For those who wonder whether the Australian blogosphere and “citizen journalism” will ever make a difference to politics, “CrateGate” – a mini controversy generated on the You Decide 2007 site – is providing some thought provoking material.

UD2007 is an exercise in citizen journalism, based around the forthcoming federal election. It is led by the Creative Industries faculty at Queensland University of Technology, funded by the ARC, and supported by worthies SBS, On Line Opinion and the Brisbane Institute.

The idea is that citizens get out and cover the issues that matter to them in their electorates, including interviewing their local candidates.

A couple of weeks ago editor Jason Wilson did this unpolished, non-soundbite based interview with the member for Herbert, Peter Lindsay, who perhaps had looser lips faced with a citizen than he would have had with a denizen of the Canberra Press Gallery.

He gave Wilson some inflammatory quotes, including that issues of housing affordability were to do with the “financial illiteracy” of young people and their desire to have all the consumer goods too soon. “I’m just stating the facts… in years gone by people were more responsible. I remember in my own case we sat on milk crates in the lounge room until we could afford chairs.”

This in turn formed the basis of a question in Parliament from Kevin Rudd to John Howard:

Does the Prime Minister agree with the Member for Herbert when he says that mortgage stress can be blamed on financially illiterate couples and his only advice to them is that they should sit on “milk crates in the lounge room” until they can afford chairs?

Apart from the milk crate solution, what is your plan to deal with Australia’s housing affordability crisis or is it simply to blame the states?

This exchange was reported by AAP, and got a run in a number of mainstream media outlets.

Now UD2007 has capitalised on CrateGate, running a survey of its readers and users on whether or not they agree with Lindsay’s comments.

The sample is hardly representative, but the results are quite interesting. Basically, instead of embarrassment for Lindsay, there is a fair bit of agreement with his comments, with respondents saying that young people’s expectations are too high. Read the results here.

It is true that the issue of housing affordability counts against the Government, but, among these voters at least, is not the most important vote determining issue.

As Graham Young of Online Opinion comments, this exercise represents a small departure from the usual “gotcha” politics, in which any outburst of unspun frankness is assumed to have been a gaffe.

A small thing, but interesting nevertheless.