Page 5578 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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respect to recent government advertising campaigns, which was supplied. It was shown that in 2008-09 only seven campaigns were over $100,000. The government maintains that $100,000 is the better limit. However, given the extensive exclusions, $100,000 provides too large a limit. An extensive campaign of an extremely political nature could be mounted for well below the suggested threshold. As an example—and this is not on the content but on the size—the community noticeboard full-page campaign costs $35,000 per month. That means that a campaign of that size could be run for almost three months and not be reviewed. As I say, it is not about the content of the community noticeboard; it is about the size of that campaign.
After careful consideration, a compromise of $40,000 was reached, including production costs. In Canberra, $40,000 would purchase a considerable campaign easily capable of being used for a number of purposes, including party-political purposes. We believe $40,000 to be a reasonable balance between our original position and the government’s request. I commend this amendment to the Assembly.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (4:28): Probably the key question about this provision is the threshold at which the reviewer will be required to review a campaign, the dollar figure. Again, this is one of the topics that were discussed in great detail in the committee. The original starting figure was $20,000. The committee received significant evidence that $20,000 was too low, that it would capture too many campaigns and that the legislation would be quite interfering with the process of government and running ordinary campaigns.
I thought about this very closely and ultimately we came up with a figure of $40,000. The reason for that was I sat down, asked some questions—as Mr Seselja has touched on—and really tried to look at the evidence of what was an appropriate number to capture the type of material that was being discussed in the context of this legislation. I took, as an example, the budget highlights brochure that was produced in the winter of 2008-09, just before the ACT election. I referred to this in the in-principle debate earlier in the year. It is one of my favourites from the election campaign because it provides a convenient breakdown by geographic area, not dissimilar to electorate boundaries, of all the things the government provided in last year’s budget.
Interestingly, when I asked in the committee what the total cost of production and distribution of this brochure was, the answer came down at $49,258. More interestingly, I asked whether a similar brochure was distributed by direct mail for the 2006-07 budget or the 2007-08 budget. The answer was that in 2006-07 there was a letter to residents, distributed by mail, addressing the structural reforms associated with the 2006-07 budget. For the 2007-08 budget no such brochure was delivered and for the 2009-10 budget no similar brochure was planned for. Interestingly, we found that the election year was the key year in which this brochure came out.
I think that underlines the Greens’ interest in this kind of legislation, because it is an example of one of the inappropriate expenditures of taxpayers’ money during 2008. The key question here was the cost of this. It came out in the region of $40,000 to $50,000. All of us who have worked on election campaigns have a fair sense of what it costs to produce and mail a brochure like this all around the ACT. I can assure you that the ACT Greens can do it for rather less than $49,000, but maybe that is due to necessity rather than desire.
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