Pissed off with LibLab? Don’t make them happy by voting informal

By Margo Kingston 29 August 2013 I’ve had several Twitter discussions with people who don’t think either big party deserves their vote and reckon voting informal is the way to stick it up both of them. It’s not. In fact, if the big two can’t get your first preference their next best option is for you […]

Time for policy meat from the incoming Abbott government, but how can we get it?

by Margo Kingston 19 August 2013 It’s over for Labor. I knew it intellectually when I saw Rudd steal from the Coalition the Northern Australia policy Labor had already destroyed, then hold up a bottle of vegemite to scare voters about a GST Abbott had convincingly ruled out in his first term. I felt it when […]

Ready to go on @NoFibs Election13 citizen journo seat reports

by Margo Kingston 4 August 2013 Nearly fifteen years ago, when I was a political journalist in Canberra, I tried to get posted to Bourke to report rural and Aboriginal affairs from the outside in. Now I’ll be covering the 2013 election from the Gold Coast with 20 plus reporters on the ground in seats around […]

ABC loses plot on ethics and news, citizen journos shine

by Margo Kingston 21 June 2013    Update 22 September 2013 Dear ABC Insiders, I note that you had Piers Akerman back on the Insiders program this morning after a three month hiatus following his heinous comments about Prime Minister Gillard’s sexuality on June 16th this year which resulted in many members of the public […]

Immersion journalism for democracy

June 15, 2013 For more than a decade I argued inside and outside election planning meetings at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that we must do immersion journalism in key seats. Rushing in and out of seats on the circus bus and making a few calls to profile marginals was crap, I argued. […]

@NoFibs new directions, by Margo Kingston

by Margo Kingston June 08, 2013 Looking back on my first six months on Twitter, two Tweeps gave me excellent insights. George Megalogenis said ‘Twitter is what you want it to be’ and Asher Wolf said that ‘any activity, repeated frequently enough, is habit-forming’. I got addicted. So many rabbit warrens to run down, a […]