-consultation and e-participation can take,
and the tendency for these activities to be introduced, either at government
level or specifc policy areas, it is diffcult to comprehensively catalogue the full
range of activities that have been undertaken in Australia. To date, the Australian
government has focused on service delivery in its electronic initiatives, rather than
on fostering democratic dialogue.
71
To provide an indication of the democratic impacts of these activities, however,
some case examples can be provided:
• Community Builders: In New South Wales, the State government established
an online community (information reservoir, discussion list system) for citizens
to talk about local community issues, develop local projects or responses,
and connect these groups and individuals with peers and members of the
public service that can assist;
• Citizenscape: Developed by the Western Australian Government, this
provides informational resources similar to Community Builders, and
a portal for accessing consultation processes being conducted by
WA’s departments and agencies. The catalogue itself is not necessarily
connected to consultations that are being conducted substantively online,
but does provide key contact points for all listed consultation processes in
the State.
• Queensland E-Democracy Initiative: Possibly one of the most ambitious e-
71
Karin Geiselhart, Mary Griffths and Bronwen Fitzgerald, 2003, ‘What lies beyond service delivery—An Australian per-
spective’, Journal of Political Marketing, 12 (3 & 4)
PAGE 108
democracy initiatives in Australia, the Queensland government’s program
includes:
o An online consultation gateway with online discussion on selected
consultation topics;
o Audio streaming of parliamentary sittings via the internet;
o An electronic petitions process for the parliament; and
o A specifc information and consultation portal site developed for young
Queenslanders called Generate.
• Acceptance since 1997 of electronic petitions by the Senate; a practice not
yet followed by the House of Representatives
• Council Meeting Webcasting in Wellington Shire: This service provides
access to real-time and archived videos of Council meetings. The system,
developed to provide greater awareness of and access to Council decision
making, allows viewers online to post messages to the Mayor that are
responded to at the end of the Council session.
• Brisbane City Council’s ‘Your Say Online’: Based on the successful
introduction of citizens reference groups which met physically to discuss
policy issues relevant to the Council’s operations, the City provides an online
discussion forum for residents. Similar online consultation processes have
been undertaken in a number of Australian local governments, including
Ballarat, Moreland (defunct), Darebin, and LaTrobe.
In addition to these specifc projects, the use of ICTs to support ‘conventional’
consultation processes is increasing over time, with more consultation
documentation being made available online, greater openness to receive
submissions via electronic mail, and the use—in some areas—of supporting
websites that document the process of consultation, provide interim updates
and status reports, and solicit more input.
Performance criticisms
While these innovations are quite positive, it should be noted that there are a
number of criticisms that have been made of government performance to date.
These generally include:
• Limited scope;
PAGE 104
• Limited support; and
• ‘Phoney’ consultation, or consultation on issues of irrelevance.
The frst criticism is that Australian governments have been highly conservative in
their use of ICTs for public participation. This argument is similar to that presented
regarding online voting, but focuses on:
• The limited level of investment made in direct provision of democratic
access online compared with investment in online services;
• The small scope of most activities, which tend to be either ad hoc, time
limited, or tagged as ‘pilots’ with no fnal implementation; and
• The tendency for these systems to be explicitly or implicitly abandoned,
rather than systematically reviewed and improved. For example, the
Tasmanian Government online discussion list, while still functional, appears
to have been abandoned by the public sector managers responsible for it,
while Victoria’s ‘Have Your Say’ forum simply disappeared.
The positive impact on Australian democratic life of such initiatives should not,
however, be overstated. While they mark a new process of consultation and
engagement, the tendency to undertake these activities ‘in house’, controlled by
public servants, and developed in conjunction with the strictures of consultation
process manuals, represents a desire to control the engagement process by
government to ensure that the process provides access, but does not disrupt the
orderly process of policy development.
72
Governments often establish formal consultation as another ‘service’, without
real commitment to heed or respond to the outcomes. This approach severs the
connection between popular concerns and the networks that distribute power
and resources. Gingering up participation in the short term via often obscure
electronic fora will not satisfy the electorate. In general, Australian agencies and
jurisdictions avoid serious refective discussion with citizens about either how well
democracy is working or what is needed to improve its application in Australia.
