Page 1647 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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to go back to the principle. Once again here we are speaking about waste by the government, but in this case it is wasteful spending that not only shows a disregard for correct priorities but is a cynical abuse of the power of incumbency. This is spending used for the purpose of gaining unfair influence and maintaining a grip on power, regardless of the cost to the community.
The Government Agencies (Campaign Advertising) Bill is designed to end the rorting of the ACT budget for purely political ends. At its core is a simple premise: government advertising should be about informing the electorate, not influencing an election. This is an important bill, a fair and reasonable bill, and deserves to be passed into law. We saw the sensitivity, and Mr Rattenbury touched on this, about some of the outrageous advertising that we saw last year, that was clearly designed to try and frame the government as having achieved significant things. It was not there to inform the community about upcoming events, it was not there for health and safety; it was there to say that really the Labor government had done a fantastic job. We know it when we go through some of their advertising. We saw the seamless transition from the government health ads, saying what a wonderful job they had done, to the Labor Party health ads, saying what a wonderful job they had done. It was really just an extension of the same campaign. It had slightly different wording and it had a slightly different format, but it gave virtually the identical message.
That government advertising was party political advertising. It was designed to get people to vote for Labor at the next election. We saw it indeed in relation to even the use of health facilities, though this may not be well known. We saw the seamless transition from the government advertising to the ALP advertising on health, but then the ALP ads, the ones funded by the poker machines and by the ALP, were actually shot in the hospital. So we had government facilities, public facilities, facilities owned by the taxpayer, being used for ALP election advertising. This is how far out of control those opposite got. They used the hospital. They got permission to use the hospital for ALP advertising. I suppose it might be because there was such a seamless transition—they were no longer sure whether they were doing the government advertising or the ALP advertising. But this was a blatant misuse of public resources.
The other one—Mr Rattenbury touched on this one and it is worth giving some more detail on it—was the Actew advertising. The Actew advertising was an absolute blitz that ran in the lead-up to the last election. We asked questions on the cost of this advertising blitz and we asked for a breakdown of the water for life campaign. $668,570 was spent on this advertising blitz. We got a breakdown of the run. It ran from the week commencing 29 June right up until the week commencing 24 August. So we asked for a breakdown of the water for life campaign. In that pre-election period the government managed to spend $688,570 of taxpayers’ money, essentially telling us what a wonderful record this government had on water. That was the message we got—for $688,570. We had ads about major projects—Murrumbidgee extraction, Tantangara dam, demonstration of water purification plant—$688,000.
We get to the heart of the sensitivity here of the Chief Minister: $688,000 spent just on one campaign by one agency, one campaign spent telling us how good the government is, in the lead-up to the election. This goes to the heart of the principle. This goes to the heart of why the Chief Minister does not want to support the principle.
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