ComeOn Australia Launched

ComeOn is an independent organisation that intends to run  "mainstream" political campaigns over the Internet. It has some similarities to GetUp, but a different point of view.

This morning they did a soft launch of their site. This should be a momentous event in Australian eDemocracy. For a long time it has seemed that only the political left "gets" the relationship between the Internet and politics. Now there is an organisation trying to do the same from the centre and right. We're proud to have built their site for them.

Internet Thinking is intimately linked to The National Forum whose mandate is to look at ways of using the Internet for democratic purposes. The forum was my brainchild and eDemocracy is still my passion and we've worked with all sides of politics. Pity is that because of the way the Australian political system operates there is not a lot of reward for established players using the Internet, particularly candidates for any of the major parties.

The US has seen a huge take-up of the Internet in politics with Barack Obama and Ron Paul being the two most prominent exponents in the last election. In particular Obama used it to revolutionise his fundraising.

For Obama, his most important election wasn't the presidential election against McCain, which he was always likely to win, but the primary election against the Clintons, which he was always destined to lose. Except the Internet allowed him to break that destiny. By more than matching the legendary fundraising capacities of the Clintons he won the Democratic nomination and the Presidency. And he did it on donations that averaged around $150 a donor.

This situation was only possible because unlike Australia the political organisations are weak in the US. Candidates are selected by the electorate at large, not in-house selection panels, so their nomination is a gift of the electorate, not of the party.

Weak political organisations mean candidates are looking for any edge they can get, and the Internet is the biggest edge that has come along since TV.

If the Internet is to be used more extensively in Australian democracy we need third party organisations without the protection of political parties to spring up because it won't happen off the back of politicians beholden to backroom cabals. GetUp has had the field to itself for almost 6 years and currently has over 350,000 members. It's about time it got a decent competitor.

Intriguingly some on the left a;ready find this new organisation threatening. It has a Twitter account and reading some of the tweets that show up on the site I found a few Twitterers complaining that the new organisation is "astroturfing" for the mining industry. One of these Twitterers is Crikey's political correspondent Bernard Keane.

Another is Keiller Macduff who is media officer for Greenpeace. Appears to think that only the "good guys" (his side) have a legitimate spot in the debate.

Another Twitterer points out that we built the ComeOn website and we built Julie Bishop's. By a leap of associative logic this makes the organisation a Liberal Party front. If he'd dug a bit deeper he would have also seen our extensive list of Labor clients, so by a similar leap of associative logic perhaps the organisation is a Labor Party front.

It seems like democracy, let alone eDemocracy, still has a long way to go in Australia.