One day on Twitter and already cynical

Yesterday I joined Twitter, and after twenty four hours I am already suspicious about what is really going on in the mystical world of social media.

The basic idea behind Twitter is you follow people you are interested in and when they ‘tweet’ a comment, you get to read about it on your home page.

Now I’m interested in politics, sport and journalism. The first person I followed was Wil Anderson (Australia comedian and former journalist) as I think he’s pretty funny. I then followed several journalists, news sources, the mighty Arsenal FC and an assortment of Australian politicians.

Now I chose to follow both the recently re-elected Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the Opposition leader Tony Abbott. I thought as a journalist it would be wise to make sure I hear the policies of both major parties before I retweeted anything absurd.

So this morning I was unpleasantly surprised  to find out Julia Gillard is now following me on Twitter!

From this I can only conclude one of two things. Either Julia Gillard is actually a robot, and therefore doesn’t need to sleep, thus giving her time to check her Twitter account and see what the  37, 267 people she is following have been tweeting. Or Julia Gillard has a small selection of her staff designated to managing her Twitter account for her.

Logic would hint at the latter of the two conclusions, but then it raises the question of why Julia Gillard wants her henchmen to monitor my tweets. I can see the logic of us (the voters) wanting to hear what Julia (our grand leader) is saying, but my own conclusion from my first day on Twitter is that politicians are using Twitter as a guise for polling, marketing as well as general lying and cheating.

The New York Times’ Noam Cohen writes, “Twitter — a microblogging tool that uses 140 characters in bursts of text — has become an important marketing tool for celebrities, politicians and businesses, promising a level of intimacy never before approached online.”

This doesn’t make me feel too confident about anything I read on Twitter in the near future, who knows how many tweets are actually written by ghost writers. If you think about it, social media is the perfect tool for politicians. They can speak directly to the voters without scrutiny from journalists. No one would know if they are posting or not so they are free to go about baby kissing whilst their public relations team churns out the tweets.

Of course not all tweets you read are like that. I’m sure most people do their own tweeting, but like my cynical former teacher Asbjørn Slot Jørgensen once told me, “If your mother tells you she loves you…..check it out!”

Why has the climate care factor reached zero?

Less than nine months ago I was in Copenhagen, where the eyes of the world was on the biggest ever gathering of world leaders, protesters, scientists, lobbyists, greenies and any other person who had a vested interest in discussing climate change.

COP15 was supposed to be the place where the problems would be solved, the debate ended and the legislation enacted, but now it looks like it will be remembered as the gob-fest where climate change mitigation was killed off.

Why has everybody stopped caring about climate change? This was supposed to be (as coined by our late PM Kevin Rudd) ‘the greatest moral challenge of our time’. Now it has been consigned to the too hard basket by the government. Maybe it will get picked up in a couple of years, but there’s no guarantee at this stage.

So if we go back to Mr Rudd, does that mean that we have failed as human beings? Or is it just our leaders who have failed us? Why do we not care anymore? Is climate change not happening? Last time I checked there was a large iceberg breaking off from Greenland and drifting through the Atlantic. This would have been top news in 2009, but now it barely gets a run. It doesn’t seem to be important to us anymore.

I wonder just how Penny Wong is feeling now. As Minister for Climate Change she spent the better part of three two years of her life devoted to overseeing the policy of the government and fighting to get the legislation through the senate on no less than three occasions. Now all that work has been cast aside and the Government is pointing fingers at all the other parties, but in our Westminster style of government, the buck stops with the executive and the Labor Party must acknowledge its failures.

As a voter I feel duped by the Labor Party. They whipped up a huge storm around climate change and hammered home that they were the party which would take action. I sat on election night in 2007 at watched seat after seat swinging to the ALP on Green preferences. People wanted climate change action, and the ALP has failed to deliver. So now when the climate care factor of the voters has reached zero, look how quickly their policies (or should I say principles) have been abandoned.

The Coalition under Tony Abbott still doesn’t have anything meaningful to say about climate change. When Malcolm Turnbull was leader, he was prepared to negotiate with Labor, but his inability to consult his party cost him the leadership, and any hope of Australia having a bipartisan agreement on the matter.

Since then Tony Abbott has done all he can to stifle the debate into submission. His constant rhetoric of the ‘great big tax’ is music to the ears of the polluters, who are doing all they can to delay taking any measure to introduce a carbon tax. With the Coalition opposed to the carbon pollution reduction scheme and the Labor right in panic mode, no politician was going to stick their neck out for the environment and so, nothing has been done.

Things may change after the next election. As it looks so far, the Greens are likely to receive a swing to their primary vote as more people become disillusioned with the major parties. This should return the Government with Green preferences delivering Labor in the House of Representatives. What will be more interesting is how the balance of power will lie in the Senate. If the Greens are left with this responsibility (enough to send shivers down the spines of all the right wingers) then maybe there could be the possibility of a left alliance at the negotiating table. This could work exceedingly well for Julia Gillard if she can hold off her masters from the NSW right.

Climate change may be off the agenda now, but it’s not entirely forgotten yet. The media cycle has passed it by, but it could be interesting after the ballot in a couple of weeks. If the ALP has to sit down with the Greens then who knows, we could be talking about the climate again quite soon.

The election no one cares about

Is there actually any point to this election?

It seems to me that it was only five minutes ago when Kevin 07 mania was in full swing and the talk of the town was the roundly despised Work Choices and the supposed warming of the planet.

Less than three years on and there is another federal election looming, but I don’t get a sense that anybody really cares.

As far as I’m concerned both major parties don’t have any new ideas, least of all the Coalition which under Tony Abbott is promising to do absolutely nothing.

Labor seems devoid of new ideas as well. The Prime Minister Julia Gillard is just sprouting the same old mantra that won the last election, only this time Labor is the incumbent.

The ALP hasn’t moved on from 11 years in electoral wilderness. During the Howard years it did a lot of finger pointing about policy failures, but lacked any credible policies of their own. Kevin Rudd played on public opinion and helped on by a heavy dose of union scaremongering swept out Howard in a landslide.

Now they have experienced three short years in government and with little of their 07 promises fulfilled, the ALP is desperately trying to turn the media spotlight onto the Coalition. There has been no action on climate change, a horrible mess with the home insulation scheme, problems rolling out the national broadband network and truckloads of asylum seekers choking up detention centers.

As the ALP tries to salvage its credibility, Tony Abbott is parading around the country doing the same finger pointing. He has made no interesting new plans for the future, other than his obvious (but not yet admitted) desire to return Australia to the good old days of Johnny Howard and co. So far into the campaign, points must be awarded to Abbott for flying this far under the radar without copping any flak. How has he done it? He has simply shut up and let a more desperate ALP turn on each other as they have always done.

So if there is no major policies from either major party, no huge political elephant (work choices) and no great moral challenge (climate change) on the agenda, then why on earth are we having an election?

Maybe it could be time to extend the time the government has until it calls an election. In Australia an election must be called within three years of the previous one. In Britain it is five years and most other countries have four year governments. It seems like we could get more done in Australia without letting the politicians out of their offices and many babies could be saved from being kissed by Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard, come on mums and dads, no one wants their kids subjected to that!

If we’re going to have an election, I would like it to be meaningful and significant. Forcing us to the polls for no reason is more likely to alienate disgruntled voters from politics, not to draw them in.