While this position has merit, it is possible to be excessively cynical. First, while
many of the issues under discussion in these fora are unremarkable, it must be
recognised that most government is unremarkable, consisting of the day-to-day
management of relatively mundane matters. Additionally, governments have been
notably reluctant to engage the community on its own turf—i.e. in community fora
already developed, rather than purpose-built government websites—the benefts
72
Patrick Bishop & Lori Anderson, 2004, ‘E-government to E-democracy: “high tech” solutions to “no tech” problems’,
in Peter Chen and Winsome Roberts (eds) Proceedings of Australian Electronic Governance Conference 2004, 14-15
April, University of Melbourne
PAGE 105
of central government consultation gateways are that they allow:
• The consultation process to be structured in line with the decision making
process. Most policy professionals attempt to manage decision making in
an orderly manner to ensure balanced attention across a range of issues,
not just those of specifc interest to a noisy minority. The use of government
consultation portals refects the internal rationality of public sector decision-
making processes; and
• By offering a range of issues under a common gateway, promotion of the
consultation process can capture a wider audience than if each consultation
is constructed as a ‘stand alone’ system.
Overall, one of the key problems of online consultation is developing a balance
between issues that can be ‘safely’ conducted via online channels—where
participants will commit to the orderly process of consultation, rather than walking
away to engage in other political strategies to achieve their objectives—and those
that are so safe they fail to engage any interest at all. While most public servants
would concur that quality is preferable to quantity in consultation processes,
the tendency for many online consultation projects or pilots to be abandoned in
Australia has been because of a lack of both quantity (numbers of participants)
and quality (valuable input). This highlights the signifcant underinvestment in
political education in Australia, a problem that the provision of online discussion
systems cannot reasonably be expected to resolve.
Future development
The future of online consultation and participation in Australia remains uncertain.
While some jurisdictions (specifcally Queensland) have taken frm steps towards
entrenching online channels in policy making processes, others have been quite
hesitant, or having undertaken some activities, withdrawn quickly following
negative outcomes. Like any activity in government, these participatory forums
need to provide their effectiveness and value, and online consultation does suffer
from low levels of awareness in government and corresponding skill issues. There
have been some highly-publicised policy retreats and failures such as the South
Australian Government’s misplaced policy announcement of the creation of a
‘virtual electorate’ of expatriate citizens.
73
While the Commonwealth has not been at the forefront of performance in this
area, it should be recognised that the national government, through the Australian
Government Information Management Offce, has recently:
73
John Olsen, 2000, ‘World frst virtual electorate for South Australia’ Press Release, 17 August, http://www.southern-
cross-group.org/
PAGE 106
• Produced a basic training document for public managers preparing or
considering the use of ICTs in consultation;
74
and
• Is developing a public sector ‘reference group’ (professional network-
cum-self help society) for public sector employees across all levels of
government. As the processes of developing effective online consultation
and participation processes are highly dependent on local conditions,
stakeholder and policy-issue characteristics, resources, and public interest
level, this type of ‘capacity building process’ may be benefcial in improving
take up of ICTs more directly in consultation and participation in the future.
Conclusions and summary
The size of the public sector in Australia makes it diffcult to make broad
generalisations about the impact of new technologies on democratic outcomes.
Some trends, such as the reduction of politically-sensitive content online, or the
development of new ICT-enabled security apparatus, suggest that the public
sector is relatively complicit in a desire by governments to reduce public debate
and human rights. There are numerous examples, however, of policy areas where
ICTs are being used to expand the options of individual citizens to participate in
an informed and democratic manner.
Whilst the democratic impacts of ICTs within the public service are deep, complex,
and intersecting, it is possible to make some broad generalisations.
First, there is a tendency for the public sector’s engagement with ICTs and their
social application to be positive, particularly in areas where democratic participation
is ‘covert’ or tangential to the overarching policy area of government. Thus, the
desire by the Commonwealth to encourage people into broadband technologies
is often stated within the rhetoric of developing a modern, effcient information
economy that has positive benefts in terms of health and education. The underlying
democratic good (greater access to information, new means of participation and
political organisation) occurs as a ‘spin off’ beneft to these programs.
Second, where participation is the stated aim of specifc projects, these tend
to be currently undertaken (with the exception of the Queensland Government)
‘below the waterline’ of ministerial awareness. Thus, a number of democratic
participation programs, often focused on disadvantaged members of the
community, occur well down the organisational chain, where their obscurity
isolates them from political concern.
