Tree of Knowledge

A Hit and A Miss for Christian Kerr

Christian Kerr gets stuck into the ‘men and women’ behind the men and women in the Federal Liberal Party; the gormless opposition staffers. Or maybe that should read the boys and girls behind the men and women of the Federal Liberal Party:

There is a feeling among many political observers that by the end of the Howard years, all the Liberals had left were child soldiers.

These young federal Liberal staffers haven’t seen Opposition. They have been used to having public servants around in government to do much of the heavy lifting for them.

Liberals joke about union hacks. At least they mix with workers. They should realise that their own offices are filled with twenty and thirtysomethings hanging around in taxpayer or party-subsidised jobs waiting for a safe seat.

Too many of them are immature. They think that online smears are clever.

All too accurate according to my reports from Canberra.

However, as for Kerr’s conclusion, he’s rather ironically wide of the mark:

Real political professionals know that the Australian blog world is insular, often ignorant and has virtually no influence on mainstream debate.

I agree with him that the Australian blogosphere is currently far less influential than its counterparts in the US and UK (though media trends always take a few more years to reach Australia so let’s wait and see whether this is permanent).

More broadly though, it’s a bit rich for Kerr to claim that blogs have ‘virtually no influence’ in a week where an Australian blog has broken a story that was on the front page The Age, The Herald Sun and got a major splash in his own paper!

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