Noted.

It’s Wednesday afternoon, and Ludlam is livid. A journalist has just quietly let him know that the AEC have stuffed up the handling of around 75 pre-poll votes in a retirement home, which have been declared invalid as a result. The West Australian is running a story tomorrow.

He says some things. I am not allowed to tell you what they are.

It’s been more than six months since Ludlam was first told he’d lost, before being told he’d won but the result was void, before finally being told that the whole thing had been chucked out and would he mind doing it again, please. This second lost-votes debacle is far smaller than the first, but it’s a prickly reminder of the state of limbo the Ludlam camp has existed in since September. Since then, they’ve inhabited a strange parallel universe, planning committee meetings and appearances that might never happen. Ludlam seems to be trying very hard not to think about it.

“I decided in the run-up to the first campaign not to have a Plan B, a comfortable fall-back plan psychologically tucked away, and I still don’t,” he says. “There were a couple of days where I thought, ‘Okay, I need to get serious about what July looks like once we’ve packed this place up’. But suddenly we were back in the fight again. I still don’t know what I’ll do [if we lose].”

The desire to leave something of a legacy (or at least take one last opportunity to vent) might have been on his mind when, on a Monday night in March only a week after the second election was announced, Ludlam rose in a near-empty Senate chamber and quietly delivered the adjournment speech that catapulted him into that most fickle of states: internet fame.

At the time of writing, Ludlam’s ‘Welcome To WA’ speech, ostensibly directed at an absent Tony Abbott but really geared towards would-be voters, has clocked up over 856,000 views on YouTube, drawn 718,000 people to this website, which first picked it up, and spawned countless flame wars between people who really shouldn’t be friends on Facebook.

Whether or not the speech’s virality had any effect on the final count will be debated until the End of Days, but the popular view seems to be that the internet has about as much influence on election results as a Sky News broadcast. Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech clocked up 2.5 million views, for instance, and look what happened to her. Most of the people who watched Ludlam’s speech aren’t WA residents and can’t vote for him; even those who can have had over a month to forget about a video that popped up once or twice in their Twitter feeds.

Despite his affection for all things Teh Interwebz, Ludlam hasn’t relied on it to get over the line. “We’ve not yet been in an election that wasn’t dominated by the four or five lead stories on the nightly news and in the paper,” he says. “Elections are still won and lost in the Daily Telegraph and by TV advertising spend, there’s no question about it. We’re still doing broadcast politics.“

Not that the Ludlam campaign hasn’t been flogging the beJesus out of those seven minutes and forty-one seconds. From the crowd-sourced selfie recreation of “Our Speech” to the campaign tees featuring just an outline of his hair and the word ‘Noted’ (the original design came from an online fan), every conceivable strategy to remind punters that Ludlam is That Speech Guy has been, in the parlance, noted. He is definitely playing to an audience — a small and disparate one, for sure, but one he believes is growing, and will come to have a far greater impact on the future than most people are giving it credit for.

“I got the sense years ago that, at every election, the internet will be more and more important. I wonder whether or not we’ll find, after this by-election, that we’ve just been through the first poll where the internet made its presence known — not decided the result, but made its presence felt. At some point in the future, the internet is where politics will be. It won’t be anywhere else.”

These little shout-outs to the online vote don’t always come off so well — like the cringeworthy pop-up Dogetext eight minutes and twenty seconds into this recent video. Even without the murderous eloquence of ‘Welcome to WA’ shuffling awkwardly in the background, “very animosity, such Liberals, wow” is not so much a burn as it is a cup of tea forgotten on the kitchen bench.

The Senator is aware of this, too; that clip’s been on his mind. “Can’t help myself. I put the Doge text in that video because it’s very now, but in two years people are gonna watch it and just go, ‘What was he doing?’“

The internet’s opinion matters to Ludlam. He’s worked very hard to make sure it likes him, and he doesn’t want to screw that up. “What the internet teaches you very fast is that if you’re rubbish, you’ll be told. You’ll be dismantled. It can be quite a cruel place because it’s not just a [one-way] broadcast medium anymore. It’s a massive conversation, and if you’re boring or condescending you’ll be torn to pieces.”

Perhaps the reason he gets away with the occasional online misstep is that, unlike a lot of other politicians, whose only arsenal of Getting Wiv Da Yoof online involves shitty, shitty memes (take heed, Wayne Swan), Ludlam’s relationship with the internet goes a lot deeper.

A few of his biggest policy bugaboos are the ongoing efforts by successive governments to introduce a mandatory internet filter, and security agencies who rampantly snoop through people’s digital movements without a warrant. A certain awareness of the endlessly-evolving quirks and foibles of online cultures comes with the territory. “If you want to run an effective campaign in defence of the medium, you need to learn how it operates, how it works,” he says.

It’s that rationale which best explains Ludlam’s massive online presence: the constantly-buzzing Twitter account, the “thunderclap” blitz of social media they planned for election do-over day, the Reddit AMAs. He’s turning more and more to the people who best know the internet to help him defend it.

“There’s a whole generation coming through who aren’t getting their politics from the evening news. They’re not reading newspapers. Some of what we’re doing is resonating partly because Labor and the Liberals have been so crap — on data privacy, on digital rights, on stuff that affects the medium where young people are actually getting their politics from — that I’ve had that space to myself, unfortunately. The others have just been on the wrong side of the argument.”

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That generation turned up in droves to ‘Ludapalooza’, a dance night-cum-fundraiser at one of Perth’s largest nightclubs on the Saturday before the election, starring Senator Ludlam as DJ S-Ludz. Like the original Gary/’Noted’ shirt design, it was a free kick for the campaign that came out of the blue: the people who run Capitol nightclub messaged Ludlam’s Facebook page, and offered to set it up.

That night was like something from another planet: hundreds of raver kids in fluoro and snapbacks going berserk over this mild-mannered politician in his forties, up on the decks like someone’s gatecrashing dad. The Spotify playlist he put together included Underworld, Nine Inch Nails, The Presets and Chet Faker; he mouthed the chorus and pumped his fist to The Herd's '0.77'. In the corner was a merch table packed with the cover-nothing singlets your average club-going Slave To The YOLO loves so much, only with the word ‘Noted’ on them in place of an acronym.

These kinds of people — hard-partying, hard-drinking, young people — aren’t meant to give a shit about anything. But neither are the type who make memes and host club nights, and this time around at least, some of them felt strongly enough to use their skills to influence politics.

“I don’t know why we had 500 Gen Ys jumping around on Saturday night, but I’m bloody glad they were there,” Ludlam says. ”And it was fun.”