Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens likewise will support any motion to clean up the rampant misrepresentation which goes on in the run to both state and federal elections and which is engaged in by the major political parties on both sides. We have seen from the Liberal Party in the past the electoral how-to-vote cards handed out that can confuse the voters into thinking they are coming from the Greens. But what is not covered in this motion is the deception of people in the run to elections through specifically targeted negative advertising. The Labor Party has become the doyenne of this deceptive activity. We saw it in the Tasmanian elections. We saw it in the South Australian elections. We saw it in the seat of Mitchell in South Australia, where arguably it changed the outcome of that election. On all occasions the Labor Party labelled its opponents—Liberal, Green or Independent—as wanting to promote illegal drugs and/or relationships with prisoners who had committed heinous crimes and who were in jail. We can expect more of it because it seems that it works, and it is not until we get truth in advertising and an end to the deliberate setting up of opponents, which seems to be coordinated and rampant in the Labor Party nationally, that we will get some protection for voters from this highly planned, misleading advertising.

Senator Fielding himself came in in an election in which his party is alleged to have spent a million dollars repeatedly advertising in my home state that I wanted to give drugs to children. So Family First is not clean from this tendency to want to besmirch untruthfully opponents in the run to elections. We should stop it. There is not in this proposal a motion for truth in advertising in the run to elections. There should be, and it is something the Greens—apparently alone, though perhaps with Senator Xenophon—will be campaigning for in the run to this election and consequently.

Question agreed to.