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Should Tony Abbott pack away the Budgie Smugglers? Twitter's role in the Aussie Politics #Spill Thrill

The irritating thing about clichés is that they tend to be true. Last week’s political shenanigans in Australia certainly seemed to support that hoary old chestnut: “a week is a long time in politics”.

The shock changes in the leadership of the conservative opposition in Canberra may well even pave the way to a bruising general election next year – one which could be the first in the world to be fought over climate change. Tougher immigration policies and government spending will also be at issue.

One factor no longer at issue is the growing role of the real time web – and Twitter in particular – in political debate, discussion and inevitably, disinformation. Paul Farrell’s provocative piece about the authorship of political tweets provoked huge debate on this forum last month. Below, he takes a look back at just how the Liberal leadership #spill unfolded and what the new communication channels might mean for the future of political coverage.

Like many journalist peers, I was gripped by the chaos of two successive political leadership spills last week. As events changed by the second, Twitter played a key role in reporting the pandemonium. And when Canberra sneezed, Sydney caught the spill bug, and saw another leader overthrown in the wake of the federal spill.

Sitting at home in Sydney, I made the slightly melodramatic gesture of unplugging my television and radio from their sockets early in the week. “Ha!” I pointed defiantly at the blank tv screen, “I don’t need you anymore”. I did realise at this point that it was probably time to take a break from my laptop for a few moments; shouting at inanimate objects is always a worrying sign.

But I stand by the symbolism of the gesture, melodramatic as it may have been. The TV and radio news were constantly lagging behind, and only served to create confusion for some – even veteran political journalist Kerry O’Brien appeared slightly befuddled and out of date with events last week as they unfolded. News.com.au even posted up the wrong headline, declaring for a few brief but confusing moments that shadow Finance Minister Joe Hockey had in fact won the Liberal leadership contest.

Twitter served two main purposes throughout these few fast paced days – as a real time news distribution node, and as an instant online commentary of events as they unfolded. Press gallery journalists tweeted directly from outside parliamentary offices. The tireless @latikambourke kept us up to date at lightning speed from around Canberra, as she dashed madly to and from MP’s offices and the press gallery of the senate. The frequency and accuracy of her tweets made me wonder more than once quite how she actually the time to speak to anybody in person.

SBS, ABC and SKY twitter accounts also kept up to pace with updates, as well as linking to the constant stream of press conferences. Hashtags served to aggregate the happenings of the day – #spill gave a glimpse into the chaos of the Liberal party, #senate the pandemonium of the Upper House, and #split an analysis of the growing fissures in the Liberal Party.

The second role was as an instant online commentary of events as they unfolded. The #senate hashtag served as an amusing break from the leadership issues, as we were all treated to highly satirical parables of the screaming and yelling lot who are our elected parliamentarians. Speculation was (and still is) ripe about the implications of events for the future of the Liberals, and respected Australian twitterati such as @MediaActive continually offered their insights on the possibilities of a split, and engaged with others on their thoughts.

The list function on twitter as well as the hashtags also allowed a reasonably effective filter of the events. Individual Twitter stalwarts, such as @julie_posetti also took on the role of news aggregators, collecting updates from trustworthy tweeps in Canberra and then redistributing them to her followers. Her thought-provoking analysis can be read here.

But what can we all learn from this experience? There are undeniably some kinks to work out. One problem which arose was as more people caught on to the #spill hash tag as it made its way higher up the list of trending topics, the more clogged it became with spam and irrelevant comments. There were a lot of confused comments from those overseas about why we were all talking about a mad monk, a barnyard and hockey, as #spill made it up onto the trending topics across the globe.

At one point, I was mildly amused by a discussion of favourite movies, but nonetheless irritated at having to sift through the hashtag to the juicy spill details. As the level of interest increased, so too did the possibility of misinformation. Some uninitiated tweeps at times found it difficult to distinguish fact from jest when the commentary took a more humorous turn, causing confusion over exactly how many frontbenchers had resigned.

But despite these problems, Twitter has undoubtedly caused a stir. Now every Australian political reporter and politician is jumping on the twitter bandwagon – Louise Hall, the state political reporter of the Sydney Morning Herald, got on board to cover the NSW spill, and even Tony Abbott has got his Tweet on, albeit somewhat feebly.

Even the Chaser team got involved in the action. Chas Licciardello made the astute observation that Julian Morrow was ultimately responsible for Tony Abbott winning the liberal party leadership, due to a tweet he posted in August.

But can a sustained use of Twitter like this continue in Australian politics? If this method of communication can be maintained, but also further refined, then we are in for some exciting times. With both federal and state elections looming on the horizon, social media is expected to play a key role. Julie Posetti’s aptly named ‘twitter electorate’ will surely have gained even more momentum.

So as I sit hunched over my laptop (again), there’s a lot of questions going on in the twitterverse right now – should Tony Abbott pack away the budgie smugglers? Will Malcolm Turnbull jump ship and start his own political party? And just how many women has Tiger Woods slept with?

But there’s only one that I’m really interested in at the moment: How can we make the experience that is Twitter in Australian politics better?