One of the most avidly reported elements of this interminable phoney election campaign has been the use and occasionally clumsy misuse of the internet by the two major parties.

The politicians and press would have us believe we are entering a new age of political campaigning and participatory politics. The internet, we are told, is a virtual hothouse of democratic ferment and will be used to reach out to, and directly engage with, the country’s nascent digerati and its youth.

The idea, one assumes, is to frame the election as a two-way conversation between the electors and the elected. The internet will enable an open and unfettered debate on Australia and its future.

But J-Ho and K07 aren’t very interested in conversation, be it with each other or with anyone else. 

The modern politician is much too cautious an animal to engage in genuine multi-directional conversation with the public. Too cautious, then, for the internet and its uncompromising brand of no-holds-barred democracy. Too much can go wrong when the rabid mob is given its head.

Howard, of course, learnt this the hard way, when his YouTube debut was roundly mocked by a bevy of cyber-savvy netizens.

Learning from his mistakes, as he almost invariably does, The Glorious Leader returned a week or two later with a shiny new filter installed to prevent any untoward commentary on future pronouncements.

Predictably, comments were were few and far between after that, and those that made it past the all-seeing eyes of the censor were mind-numbingly gushing in their praise.

This, for all intents and purposes, was a conversation in name only.

But then conversation isn’t, and never was, the point. The point is image-management.

The online campaign, in contrast to that waged in print and on television and radio, gives political leaders unprecedented control over the image they project and how it is received. The web allows a politician to sculpt their image, bypass the media middleman, and rush headlong towards the public with a message that hasn’t been compromised by unwelcome editorialising.

Howard’s YouTube tête-à-têtes with the electorate are in reality pre-packaged video press conferences that forgo both the press and the conference. And Rudd’s Obama-esque virtual shrine to himself, Kevin 07, is nothing short of an exercise in mythmaking.

It follows that the incursions of both leaders into the wild, wild web, like their occasional baby-kissing excursions into the electorate, have been micromanaged within an inch of their lives. And the micromanagement is only going to get worse.

Network Ten has announced that its Sunday morning political program, Meet the Press, will be partnering with MySpace during the election campaign on a project that will see politicians responding on air to video questions submitted online. And Labor’s national secretary, Tim Gartrell, has proposed a YouTube leadership debate that will involve some form of online participation.

On the face of it, these are excellent ideas. But, as with the CNN/YouTube debate between Democratic presidential hopefuls in the United States earlier this year, you can bet the family farm that only the most heavily vetted questions will ever see the light of the airwaves. Both sides will veto the prickly and the slippery, and questions that probably should be asked won’t be. The participation everyone will inevitably talk about will have been largely tokenistic and the use of the internet will have been little more than an opportunistic tilt at street cred with the new kids on the block.

The mainstream media have reacted to these developments in a couple of ways.

Early morning radio and television bulletins have become little more than an uncritical aggregator of political propaganda, broadcasting Howard’s unmediated YouTube pronouncements as if they somehow constitute the news in and of themselves.

Meanwhile the heavy-hitters of the press gallery, who should know better than to swallow swill, have tended to focus more on the novelty of the medium than the content that has come wrapped up in it. The press have tended to misrepresent the nature and implications of the online campaign, and have continually failed to acknowledge the manner in which it is being used to restrict, rather than encourage, the very culture of free-flowing debate it professes to have sired.

Power pays lip service to interactivity and participation at precisely the same moment it smothers them with a pillow, while the mainstream media blinks into the oncoming headlights of a brave new world.

Nevertheless, there remain some reasons to log on.

The financial barriers to online campaigning remain relatively low. Democrats leader Senator Lyn Allison's uncompromising YouTube video on the Government’s citizenship test is a fine example of how the minor parties can use the internet to their advantage. So too is the Greens’ video depicting Howard and Rudd in bed with the coal industry. 

As Liberal and Labor spin merchants throw sweaty wads of money into advertising, alternative, traditionally weaker, voices can sometimes still assert themselves.

Indeed, the supposed leaked Government scare ad, which was posted on YouTube early last week, remains the best example of online participation to date. While the mainstream media readily assumed that this was the work of a cold-blooded professional, Helen Razer, writing in Crikey, revealed that the video had in fact been made by a talented, if jaded, amateur.

Turned off by the smear campaigns of both the major parties, this natty private citizen had decided to do some smearing of his own. Sandwiched somewhere between Kevin 07 and Howard’s latest video press release, the anonymous adman’s viral video became the most talked about, e-mailed and linked-to piece of agitprop this side of the issuing of the writs.

Now, that’s democracy for you.

Matthew Clayfield, 22, will be 'tracking' John Howard during the second last week of the election campaign and reporting to electiontracker.net. He is a freelance critic and postgraduate journalism student at the University of Queensland. He is currently based in Melbourne and is studying by correspondence.

Photo: Kevin Zollman