PM gets into live chat business

James Riley
Monday, 10 August 2009 08:26

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is going direct – using live Web chat this morning for the first time – to engage voters directly through the PM Connect site.

With the Senate scheduled to vote on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation this week, it is no surprise the topic of the PM’s Web chat was climate change.

And around the time Mr Rudd was chatting online with people online about Climate Change, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull was posting his alternative emissions trading scheme policy on his personal website – and calling for the Government to withdraw the legislation.

Both politicians announced their web posts through social networking utility Twitter. In fact, Twitter this morning acted like a firing gun on the end of Parliament's winter recess and the start of a sitting week.

If you want to avoid politics in the next year, don’t even think about social networking. It is the battlefield where all the major political parties – as well as grassroots lobby groups – are seeking an edge.

The PM’s online chat about climate change is expected to be the first of many.

The rules for participating in Mr Rudd’s live chat allow for only 20 people online – although obviously anyone can see the feed. The Prime Minister’s office says the 20 participants are selected from many hundreds of people that responded to Mr Rudd’s Climate Change blog of last most.

The participation rules are likely to be refined as the PM live chats continue. But there is still plenty of room to manipulate the conversation, depending on the participants picked. It is not clear how many online users took a feed from the live chat – nor whether the PM’s office plans to post the transcript from it.

The PM’s communications unit is developing its live chat and social media strategies on the fly. Certainly there is no formal Government policies yet devised about the use of social media by departments and agencies – and certainly none that would apply to political staffers inside the PM’s office.

The Australian Government Information Management Office has some broad guidance about the use of social media, but remains a long way from developing any specific framework.

The GLAM-WIKI conference of Wikimedia Australia and cultural institutions in Canberra heard that the most advanced policy work in the use of social media within departments was coming out of the Department of Environment.

The Prime Minister’s press office did not return phone calls