For my last post about the Twitter activity around Australian politicians before tomorrow’s election, I’m once again looking at the distribution of Twitter activity across Australia’s 150 electorates (this is excluding Senate candidates by default, therefore). We’ve done this once before during this campaign, a few weeks back – this post covers the period from 4 August to 1 September (i.e. the full campaign except for the final week, which hasn’t finished yet).
Once again, a reminder about our approach here: we are tracking all tweets by and @mentions of sitting members and candidates in the 2013 federal election. As more (especially minor party) candidates have become known, we’ve progressively extended our list as far as possible.
This post covers the two sides of the equation: first, I’ll provide an overview of which local candidates are receiving especially much attention on Twitter; further down, I’ll explore which candidates are particularly active in their own use of Twitter.
@mentions of Candidates
We’ll begin with the @mentions of local candidates. Just to make this absolutely clear: those @mentions may be coming from anywhere in Australia, and even in the world, not just from the electorate itself. So, if an electorate flares up in red in the maps below, it’s because its local candidate or candidates are @mentioned especially frequently on Twitter – not (necessarily) because Twitter users who are based in the electorate are highly active. (And as always, zoom in to enlarge.)
The national map points to some of the rural and regional electorates whose candidates have been especially frequently @mentioned on Twitter. In northert Queensland, Bob Katter’s seat of Kennedy gets considerable attention; in northern NSW, retiring Independent Tony Windsor remains a point of focus in New England; and in northeastern Victoria, Sophie Mirabella’s struggles to hang on to Indi have been a focal point for some time.
In and around Brisbane, Kevin Rudd’s seat of Griffith is featured strongly for obvious reasons. High profile draftee Peter Beattie lights up Forde, while former Treasurer Wayne Swan may be in trouble in Lilley. On the Sunshine Coast, neighbouring electorates Fairfax (where United Australia Party leader Clive Palmer is running) and Fisher (where the bitter feud between former Speaker Peter Slipper and LNP candidate Mal Brough continues) are also highly active.
In Sydney, Tony Abbott’s Warringah, Malcolm Turnbull’s Wentworth, and Joe Hockey’s North Sydney are featured even more prominently than Anthony Albanese’s Grayndler, Tanya Plibersek’s Sydney, Scott Morrison’s Cook, Chris Bowen’s McMahon, David Bradbury’s Lindsay, or Tony Burke’s Watson. Here, the high level of activity serves in the first place as a reminder of how much the frontbenches of both sides of politics are populated by politicians from a single city.
By comparison, Melbourne gets a much smaller share of the action. Sole Greens MP Adam Bandt’s seat of Melbourne leads the way, followed by Lalor (where retiring member and former PM Julia Gillard still receives her fair share of @mentions, even though she has been virtually absent from the campaign itself), and Bill Shorten’s Maribyrnong isn’t far behind. Flinders (where opposition climate spokesman Greg Hunt is standing) is somewhat less active, while Corangamite may be prominent mainly for the disendorsement of its Palmer’s United Australia Party candidate Buddy Rojek. Up in the northeast, rural Indi (at close to 6,000 tweets) leaves many a suburban seat behind.
In Adelaide, things are quieter still. Only Kate Ellis in the seat of Adelaide, and Mark Butler in Port Adelaide, have generate any real activity over the course of the campaign to date.
Meanwhile, the obvious star candidate in Perth – and perhaps the only Western Australian politician on Twitter who has a truly national profile – is Coalition foreign policy spokeswoman Julie Bishop.
In Tasmania, it looks like Twitter activity also reflects population density – and here, too, the only politician with a national profile, Independent Andrew Wilkie, is the main reason that Denison (taking in Hobart) is the state’s most prominent electorate.
The ACT is surrounded by interesting electorates – Indi, and the “bellwether” seat Eden-Monaro – but itself remains more subdued. Canberra itself is quiet, while Fraser (with its coastal exclave Jervis Bay), where Andrew Leigh is standing, is slightly more prominent.
And finally, nothing much to see in either of the two federal electorates covering the Northern Territory.
