Page 1644 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 April 2009
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We had a discussion in this place last week about the government doing a mail-out to all households about changes to the unit titles legislation. That again is an appropriate expenditure of government money because there are in the region of 30,000 unit title holders in the ACT. These are significant changes to that act and it is warranted to send them a short booklet saying: “We’ve changed the laws. This will now affect the way you have to sell your property” and detailing various other obligations that owners of unit titles have.
A number of people have talked to me about how much of an impact the recent federal government advertisement about obesity—the one with the fellow walking along the time line—had on them. That was an entirely appropriate and very clever government advertising program that had an impact on the community.
Mr Stanhope: It uses a few advertising techniques, though, Shane.
MR RATTENBURY: I am coming to exactly that point. But I would also recall some of the, I think, less appropriate examples of government advertising, particularly that we saw during last winter. The first was the budget brochure that we all got through our letterboxes and which again I referred to during the election campaign. That was a nice little brochure, but there was, in my view, no new information provided in that brochure about services that the government would be providing to the residents of the ACT. Rather, it was simply a brochure about how much money the government was going to be handing out to the community, in quite general terms.
Interestingly, that brochure was conveniently broken down into geographic areas. There was a special double page on each geographic area and, surprisingly, those geographic areas fairly closely matched the electoral boundaries in the ACT. It may as well have said, “For voters in Ginninderra, this is what the Labor Party has given you,” because that is pretty much how the brochure was set out.
In a similar vein, every household in the ACT received a brochure outlining what the government was going to be spending money on, on health. The health brochure set out in very similar terms, only weeks before the election, conveniently just before the caretaker period—I think it was last August that that brochure came out—“Here are all the things the government is going to do in health. Here is our massive investment in health.” Come on; people know that health was an issue of concern to ACT voters at the last election. How convenient that the government circulates, at taxpayer expense, a brochure detailing all of its major initiatives just a matter of weeks before the coming ACT election.
Interestingly, my favourite one during the election campaign was the infamous Actew ads. I do not know if we can fix this with this legislation—this is an interesting point—but I would like to—
Mr Seselja: The committee can certainly look at that.
MR RATTENBURY: I think the Assembly committee should have a look at it because it would be interesting to get to the bottom of those ActewAGL ads which ran
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