Queensland Liberal Leader Bruce Flegg is going to the Internet with the issue of recycling water for domestic uses. It’s a critical one for Brisbane where dams are at critical levels and the government procrastinates, playing for political safety by promising to run a $10M plebiscite on the issue in March next year.
He’s established a site www.wateroptions.net and is running an online plebiscite – cost a few thousand dollars. The site carries information from all sides of the argument, although Flegg favours the use of treated recycled water. There’s also an Internet ad, which you can see just below:

National Forum built the site for Dr Flegg and we’re looking forward to seeing how it runs. So far, very few Australian politicians have used the ‘net for connecting with voters. If a few more were prepared to experiment like Flegg I think we’d see a whole new generation of political activism. (The reason for the so-called “political disconnect” is not that people don’t care about issues anymore, just that they hate going to meetings.)
There are sites around like GetUp that do this to a certain extent, but they aren’t actually connected to any of the formal levers of power, and you have to share their point of view to use them. From what I can see, the Flegg site is a genuine attempt to inform voters and help them to influence policy by showing what they think through a transparent online voting mechanism.
If you’re interested in supporting this initiative I can send you the code that generates the advertisement.