In a strange way Peter Watson, the Australian Labor Party election candidate disendorsed and expelled for his homophobic views, is a trend setter for his generation.
Mr Watson was caught out by the unsavoury views he’d posted on Facebook and other online forums. That he defended what he had written “when I was like 14, 15 years old, so we’re talking about four, five years ago” made matters worse.
Our digital footprints – material about us on the web or in social media sites – sometimes show we’ve strayed into places we’d rather admit to.
There’s plenty of others who have posted things that will bite them later when they apply of jobs or seek political office.
It will be interesting to see how society and the media adapt to our histories and the dumb stuff we did as teenagers being freely available, Mr Watson is an early casualty of that adjustment process.
One of the more disturbing aspects of the Peter Watson case is his political party’s failure to do the most basic of checks on their candidate’s background. Something that again illustrates just how out of touch the nation’s political structures are with modern society.
When we talk about disruption, we often focus on the jobs, business and social aspects of that change. One thing we often forget is that social upheaval directly affects political parties.
Political parties who fail to adapt to the needs of their society become irrelevant and fail.
So maybe Peter Watson has, through sheer dumb luck, found himself on the right side of history in being expelled from a political party that doesn’t know how to use Google search.
