WikiLeaks bombed - and that's an inescapable fact
Peter Costello
Herald Sun
October 21, 2013 9:00PM
NOW that the football season has ended, there are slim pickings on Saturday afternoon television. That's .. how I came to be watching a program about the WikiLeaks political party on the weekend.
When I switched on, the WikiLeaks Senate candidate for NSW, Dr Alison Broinowski, was telling us how much support the party received in the recent federal election. Dr Broinowski is well spoken and polite. She has represented Australia overseas as a diplomat. But the world she inhabits is quite different from the one that actually exists. The way she tells it, WikiLeaks gathered enormous support in the election. Journalists flew in from all over the world to report about it.
With a little more political experience, Dr Broinowski will realise that foreign journalists don't vote in Australian elections and even if they write glowing stories back in Japan or wherever it was that they came from, that doesn't swing votes back here. In fact, Dr Broinowski and the WikiLeaks Party will figure out there is one really accurate way to tell how much support a party has in an election. It's by counting the number of votes it receives ...
In December the Age ran an online poll that showed an incredible 55 per cent of an unusually large sample of people claimed they would vote for Assange. By April the Fairfax-Nielsen Poll was estimating support for WikiLeaks in Victoria at about 15 per cent. WikiLeaks was always going to poll better in Victoria where Assange, its leader and spiritual inspiration, led the party's list of candidates. The sympathetic media did its best, but in the event WikiLeaks polled a little over 1 per cent of the vote - actually 1.24 per cent - coming in behind the Sex Party and Family First. It was a long way from the online polls and the puff pieces that were designed to boost its vote ...
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/wikileaks-bombed-and-thats-an-inescapable-fact/story-e6frg12c-1226744051580