Tweets by Candidates
As we’ve seen in previous analyses, the volume of @mentions received by the candidates usually doesn’t correlate much at all with their own tweeting efforts; this is the case especially for the most prominent leaders, who’ll be @mentioned at significant volume even if they don’t tweet at all. So, it’s worth examining which local candidates have actively taken to Twitter across the nation.
The national map of tweeting candidates shows a few new hotspots. In Queensland, the highly active @MaranoaGreens account of Grant Newson lights up the southwest Queensland electorate of Maranoa, and his party colleague Jonathon Dykyj is similarly active in Dawson, half-way up the Queensland coast. Eden-Monaro and Indi again appear prominently in NSW and Victoria, while Tony Windsor’s would-be successors in New England (in northeastern NSW) haven’t generated a great deal of activity of their own. Corangamite southwest of Melbourne also flares up, due to the high volume of tweets from ex-Palmer candidate Buddy Rojek.
In Queensland, Kevin Rudd in Griffith and Wayne Swan in Lilley aren’t actually especially active, despite their high profiles. They’re outdone by their party colleagues Gayle Hislop in McPherson and Graham Perrett in Moreton (where the LNP’s Malcolm Cole and the Greens’ Elissa Jenkins are also fairly active). To the west, by the way, we see the eastern edge of Maranoa, which stretches from here to the state border.
In Sydney, the difference between the @mentions and tweets maps is even starker. Coalition and Labor leaders are active on Twitter, but not all that much; in Wentworth and Grayndler, sitting members Malcolm Turnbull and Anthony Albanese are also facing Twitter competition from Labor’s Di Smith and the Greens’ Hall Greenland, respectively. Further out west, Lindsay Labor MP David Bradbury is well outdone on Twitter by Palmer candidate Andrew Wilcox.
In Melbourne, by comparison, the inner city shows some more signs of life – perhaps precisely because the local candidates don’t also hold prominent frontbench positions. Greens MP Adam Bandt is being outdone by Labor’s Cath Bowtell in the set of Melbourne, while significant local Twitter battles also rage in Batman, Scullin, Gellibrand, and Calwell, to name but a few. In Corangamite, as I’ve noted before, disendorsed Palmer candidate Buddy Rojek is tweeting up a storm in spite of his newly found status as an Independent.
There’s less to say about Adelaide. Here, the sitting members in the outer electorates of Wakefield and Mayo – Labor’s Nick Champion and the Liberals’ Jamie Briggs, respectively – generate only some limited action, more or less unopposed.
In Perth, Julie Bishop isn’t only the recipient of a substantial number of @mentions, but also tweets out relatively frequently. She’s outdone, however, by the Greens’ Dawn Jecks in the southern electorate of Brand, who claims the crown as Western Australia’s most active tweeting candidate.
In Tasmania, tweets sent mirrors @mentions received remarkably closely. Once again, Andrew Wilkie’s Hobart-area seat of Denison leads the way, but Twitter by candidates in the seat is fairly evenly split between Palmer candidate Debra Thurley, Wilkie himself, the ALP’s Jane Austin, and the Greens’ Anna Reyno. Liberal candidate Tanya Denison’s fabulously-named @Denison4Denison account has not tweeted since 17 July.
The same goes for the ACT – as with the @mentions, we see limited activity from Canberra candidates Gai Brodtmann (Labor) and Julie Melrose (Greens), while in Fraser, active Twitter user Andrew Leigh (Labor) is some way ahead of the Greens’ Adam Verwey. Other parties’ candidates don’t seem to figure much here. Next door in Eden-Monaro, by the way, Labor’s Mike Kelly has taken to Twitter with some aplomb, while Palmer candidate Dean Lynch also puts in a strong showing.
Finally, Northern Territory candidates have s far failed to set Twitter alight. Perhaps there’s a chicken-and-egg situation here: seeing as they receive very few mentions, they may see little reason to tweet themselves; on the other hand, since they don’t tweet much, they don’t receive many @mentions. At any rate, it’s very quiet in the Top End.