With the 2010 Federal Election now etched in history, JOHN HARRIS looks at how candidates in his local electorate used the Internet to sell their messages.

In case the pollies missed the point, this voter disdain was underscored by a “landslide” 5.6 per cent informal vote – the closest you can get to a “no show” in a system that demands $20 for not turning up to vote.

The problem was summed up on Monday night’s Q&A by former ALP heavyweight Graham Richardson, who described politics as the “art of persuasion”. “I don’t think either side did much persuading,” he said.

“I think both sides have got far too enamoured with focus groups, with picking up key phrases and running with them day after day after day…all those lines have been tested to death. No one had a go.”

As I said to a Facebook friend lamenting the election result: “Democracy rules: They gave us no choice and we gave them no decision.”

The irony of the 2010 election is that both major parties fought tightly-scripted, narrow-focussed campaigns to win the hearts, minds and ballots of swinging voters in about 20 or so marginal seats.

Yet the voters handed political decision-making power to independent MPs elected by conservative rural voters in NSW and Queensland.

I didn’t decide how to vote until Saturday morning when I spent a couple of hours studying the candidate choices in my electorate of Sturt.

First was Chris Pyne, our hyper-activist Liberal MP who regularly appears on ABC 891. Typing his name in Google brings up his www.pyneonline.com.au website plus a Wikipedia entry.

Likewise, Peter Fiebig, the uni-educated gardener who stood for the Greens in the formerly blue-ribbon Liberal seat, had a fairly prodigious online profile.

However, typing in Rick Sarre, the name of Labor’s candidate, was another matter.

While Google found plenty of references to the academic role at Adelaide University that Professor Sarre had resigned to contest the seat, it provided precious little about his opinions as an aspiring MP: Just 135 words of boilerplate bio on the ALP website and a couple of pork-barrel announcements.

The only interesting item was about how someone had secretly recorded Sarre making street-corner comments that were interpreted as critical of the Gillard Government’s climate change caution.

Curiously, Sarre complemented this “Mr Invisible” identity online by repeatedly declining invitations to speak on ABC talkback radio.

By all accounts, Sarre was active in the electorate and I saw a cute toddler photo of him on a flyer that was shoved through our letterbox, but I wanted more than pictures and slogans. His grassroots campaign strategy failed to connect with voters like myself, with kids to raise and a business to run.

Even putting aside the silliness of hiding bright candidates beneath a dull presidential-style election campaign, the lack of a meaningful online presence for a political candidate spells electoral doom.

It’s a lesson underlined by the ALP’s 8500-vote deficit in Sturt.

John Harris is managing director of Impress Media Australia. Email jharris@impress.com.au.

Twitter