Page 2422 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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through and check your records. We know that you will spend more on administrative expenditure than the amount of money that you will ever get back through the publicly funded system, so just claim it. We don’t want to have an acquittal system, because it makes our life too difficult.”
This is going to make life extraordinarily difficult. Opinion polls are rarely used for specifically formulating information that would go into a broadcast ad, a policy, a pamphlet, a flyer or something that goes in a letterbox. When we discussed this with the attorney, he said, “We wanted to stop people using push polling and saying it was opinion polling.” Push polling, attorney, is illegal. It has been for some time. Push polling cannot be done. So we are not using this as a means of stopping people using push polling.
If the minister came in here and said, “If you use focus groups to test your policy ideas, to run a slogan through them or anything like that, and it comes within the capped expenditure period,” we would say, “Right on.” Absolutely. But as this currently stands, it is completely and utterly unenforceable and unmanageable. You will end up having the Electoral Commissioner saying, “It is too hard. If you conduct an opinion poll, whether or not it was used for formulating a policy position or whether or not it helped you formulate an ad or a brochure, we will count it.”
That is patently unfair, because that is not what opinion polling is used for. It shows that if this is the attorney’s idea, he knows very little, as an experienced campaigner, as an experienced member who has faced six or seven elections, of exactly what opinion polling is used for. He should get out more and learn what it is for.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (7.51): Mrs Dunne is wrong. Push polling is not illegal, and the party with the record on push polling in this territory is the Liberal Party. Let us remember that.
Mrs Dunne: And it is illegal.
MR CORBELL: It is not illegal. There is nothing in the ACT Electoral Act that prohibits parties using push polling. So it is appropriate that we ensure that opinion polling is captured in the definition of electoral expenditure. The government does not support Mrs Dunne’s amendment.
Leaving aside the issue of push polling—which of course was used notoriously by the Liberal Party in the Canberra by-election that saw Mr Smyth elected to the House of Representatives; let us just remember that Mr Smyth has got form when it comes to the issue of push polling—the broader issue that I and the government find it difficult to understand is the claim that opinion polling is not used to inform the decisions of political parties about the sort of material that they put together, the sort of slogans or campaign messages that they use. Of course opinion polling does that. Of course it does that. All political parties do that. All political parties use opinion testing to help inform messages, help inform slogans, help inform the production of written, printed and electronic advertising material. That is why it is in there.
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