Page 1645 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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ad nauseam during the election campaign, clearly designed to neutralise people’s concern about water. Any person who ran for this place during the last ACT election knows that the community are concerned about water security in the ACT. It is an issue of considerable public interest. However, what was really extraordinary was the way that Actew suddenly did a whole lot of advertising saying: “Hey, we’ve got it under control. This is not an issue. It is all taken care of.” I wonder how it is that Actew came to the conclusion that a few weeks prior to an election was the best time to inform Canberrans they had nothing to worry about with their future supply of water.
I wonder whether the two voting shareholders, the Chief Minister and his deputy, when they had a board meeting down at Actew, queried the expenditure of funds at this point in time. Were questions put to the board at their regular shareholder meetings or their less formal social interactions? Did they ask John Mackay or Michael Costello: “John, do you think this is really the best use of public funds at this point in time?” or “Michael, these ads seem to be about selling emotions and feel-good images rather than imparting factual information. Do you think they are appropriate at this time?” I suspect those questions were not asked by the ACT government shareholders down at Actew. I wonder whether they asked the question, “Do we need to run these as saturation ads?” Frankly, I think we were all sick of the sight of that Actew ad by the time they had run it on high rotation during last winter.
I suspect none of these questions were asked, and these are the sort of issues that we are trying to get to with this bill. I guess that implicit in my intention to move this to the committee is that I do still have some reservations about this legislation, but I think they are in the detail, not in the intent, of the legislation. These questions are far from fatal to the future of this legislation but are areas where we think a bit more work can make what is a good bill with the right intentions an even better bill, and make sure that it does not create unintended consequences, which I have already alluded to.
We have seen some amendments from Mr Seselja today, and I think they already start to address one of the areas I see as a problem, and that is with things like jingles. We want government advertising to be effective. We want it to penetrate through the plethora of advertising that is out there. I think of a campaign like the slip, slop, slap campaign, which was a government agency advertising campaign. Perhaps I am showing my age here, but that is a campaign I remember from my younger years. We do want government to have the ability to make those sort of campaigns because they are effective and they make the government’s message more effective in getting through to the community that it is trying to influence.
The federal government’s obesity ad that I referred to earlier is another example where the government needs to have the most effective ads it can have. This is an area where perhaps the intention of the provision is correct and that we just need to look at the detail a bit more closely. I am also keen to explore the detail of the exemptions a little bit more. Probably the wording could be made more effective there to ensure that the government does have the ability to advertise when it needs to and for appropriate community information campaigns.
I am also not convinced the Auditor-General is the right person to adjudicate on these matters and to seek advice from. We need to think about whether there is another
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