Page 5585 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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government.” I think that we want our government ads to be effective. We do not want them to be dull; so the Greens will not be supporting this amendment.
MS PORTER (Ginninderra) (4:53): I would like to support also what Mr Stanhope and Mr Rattenbury have just been talking about. Numbers of years ago when I was working with the national and also the ACT volunteer movement, we looked at some research that looked into the value of using volunteers in trying to get a message through to the community, particularly in health promotion.
There has been a great deal of research undertaken looking at this particular matter because it was perceived that people were switching off from the health promotion message when it was being given by a person who happened to be working for a government department. People would say, “The person is paid to give that message; therefore, I will not listen to that message.” However, if a volunteer, or even someone who leans over the garden fence and has a conversation with you, tells you that you should not eat fatty food then you are more likely to take notice of that person. Therefore, that good message can be diminished by saying up-front, “This is a government message” or, “This comes to you from the government.”
I would reiterate that there is very sound research that actually backs that up. Apart from the research, obviously people who are experts in advertising know this full well. There is also other research that has been undertaken by other people, particularly in the health field, about the value of using independent people or volunteers to deliver a message—for instance, about health promotion and health preventive measures. It is very clear that putting up right across an ad, right at the beginning, “This is brought to you by the ACT government,” obviously will tend to have people switch off and think that it does not have the value that someone else delivering that message might give it.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.55): Both Ms Porter and the Chief Minister actually make the case for this amendment going through. If we have to debase the coin, if government advertising is so worthless that people do not believe it, why do we do it? If we are going to say, “We are going to tell you a message but we are going to put the notice at the end that it is from the ACT government because we do not want you to think that it is a bad message,” does that not tell you something? Does it not tell you that because advertising from government has been so politicised it makes a case for this amendment and it actually makes the case to put the warning up front?
As Ms Porter says, if it is a message from the ACT government that people do not trust, surely the way around that is exactly the two examples that the Chief Minister gave: “this is an important message from the department of health” and “this is an important message from the Emergency Services Authority”. But they actually make the case that perhaps what it means is that there needs to be a full review of the effectiveness of government advertising on the whole, given the vast amount of money that this government spends on the—
Mr Stanhope: They have not recovered from when you were a minister, Brendan. That is the problem.
MR SMYTH: We had significantly less funds to spend on advertising—
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