Spindoctors doing MPs' jobs

I’m going to make a rule which you have you abide by. And I promise that I’ll obey that rule too. That’s fair – right?

But now that I think about it, I really think I should be able to exempt myself from that rule at the moment. I’ll have a look at my rule in detail and see if there’s a way I can get around having to stick to it.

So maybe, it’s going to be more like one rule for you, and one rule for me. But it’s only because I really need to break this rule. It’s an emergency. A matter of extreme urgency! I have a really compelling reason for it.

Are you convinced? Probably not.

By now you may have realised I’m referring to political advertising, specifically the latest round of federal government advertising around the proposed mining super profits tax.

Let’s step back a few years to 2007. The then opposition leader Kevin Rudd was telling the community his policy on political advertising. Here’s part of a report from ABC News Online:

Labor promised prior to the 2007 election that it would cut back drastically on government advertising and that it would introduce new checks and balances.

"I believe this is a sick cancer within our system. It's a cancer on democracy," then-opposition leader Kevin Rudd told The 7.30 Report in October 2007.

Mr Rudd said as prime minister he would put his job on the line to ensure the auditor-general had the power to scrutinise expensive ad campaigns, to check their veracity, and make sure they were not simply political ads.

He was asked in 2007 if he would resign if he had not delivered this system within his first term.

Mr Rudd replied: "In terms of establishing the office of the auditor-general with clear-cut guidelines to whom every television campaign is submitted for approval before that television campaign is implemented, you have my absolute, 100 per cent guarantee that that will occur.

"One hundred per cent guarantee and each one of you here can hold me accountable for that."

But two months ago the auditor-general was sidelined from the job.
Instead a vetting panel of three retired public servants, known as the Independent Communications Committee, was set up to check government ads.

The committee is answerable to the government, not the Parliament.

Political advertising is one of those things that we as voters have to live with.
You might remember the Joe Cocker inspired Unchain My Heart GST ads run by the previous Howard Government. From a creative point of view they were terrific! But voters were not impressed with their tax dollars being used for government propaganda. That was a propaganda campaign, and so is this mining tax campaign.

But wait – the mining companies are running one of their own. Well, yes they are. I‘m not saying I agree with one side or other on the tax itself, but when it comes down to brass tacks here, the mining companies are private corporations and are using their own money for these ads.

Any government advertising comes right out of my pocket and yours.

The argument has come from Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, deputy Julia Gillard and treasurer Wayne Swan that there is too much misinformation about the proposed tax in the public domain and the public has a right to know the finer details. Good point.

But is it really our tax dollars which should be used to put that info out there in the form of government advertising?

This ad campaign will have a federal government disclaimer at the end of it so that every time we see it, hear it or read it in the newspapers we will be reminded that it has been “authorised by the Federal Government, Canberra.”

Could this be a real mistake for the government? Do they really want to remind us at every turn that it’s a tax payer funded ad campaign?

Probably not.

Again, this is not about if I agree with the actual tax or not – this is about government funded advertising.

There is another big area which disturbs me in all this.

Senior government members are trying very hard to convince taxpayers that this ad campaign is needed to counter the mining industry’s misinformation, that we need the policy spelt out for us so we can make educated choices as voters and gain a better understanding of how the tax could work to benefit Australia.

But isn’t that THEIR job as senior government MPs? Shouldn’t they work out how to give us the information through effective use of the parliament, and through interviews and statements through the media? Isn’t it PART OF THEIR JOB as senior government MPS to sell the policy idea to us?

It should not be the job of some clever advertising firm to swing us. I do not want to be “marketed to” by my government.

If they’re worried the Opposition and the mining interests are winning the PR battle, then they need to work harder in the parliament to get their message across.

If the message is a sound one, then people will listen. The voting public by and large is not stupid. We do see through gloss and glitter whichever direction it comes from, and most of us really do pay attention to facts rather than spin.

I’ve seen some of the figures from treasury about the predicted impacts from the tax. If you look at it on paper some of those figures make it mighty attractive to the average Aussie – the ‘working families’ if you will.

So why hasn’t Treasurer Wayne Swann be spruiking these figures better?

Any government claiming a special exemption from its own rules because it hasn’t done its own job well enough is not facing an emergency, or a matter of extreme urgency.

It’s a political excuse, and a bad one at that.