Page 3893 - Week 10 - Thursday, 27 August 2009
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was also considered unworkable by the Managing Director of Actew and problematic by the ACT Auditor-General, who said:
We are struggling with the idea of whether or not TOCs should be covered. The reason the government set up TOCs often is that they have commercial obligations and hence they are not normally subject to a number of government policies and guidelines. So if this legislation applied to TOCs such as Actew and ACTTAB then it will be a step away from the normal government legislation coverage.
I think that could be very hard for government legislation in terms of complying with policy and procedures to be intended to cover TOCs.
The fact is that this bill was so hastily created, so politically motivated, so half-baked, that it can only be assumed it is nothing more than a petty trawling exercise by the Liberals, a result of no policy, no ideas and confusion about what advertising is—advertising by a political party, the government or a corporation. I will just provide a couple of examples—firstly, most crucially, the lack of meaningful definitions in the bill. The original definitions provided by Mr Seselja were so fuzzy and meaningless that after extensive criticism from a range of parties we have been left with recommendation 11, which states that, should the bill proceed, clarification of these terms would be required.
But my favourite of all, Madam Assistant Speaker, was the original insistence that advertising slogans be banned. As mentioned earlier, we were fortunate to have a number of expert witnesses come before us. One was from the Advertising Federation of Australia, which is responsible for slogans such as “slip, slop, slap”. These slogans are still memorable and have saved many lives. Slogans are a valuable way to get a government message across in an effective way. But, according to Mr Seselja’s original bill, this was not so. It was quite a counter-productive approach.
Mr Seselja had some insight and sought to amend it, but even his amendment showed that he did not just quite get it. If only this policy of no slogans had been taken to heart by the Liberals before the last election, we could have been spared from their slogans brains trust. What were they? “Zed instead”—that was a classic. In Brindabella, we had “a better fella for Brindabella”—a slogan if ever I heard one. We also had—and he is not here—“Doszpot for top spot.” I did not notice that there was an objection to those slogans.
Madam Assistant Speaker, I would like to point out that at no time throughout the hearings and through all the deliberations did Mr Rattenbury or Mr Coe provide the committee with an actual example of a politically motivated government campaign—not one actual example. The closest we got was the confusion about advertising by an independent corporation when Mr Rattenbury waved around a budget brochure in one of the hearings. Since this was the great piece of evidence, and it was the only piece of evidence provided to the committee implying a politically motivated campaign, I will just address that brochure for a moment.
Of course, the government has a need, a right and a responsibility to keep the community informed of how it spends its money in its budget initiatives. The government has sent informative brochures to Canberra on a number of occasions. Let
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