74
In addition, it is increasingly common for ICT channels to be discussed, at least tangentially, in most central policy manu-
als on consultation developed by Australian governments.
PAGE 101
Finally, given that small scale, isolated projects tend to have small scale and
isolated democratic benefts, the future role for the public sector in promoting
an ‘electronic democracy’ agenda must be to move this into a more prominent
position. This has been clearly achieved in Queensland, where the State has
adopted a range of high-profle activities under the clear patronage of the
Premier himself. In other States, and particularly at the Commonwealth level,
caution appears to continue to reign, and so the future development of electronic
democracy remains uncertain. Clearly if the Queensland experiment appears to
bear fruit, other jurisdictions that have either tentatively dabbled or backed away
from experiments in the past (Victoria, NSW, South Australia, Western Australia)
may, through the process of inter-jurisdictional learning and emulation, develop a
more vibrant approach. The outcome remains to be seen.
PAGE 108
SIrcngIhs
• Publication of policy-related information online, increasing access to
information by the wider community.
• Policy responses to information gaps such as access gaps, or
information literacy barriers.
• Experimentation with new democratic services, such as online
freedom of information, and ICT-enabled means of public
participation and consultation.
• The ABC provides a good base line for use of ICTs in public dialogue.
Wcakncsscs
• More limited experimentation with online consultation than in
comparable nations, like Canada or the UK.
• Problems associated with regional access to telecommunications
infrastructure.
• Access to information by those with disabilities and members of
non-English speaking communities inhibited by slow development
of government accessibility standards and technologies.
• Deployment of security technologies, placing increasing numbers of
Australians under active or passive surveillance.
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PAGE 114
The Research Team
Professor Barry Hindess, Political Science Program, Research School of Social
Sciences, Australian National University
Dr Phil Larkin, Democratic Audit of Australia, Australian National University
Professor Marian Sawer, School of Social Sciences, Australian National University
International Advisory Committee
Professor David Beetham, UK Democratic Audit
Dr Helena Catt, Electoral Commissioner, New Zealand
Professor Arend Lijphart, Department of Political Science, University of California,
San Diego
Professor Pippa Norris, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Professor Olof Petersson, Co-ordinator, SNS Democratic Audits of Sweden
Professor Stein Ringen, Green College, University of Oxford
Professor Patrick Seyd, UK Citizenship Audit
Professor Hege Skjeie, Department of Political Science, Oslo University
Professor Stuart Weir, UK Democratic Audit
Academic Advisory Committee
Professor Larissa Behrendt, University of Technology, Sydney
Professor Hilary Charlesworth, Faculty of Law, Australian National University
Professor Murray Goot, Department of Politics and International Relations,
Macquarie University
Professor Colin Hughes, School of Political Science and International Studies,
University of Queensland
Professor Dean Jaensch, School of Political & International Studies, Flinders
University
Professor Graham Maddox, School of Social Science, University of New England
Professor Geoff Stokes, School of Social & International Studies, Deakin University
Professor Elaine Thompson, School of Politics and International Relations, University
of New South Wales
Professor John Wanna, ANZSOG, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian
National University
PAGE 115
Professor George Williams, Director, Gilbert & Tobin Centre of Public Law, University
of New South Wales The Democratic Audit of Australia
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Prepared by
Peter Chen
Research Associate
National Centre for Australian Studies
Monash University
Rachel Gibson
Professor of New Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Leicester, UK
Karin Geiselhart
Visiting Research Fellow
University of Canberra
Electronic Democracy?
The Impact of New
Communications Technologies
on Australian Democracy
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Previous reports in this series:
How Well Does Australian Democracy Serve Immigrant Australians?
James Jupp
Australian Electoral Systems – How Well Do They Serve Political Equality?
Graeme Orr
Corruption and Democracy in Australia
Barry Hindess
Australian Political Parties in the Spotlight
Dean Jaensch, Peter Brent & Brett Bowden
Representing the Disadvantaged in Australian Politics: The Role of Advocacy Organisations
Bronwen Dalton and Mark Lyons
for the
Democratic Audit
of Australia
Political Science Program
School of Social Sciences
The Australian National University
Report No.6