Summary
| Website: | www.crikey.com.au/topic/crikey-for-pm |
| Social Media: | none |
| Previous Names: | none |
| Slogans: | none |
| Themes: | none |
| Upper House Electorates: | Victoria |
| Lower House Electorates: | none |
| Preferences: | To quote from the site: We really, really don’t want to win, and we won’t be making preferences |
| Previous Reviews: | none |
Policies & Commentary
K. Black is not a serious candidate.
But neither are they an unserious one.
They have no policies at all. They are running for the Senate, but they do not want to be elected.
This is because their campaign is less a candidacy, and more an exercise in stunt journalism. Now, stunt journalism gets a bad name – there are a lot, perhaps even a majority, of bad stunts out there, but each one should be judged on its individual merits.1The career of Nellie Bly provides excellent examples of stunts that are socially important and those that are merely entertaining, for example. This one, I think, is a worthwhile one.
In this case, the stunt is running a candidate so that Crikey can report on the mechanics and legalities of campaigning from the inside. It’s an excellent idea, and will be an interesting one to follow. Crikey will be running the articles covering it outside of their usual paywall (although you will still need to log in to their site, and they have – rather stupidly in my opinion – applied their usual “3 articles a month” limit to reading them, so they are a little less outside the paywall than Crikey would have you believe), in the hope of drawing more attention to the series.
You can find the ongoing coverage at the website link above.
I doubt they need to lose any sleep on being elected as an independent. Being a candidate can be meaningful apart from winning (and even with no chance of winning). And in this case it is an intriguing idea for journalism.
Indeed it is, I just wish Crikey were making it as accessible as they claim they are.