The night we changed the guard - Federal Election ‘96

The 1996 Australian Federal Election was a big deal. The Australian Labor Party’s dozen years in office officially ended as the nation switched allegiance to the Liberal-National coalition, led by John Howard, himself destined to become Australia’s second-longest serving Prime Minister since Robert Menzies.

But another big thing happened that night. A late journalist mate of mine, Ian Marshman, and I called the election result in Australia’s first live internet coverage of the ballot. It was a chaotic coverage in a primitive form by today’s standards but nonetheless, we did it.

Like most things in those days, as two nerdy sort of communicators, we’d kicked around the idea of running an election website over a bottle of red. Remember, this was a plot hatched while computers still had 3.5-inch floppy disks, 30Mb of RAM with a 500Mb hard drive was a highly spec’ed CPU and cathode ray tube (CTR) screens were irradiating our eyeballs.

Sans business plan or any ambition to commercialise anything, we kicked off the site on my domain medianet.com.au (later I sold this to AAP for its Medianet operation and that’s another story). It was a few months ahead of the 2 March 1996 election date, so we began by running heavily plagiarised news about the lead-up out of newspapers and from radio and TV news.

Of course, you couldn’t really spot the plagiarism because what we had decided to run was material that would be classified as a hybrid of The Age and today’s Betoota Advocate. The site was as much to have a bit of fun while building our nascent internet skills.

We had no competition. No Australian mainstream media group had established a functional website, which explains why our activities were generously covered by both The Australian and the Australian Financial Review. In fact, corporate websites were so rare that the Australian Electoral Office was redirecting visitors from its domain to our website for election information. They clearly had not examined the material we were running!

Election night saw us in the war room at Ian’s house. Two TV’s to monitor the tally room coverage, me at the keyboards scrambling out short punchy bulletins, Ian taking my work on 3.5-inch floppies and uploading to the web via another machine. About half way through the coverage, it was evident that incumbent PM Paul Keating’s team were on the ropes.

Almost simultaneous with the realisation that a change of government looked inevitable, our evening was punctuated and highlighted by an email from the White House, which simply said ‘Go the Greens’. I wondered whether Bill Clinton had found the time to send it, but it was evident that we were now making waves internationally.

We had no idea of the breadth, depth or even presence of a domestic audience, but we were having a hell of a lot of fun between swigs of red wine and regular noshes of unhealthy snacks.

Unfortunately, better funded players like News Limited, Fairfax, the ABC and the commercial networks were not going to let us under their guard again. The writing was on the wall. As I had boldly predicted in my interview with The Australian, the internet was about to “become too popular for politics to ignore”.