It started on Friday 27 November when Joe Hockey posted a 9:40am message on the social blogging site Twitter: "Hey team re The ETS. Give me your views please on the policy and political debate. I really want your feedback."
The ETS is the Emissions Trading Scheme being proposed by the Rudd government in Australia.
The next morning the Sydney newspapers were adding fuel to the fire by mentioning Mr Hockey's 'tweet' and soon hundreds from both sides of the environmental and political fence were offering their take on the situation.
That's when I had this brilliant (self labelled) idea over my Saturday morning coffee - let's aggregate all the tweets mentioning @joehockey since the initial post on Friday and see what the punters actually say. A quasi 'Twitter Pollie Poll' had commenced and I was certain there was value in the people's opinion.
Here is the pie chart showing percentage of tweets that had an opinion either for or against the Turnbull/Labor ETS deal:
My Method:
In order to generate the above graph the following steps and decisions were made:
- Twitter's search feature was used (via the API) to download all 1500 tweets made since Friday and containing the @joehockey text.
- This data was processed using a script to generate a spreadsheet of all Twitter messages along with the time they were published and the Twitter screen name of the message author.
- The spreadsheet was then sorted to display any duplicate authors.
- A rating scale was applied to every tweet to reflect the opinion of the author or whether the tweet should be excluded: Yes, No, Duplicate exclusion, Retweet exclusion, No opinion exclusion.
- The resulting totals were used to generate the pie chart displayed above.
Considerations:
In order to decide on the value of each opinion I focussed on the central question asked by Mr Hockey, with a slight editorial licence: "Should the Liberal party pass the ETS in it's amended form through the parliament and in doing so support Mr Turnbull's position?"
Interesting Opinions:
As is often the case, the public voice contained many fascinating and sometimes insightful trends:
- The ETS is seen by many supporters as not perfect but better than inaction.
- ETS detractors claim that the average person will pay for big business pollution should the scheme be enacted in parliament.
- Joe Hockey's potential leadership challenge against Malcolm Turnbull was seen by many as more interesting to discuss than the ETS.
- A 'wait for the Copenhagen Convention' message was evident throughout the tweets.
The prize for the funiest tweet goes to troymac79 who said, "Go for the leadership ur our big cuddly teady bear."
The public have had a rare opportunity to voice their opinions and let's hope Joe Hockey and other political leaders choose to take some of these messages on board when deciding on this important environmental deal.
