Page 2424 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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The real challenge for the attorney is this: if ABC polling ring my house tonight and ask to speak to the youngest voter in the house and ask them if there was an election tomorrow how would they vote, I would like you to tell me, attorney, how that will directly inform the publishing and preparation and dissemination of electoral advertising? That is what it is all about. That is what it is all supposed to be about.
The attorney says that if we are opposed to this we must have nefarious intent. Quite frankly, the Canberra Liberals run rings around the Labor Party when it comes to campaigns. The Labor Party are overfunded, fat and lazy and they will spend much more time and much more money on opinion polling than we ever will, because we can do it smarter and better than they do. That has been borne out year after year. They will outspend us time and again and they will not get significantly more votes than we do, because they do not think about how they do it, because they have got buckets of money and they just fling it all around.
If this goes in it will be more to the detriment of the Labor Party than it will be to the Liberal Party. The Labor Party will, without a doubt, spend much more on polling than we will between now and the election campaign—because they have much more money to spend—and they will do it badly and we will do it well.
The whole issue is not whether we have a nefarious intent; it is about whether we have a workable electoral system. The definitions in this are wrong and muddle headed and the attorney and the Electoral Commissioner will rue the day this is put in here, because the Electoral Commissioner will have to sit down at the end of the election period and arbitrate on whether this question is in or out. That is why, for the sake of simplicity, for the sake of getting things done properly and for the reason that we all recognise that every political party spends money on polling and it all evens itself out in the long run, we should oppose this inclusion here.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (8.01): Mrs Dunne does not seem to understand the intent of her own amendment. It completely omits the subsection which includes “opinion poll or other research”.
First of all, opinion polling can be quantitative or qualitative. It can simply assess voting intention or it can do more than that: it can test people’s opinions; it can ask qualitative questions about people’s views on certain matters or what they might favour in terms of government or opposition or political party policy. That is going to directly inform the production of electoral matter. But of course, even if it is not a qualitative or quantitative opinion poll, the clause that Mrs Dunne seeks to omit also includes the term “other research”. What is “other research”? Other research could be focus points. It could be a whole range of other things designed to inform a political party about what sort of electoral material it should produce to be successful. It is directly linked to electoral expenditure and it should be captured in, not omitted from, the definition.
Question put:
That Mrs Dunne’s amendment be agreed to.
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