Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The federal election draws ever closer. In most countries the big question when they have an election is: who will win? In Australia, almost as big a question is: when will the election be? In my view, this is an anachronism, a hangover from the past. It is time we moved to set our election dates, to fix the length of the parliamentary term. The United States has fixed election dates for its president every four years; everyone knows when the vote will be held. It is a much better arrangement than the uncertainty, speculation and opportunism that we have in Australia. Many other countries have also moved to fixed four-year terms—Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, amongst others. In Australia, the states and territories have been moving to set their election dates. Everyone knows when the next elections will be held in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory. This is a good system for everyone. It gives business certainty, it gives the voters certainty and it adds a measure of decorum to the whole political process.

In my view, four-year parliamentary terms are better than three-year periods. While I have no wish to see governments avoid scrutiny and I am all in favour of accountability mechanisms such as freedom of information, controls on election expenditure and lobbying, whistleblower protection and robust Senate estimates committees, I think we have too many elections in Australia. The average period between federal elections since 1901 has been 945 days or 31½ months—well short of the three years provided by the Constitution—and, of course, we have a plethora of state elections to add to that. So it is time we put to stop to the Prime Minister having the power to call an election at the time of his choosing. Prime ministers do not use this power in the national interest; they use it in their party’s interest or even their own personal interest. The power allows for arbitrary, partisan and capricious election dates and it generates uncertainty, speculation and game playing. Its time is up.

People will quite reasonably ask: what do you do about the Senate? Clearly, we should have simultaneous elections for the Senate and the House of Representatives. Labor’s national conference has resolved in favour of simultaneous four-year fixed terms for both the House and the Senate. This avoids having senators who would be elected for eight years. It also lowers the threshold for election to the Senate, which would mean that minor parties would be given a much better chance of being elected. The truth is that the Labor Party treats the minor parties much better than they treat us. We reformed the Victorian Legislative Council with the introduction of proportional representation, which enabled three Greens party members to get elected. They could not have got elected to the old Legislative Council in a pink fit. We do not get any thanks for that—the Greens party are mostly voting with the Liberal Party in the Legislative Council. Nevertheless, it is better that we run the risk of minor parties controlling the Senate than continue to have an uncertain, outdated system with too many elections and too much power in the hands of the Prime Minister. There is not much to be said, from recent experience, in favour of the government controlling the Senate. They rammed through Work Choices, leaving employees vulnerable to instant dismissal for no reason at all, and they stifled proper attempts to have the Senate investigate the AWB scandal.

While the nation waits with bated breath for an election to be called—at least, some of it does—we are being subjected to a veritable blitzkrieg of taxpayer funded advertising promoting the Liberal Party’s policies and actions. I remind the House that in September 1995—12 years ago now—the then opposition leader, John Howard, promised that a Liberal government would ‘ask the Auditor-General to establish a set of guidelines for government advertising’ and said, ‘We will run our advertisements past the Auditor-General and they will need to satisfy those guidelines.’ This turned out to be one of the Prime Minister’s notorious non-core promises, a deceptive piece of propaganda designed to get voters to support him. This government spent a staggering $1.7 billion in the past decade on such notorious propaganda campaigns as the GST ‘Unchain My Heart’ ads, the Strengthening Medicare campaign and the Work Choices campaign.

Back in the 1930s, George Orwell saw clearly and nailed, in books like Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the way in which fascist and communist governments used government resources to indoctrinate their own populations, to manipulate people and to elevate political propaganda into an art form. One wonders what George Orwell would make of today’s government advertising campaigns if he were still alive. I suspect he would see, as he saw back in the 1930s, the outrageous irony of governments using the people’s own resources to manipulate them and to keep them acquiescent, passive and apathetic.

After the ‘Unchain My Heart’ campaign, the Auditor-General, to his great credit, produced a set of guidelines designed to draw the line between bona fide government advertising and political advertising, for which the Liberal Party should be paying, not taxpayers. The government ignored those guidelines. Two years ago, in September 2005, I presented to the parliament a private member’s bill, the Government Advertising (Prohibiting Use of Taxpayers’ Money on Party Political Advertising) Bill 2005. It would have delivered on the Prime Minister’s 1995 promise to bring to bear the independent authority of the Auditor-General on government advertising.

The Auditor-General proposed guidelines to ensure government advertising ‘be presented in an objective and fair manner’ and ‘not be liable to misrepresentation as party political’. My private member’s bill would have made these guidelines a legal requirement for governments. That private member’s bill of 2005, like the Auditor-General’s report of 1998, was ignored.

And what have the consequences been? While all the polls are indicating that the electorate wants the government to listen to it more and to pay more attention to it, the government are instead out there with a taxpayer funded megaphone, a taxpayer funded loudhailer, screaming into the electorate’s ear because they think the electorate will get the message if only the government yell a little louder. We have had a renewed avalanche of Work Choices advertising. In May, the Special Minister of State told the House that the government had approved the advertising campaign because it passed the value for money test, yet the minister was unable to tell the House how much the advertising campaign would cost. That is plainly ridiculous. How can it possibly be value for money if you do not know what the cost is? It is like going home to your family and saying, ‘I’ve just bought a horse; I think it’ll be great value for money,’ and, when the family asks how much it cost, saying, ‘I don’t know; the owner hasn’t sent me the bill yet.’

Last week, the government launched a new climate change initiative, not ratifying Kyoto, bringing in emissions trading or lifting the renewable energy target—all of which would be useful—but, you guessed it, an advertising initiative: a $25 million climate change advertising campaign. A government which spends 0.05 per cent of the federal budget on tackling climate change can find $25 million for an advertising campaign; 0.05 is a blood alcohol limit, not a climate change strategy. Since the last election we have seen $93 million spent advertising Work Choices, the policy that dare not speak its name; $63 million spent on superannuation advertising; $27 million spent advertising private health insurance; and the $25 million climate change campaign, to which I have just referred. Two hundred million dollars of taxpayers’ money has been spent just this year. With apologies to Winston Churchill, never before has so much money been hosed up against a wall by so few in so short a time.

As well as introducing fixed dates for federal elections and curbs on taxpayer funded advertising, there is much more we can do to lift standards of public accountability. Last Thursday in the Main Committee I referred the House to the publication by the Australasian Study of Parliament Group Accountability Working Party entitled Be honest, Minister!: restoring honest government in Australia. That paper makes numerous serious recommendations to improve the conduct and accountability of ministers. It includes a detailed section on contact with lobbyists and proposes the registration of all lobbying activity. It proposes curbs on the post-parliamentary employment of ministers and parliamentary secretaries to tackle the perception of impropriety where holders of ministerial office have accepted lucrative employment or directorships shortly after leaving office. This is especially concerning where the former minister’s new employer has benefited from a decision made by the minister during their period in office. If this government wants to show it has a vision for the future, it should pick up these reforms and implement them. (Time expired)