Out of idle curiosity, because I have no better way to spend my days and it’s hard to avoid the ‘e’ word this week, I searched my blog for any mention of the word ‘election’. The earliest post I’ve written containing that word is from 15 January 2004 (yes, I’ve been writing stuff for way too long), and was a quick note that Peter Beattie, then Queensland Premier, had called a snap election ‘Queensland Labor Online‘.

This is the main part of the post:

“There was a minor hiccup this week when an enterprising activist registered peterbeattie.com and directed it to the rival Liberal web site, but this seems to have been altered and it now goes to the teambeattie, so someone has had a word to someone. Fascinating how the media blew it up as a hack attack. Nothing of the sort of course, just a piece of online activism, and serves Beattie for not spending the few extra bucks to register the domain in the first place.”

Again, because I have nothing else to do in my long idle days, I checked both the domains peterbeattie.com and teambeattie.com.

The former leads you to site of Peter Beattie “…internet entrepreneur, motorcycle junkie and world famous hardcore porn star. (one of those might be fake)”

The latter is now sitting on a domain park, and available for purchase from whoever owns it – which I can’t tell because WHOIS shows it’s registered behind one of the domain privacy companies.

Pretty surprised some enterprising Liberal hasn’t picked up on this and taken action. And even more surprised that ‘Team Beattie’ couldn’t be bothered to pay a few bucks to renew the domain. Then again Mr Beattie did say he’d never run for political office again after stepping down as Premier in 2007, so guess wasn’t top of his mind at the time.