Peter John Chen

E-Election 2007? Political competition online

This paper examines the use of new media in the 2007 election. This election is commonly seen as a breakthrough for the use of Internet in electoral campaigning due to the high profile use of Internet channels in the ‘Kevin 07’ campaign and its association with the change of Government. The paper examines the impact of the technology on the presentation of political campaign messages in the campaign. In this election, the Internet played a more visible role in both centralised party and individual candidate campaign strategies. The paper concludes that while some innovation occurred, the overall application of new media was modest, which parties and candidates face unprecedented challenges from a wide variety of alternative online voices. The degree of political engagement with online channels remains limited, however, by the continued dominance of mainstream mass media channels.

Digital Media in the 2008 Canadian Election

ABSTRACT This article examines the use and impact of digital media in the 2008 Canadian federal election. It examines the extent to which different digital media were employed by candidates and parties. The research informs a wider debate between competing schools of thought on the democratizing potential of the Internet. The article demonstrates a mixed role of digital media in the election. Structural, human, and financial resources can be identified as advantaging established parties access to both conventional and online media. The pattern of adoption of different forms of digital media is also significantly affected by factors internal to professional politics.

Advocating Online Censorship

Using Sabatiers Advocacy Coalition Framework, the development of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999 is presented. Introduced to control the flow of online content (especially pornography) into and within Australia, this policy area incorporates a mix of high technology, morality and commercial interests. Analysis of the development of the Act is presented over five periods that show: the activation and formation of competing coalitions; acquisition of information and arguments about what form (if any) government regulation should take; and the relative importance of the issue. Analysis shows a number of relatively stable advocacy coalitions formed rapidly in response to government moves for regulation. The stability of these coalitions was significantly influenced by shor -term changes in regulatory technology and the nature of the political discourse used by the government which raised or lowered the ‘temperature’ of subsystem conflict. The article makes a number of methodological comments about the application of multivariate clustering to subsystem analysis.

Animal welfare officers in Australian higher education: 3R application, work contexts, and risk perception

Acceptance of the concept of replacement, refinement, and reduction (the 3Rs) and the need for their implementation is widespread in the research community, and is also backed by local governance requirements in many key jurisdictions. Yet concerns about underutilization of these concepts and practices remain. From a survey of animal welfare officers (AWOs) in Australia, the attitudes to, and the adoption of, 3Rs in Australian public universities is explored. The survey finds that Australian AWOs have considerable concerns about 3R uptake, with 44% agreeing that ‘3R possibilities often remain unused’. At the same time, these officers see access to relevant information, and the implementation of the 3Rs, as comparatively easy. Thus, a problem of under-implementation appears to exist. A number of explanations for this are put forward. AWOs are comparatively junior professional staff in the Australian university system, constrained from going beyond basic regulative functions and to the training and promotion of the 3Rs. When compared with their international counterparts, Australian AWOs spend less time providing information and advice on the 3Rs to researchers working in their institutions. Significantly, while AWOs tend to see themselves as being well supported institutionally, they have comparatively poor relationships with active researchers who are using animal models. The implications of this are examined, with recommendations for research institutions, as well as for further research.

Conclusion: The Implications of the 2016 Federal Election

In the year that the pollsters were stumped by unanticipated outcomes in both the Brexit vote and the United States (US) presidential election, the Australian polls got it close to right. Although Malcolm Turnbull had not campaigned particularly well and the party’s relentless mantras of ‘jobs and growth’ and ‘innovation’ were perceived as out of touch with the concerns of everyday Australians, the poll trends almost consistently put the Coalition one to two percentage points ahead of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). They predicted a close result in terms of the vote, which, in 2016, also translated into a close result in the number of seats won.1

Non-Mainstream Media Coverage

From a media diversity perspective, Australia’s standing as an established democracy is not strong. When compared with peer democracies, Australia has the most concentrated media system in the world (Australian Collaboration 2015). The causes of this are various, but include comparatively small market size, ‘dumping’ of English-language content into the Australian market and lacklustre media policy that has facilitated media conglomerates to consolidate their market share (Winseck 2008). As part of this story, the popularisation of the internet over the last two decades has been an exacerbating factor and corrective: undermining the economic basis of established commercial media and eroding domestic regulatory capacity, while at the same time providing the capacity for the establishment of ‘new presses’.

‘Double Disillusion’: Analysing the 2016 Australian Federal Election

After six weeks of a faux campaign followed by eight weeks of official and vigorous campaigning, the night of Saturday 2 July 2016 proved an anticlimax for election observers, particularly those expecting a clear result. Australia’s seventh double-dissolution election did not deliver the political ‘cut-through’ intended by the Constitutional framers—inspiring the title of this volume: Double Disillusion.