gatewatching

I’m sure many of you have Andrew Landeryou’s “The Other Cheek” in your RSS readers. Those who do will have seen that over this weekend he’s been revealing a story about the Victorian Liberals that he’s calling “blog-gate“. The Sunday Age also wrote this story up today.

Two Liberal staffers, it seems, have been anonymously authoring a blog (now “disappeared”) called hewhostandsfornothing.blogspot.com which was critical of State Liberal Leader, Ted Baillieu. Their anonymity was shattered when the Liberal Party launched an investigation and found that their blog had been set up and maintained from computers at the Libs’ Victorian headquarters. The staffers responsible - Simon Morgan and John Osborn - were summarily sacked by the State Director, Julian Sheezel. There are suggestions (prinicipally from Landeryou) that as Morgan was Sheezel’s right hand man, he must have had some knowledge of the “dissident” blog.

The remainder of the details need not detain us here at Gatewatching for too long - essentially it’s part of a damaging factional fight in the already-beleaguered Victorian Liberals. If you’re interested in following it up, Landeryou has all the details over several posts, including the archived contents of the now locked blog.

Two things are important from the perspective of Gatewatching. The first is that Landeryou - essentially a blogger, although he has a gig from the Herald Sun - has broken a story before the MSM could get on top of it. Landeryou’s work is always entertaining, although it can be hit and miss - this time he’s nailed it.

The second is that here we see blogs revealed once more as a politically disruptive technology. Disgruntled (some, with Andrew Elder, might prefer “disloyal”) Liberal staffers have decided to vent their feelings about a State leader (that many Liberals see as too left-leaning) on a blog. Imagining their identities would be safe, they’ve managed to get themselves sacked, made their organisation look amateurish, and have put their Parliamentary party back on the ropes. I don’t suppose that this would have happened in an era when instant publishing and global distribution, and the seductions of publishing anonymity weren’t available to those who wanted to gossip about their masters. When I was at the “Politics and Web 2.0″ conference, I listened sceptically to the arguments that blogging and related technologies were having an immediate and sometimes catastrophic effect on existing political institutions. Every incident like this makes me reconsider that.

We mentioned a few times during the election campaign that the Liberals seemed less than interested in engaging with online political initiatives; since then, it’s emerged that it may have been Janette Howard herself who put the kibosh on online campaigning. Perhaps its the Liberals’ refusal to come to grips with online political communications that have allowed them to be mugged by incidents like this.

UPDATE: This story is everywhere now. Andrew Bolt jumps on board, running the Landeryou line that Baillieu deserved it.

UPDATE #2: Reasons you will hate me is pretty funny on the whole thing, including the contributions of naughty Age picture subs.

blogging anonymity, blogging, Elder, Landeryou, Liberal Party, Victoria