Page 2423 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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You have to ask the question: why do the Liberal Party want to exempt it? I do not understand why, but their motivations cannot be good ones when you consider the purposes for which opinion polling is used in the context of an election campaign.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (7.53): We will not be supporting this amendment. It is quite clear that opinion polls are used to tailor slogans, to tailor campaigns, to tailor messages, so it is a bit of a nonsense to be saying that they should not be included in the expenditure cap. Of course opinion polls and research that are included here are used to inform the production of campaign material. As Mrs Dunne said, there will be some difficulty in it all for the Electoral Commission. Nevertheless, there is a link here. There is a clear link between opinion polls and research and formulating campaigns and messages and so forth. So we will not support the omission of opinion polls and research from that expenditure cap.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (7.54): It is ironic that neither speaker who would oppose this has given examples of how opinion polls are used; they just asserted that they would be. This is the thing with opinion polls: it depends on what you ask. What we are going to end up having to do is go through this whole process in fine detail and put more work on the Electoral Commissioner, who is going to have to arbitrate whether the opinion poll in a particular case was research that was undertaken to support the production of electoral matter.
I will give an example of ABC polling doing a poll for the Labor Party. They ring up and say: “I want to talk to the person who is close in age to 23 in this household. Are you enrolled on the electoral roll?” “Yes.” “Would you like to answer these questions?” “Yes.” “If there was an election tomorrow, who would you vote for?” If the answer comes back that X percentage say they are going to vote for the Labor Party, X percentage say they are going to vote for the Liberal Party, there are people who are going to vote for the Greens, somebody is going to vote for anybody else that they can possibly think of, and there are a whole lot of people who do not know, how is that informing? That is one question on the poll.
The next question might be: “You live in the electorate of Ginninderra. Who are your local members and can somebody answer that question unprompted?” They probably cannot. And then the next question is: “Of these people,” and they read out a whole list of people, “do you recognise their names? Are they a member of the Legislative Assembly?” How does that inform the publication and development of election material? It might tell a political party how well they are travelling or how badly they are travelling and whether there is reasonable name recognition and favourability of their members and their candidates; that is all it tells them.
If they then ask, “What are your views about building a light rail down Northbourne Avenue?” that question might do. If the party then decides that it wants to run on light rail and it goes around and gets a focus group and says, “This is a really important issue because” and “Here is a message; how do you respond to that?” that is material that could be used. We need to be utterly clear that not every time you ask someone an opinion is that going to inform the way that you put together your election material.
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