Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 03 Hansard (Thursday, 11 March 2004) . . Page.. 1104 ..

the regulations of the Electoral Act, it can muddy the waters about what is an official publication and what is not. It is an audacious attempt by the government today to rort the Electoral Act.

Currently, government publications are exempt from the authorisation requirements of the Electoral Act if they have the words “ACT government” and the name of the agency publishing the material. That clearly identifies it as an official government publication. Government material often meets the definition of electoral material if it has the photo of a minister or quotes from a minister or any MLA.

Subordinate Law SL2004-6, Electoral Amendment Regulations 2004 (No 1), tabled last week by the government, changes that exemption to add the words “Building our city, building our community”. We have to note that these are the words only, not the logo. We also need to note that there is not the triple requirement of crest, government and agency identification.

A government publication will be exempt if it only uses what the community is now referring to as “BOCBOC”—“Building our city, building our community”. In effect, this will allow the Labor Party many months of free political advertising. There is nothing to stop the Labor Party from using BOCBOC as its campaign slogan after it has been used as a banner headline for any amount of taxpayer-funded advertising.

We need to remember that “building our city” was a Liberal government slogan. It was the third stage of “our city”, “creating our city” and “building our city”. Mr Stanhope said this morning that they have copyrighted it. I would be interested to see whether they have copyrighted just the words, because my understanding is that one cannot copyright words. Maybe the entirety of the logo, including the words “Building our city, building our community” under it, can be copyrighted. It is interesting because it is a slogan that the Liberal Party put out when in government some years ago.

There is also the point that BOCBOC is not an appropriate identifier. Governments should only be identified by their coat of arms or crest, the government’s name and the government agency involved. As Ms Dundas pointed out so well, it is this trendy little symbol that some people would obviously identify with. Does everybody know what “Building our city, building our community,” is? I think not. But I am sure that with a taxpayer-funded advertising campaign that may well be the objective of the government.

It is appropriate that we look to our symbols. They are established for the purpose of identification. They are the symbols that people recognise, and what we are seeing today is a most audacious attempt to rort the Electoral Act by the Labor Party. I refer to some advice my office received from the Electoral Commissioner on the matter. He said:

This change was made as the ACT government has recently adopted new government publication guidelines relating to the use of the Building Our City, Building Our Community theme. One of the features of these guidelines involves, in some circumstances, dropping use of the City of Canberra Arms and/or agencies names and using instead the Building Our City, Building Our Community logo.

Let me read the last bit again. He said:

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .