Electoral (Government Advertising) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 19 October 2017.)

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (11:09): This is an important bill brought to the house by the member for Bragg. It responds to what has been an atrocious abuse of public trust and public funds by this government over the last year, over the last three years, since the last election and over the last 15 years, frankly. This is a government that barely one in three South Australians voted for, yet they have managed to spend over $100 million since I have been in the parliament on advertising themselves—more than $30 million in the most recent year on telling the people of South Australia how good they are. It is a disgrace.

We have examples of the government, not content with destroying South Australia's confidence in their electricity supply, and the reliability of the electricity supply, and then coming up with a half a billion dollar solution to cover their shame, then wanting to spend millions of dollars of the South Australian taxpayers' money telling the taxpayers about their solution. My goodness, $400 million for diesel generators, but we can spend millions of dollars of taxpayers' money on advertising them.

Millions of dollars of taxpayers' money has been spent by this government on advertising their Transforming Health strategy—Transforming Health, which became so synonymous with failure and cuts to services that the Premier no longer calls the government's policy that. They say that Transforming Health is done, yet we have pictures of the Premier not only advertising his own electricity solution but advertising Transforming Health.

We have cinema advertising and electronic advertising. It is impossible to open an app on your phone these days without having very pleasant ads about how much money the government is spending on government schools. There are a lot of things in the government's Public Education Action Plan that the opposition supports from the announcements a couple of weeks ago. But $1.8 million in advertising encouraging people to talk to their local schools about their children 'becoming themselves' is not a wise use of money in the education space. A lot of good things could be done with $1.8 million.

There was a $40,000 ad on pages 2 and 3 of The Advertiser the other day that talked about 'children becoming themselves'. It was very nice, but we are talking about taxpayers' money that could have been spent on other things in the education system. But the education minister and the government thought to spend it on ads telling people that government money was being spent on the education system and using taxpayers' money to do so, so that is what they have done instead.

The most appalling aspect of government advertising, though, is very clearly that which is in fact political advertising paid for by the taxpayer and not by the Labor Party. It has long been a tenet of principal administration in South Australia that if you have a reason to use taxpayers' funds for government advertising then it must be non-political. For the most part, I think there are plenty of things that we spend government money on, at a federal and a state level, that the members of the public would not have a concern with.

'Every cigarette is doing you damage,' is a public health education campaign using taxpayers' funds at a federal level over a number of years that saw a marked impact on the health and wellbeing of the people of Australia. Smoking rates dropped and the message that 'every cigarette is doing you damage' is a clear evidence-based message that was worthy of public funds and has seen solid outcomes. It is a message that people remember. Messages about drug education sometimes can be controversial, and the concept of advertising safe driving can have positive impacts on the community, positive health outcomes and positive outcomes for the wellbeing of the South Australian community.

When you have a politician's face and, particularly in television advertising, a politician appearing and talking about their own campaigns, as was the case with the Premier talking about their electricity campaign and the Premier talking about the health campaign, you have descended into political advertising. This is not just the opposition saying this. This is a long-held principle that has been understood by people on both sides of the chamber for many years. The Auditor-General says so, parliamentary inquiries have said so and the government's own advertising rules have said so.

The fact that this government chooses deliberately, despicably, to flout those rules, to flout those conventions, is a wilful act of a government that is determined to use taxpayer funds for their personal preferment, their political ambitions and their desire to stay in power. It is a disgrace. It is a disgrace that should not be countenanced. It is a disgrace that will be addressed by the member for Bragg's bill in this case. There are a couple of challenging issues here, and one is the question of retrospectivity.

We think it is important that this government takes note of this bill because it is the opposition's intention to put this bill into law if we are elected to government on 17 March next year. This bill includes a provision that as of 1 November 2017—as of 15 days ago—every advertisement promulgated and paid for by taxpayers under government advertising will be caught so that, if the government puts any more of those 'Jay Weatherill for health and electricity' ads on the television, they will be in breach of this bill, and the government advertising will be looked at by the Electoral Commissioner and potentially taken into account for the purposes of penalty on their public funding.

The Labor Party stands on notice that the people of South Australia and all political parties in South Australia, other than the South Australian Labor Party, believe that the Premier should not be appearing in his own ads at taxpayers' expense effectively spruiking for the re-election of the Labor government. We are in a situation where the expense on political advertising from 1 July this year through to the election day on 17 March is, in fact, capped. Only a certain amount of money can be spent on political campaigns in this election.

It is a novel concept dreamt up, in fact brought forward, by this Premier, yet that cap is dwarfed by the amount of taxpayers' money—not paid for by the unions and the Labor Party—pushing forward political ads for the Labor Party in the period from 1 July. When we introduce bills that have a starting date, the principle is that the starting date for the application of the bill should be after the announcement of the bill. That is why we cannot go back to 1 July this year. If we did, we might find that the Labor Party had spent more through taxpayers' dollars than they did through Labor Party dollars on their own political ads.

That is a disgrace. That is a matter for the government to be judged on. This bill will take it from 1 November. Hopefully, that will save the taxpayers of South Australia some money because the government will decide that they are concerned that they might lose the election. They are concerned that this may become legislation, assuming that they are not going to support it now, in April or May next year, and they do not want to have to pay that fine.

Hopefully, this will improve their behaviour. The fact that it has to be brought up in the first place is a real disgrace, and it is an indictment upon the credibility of this government. Anything they have to say about public administration or fairness in advertising, political advertising or campaigning is undermined by the behaviour they have exhibited in recent years. Mike Rann used to complain about government advertising under the Brown, Olsen and Kerin governments.

The hypocrisy demonstrated by Labor Party members elected to the parliament in 2002 or 1997, back when Mike Rann used to complain about far less egregious uses of government advertising, is palpable. I will give you this commitment: a Liberal government led by Steven Marshall will not ever use government members spruiking themselves and get the taxpayers to pay for it. What is more, we will make it punishable through financial sanction by this bill that the member for Bragg has brought forward.

I commend this bill to the house. I hope that government members will reflect on it and vote for it so that the public of South Australia can go to this election confident that this government is not going to waste any more of their money on political advertising. I suspect that the government may not do that, so we call on the Independent members of this parliament to support it. Hopefully, today or next Thursday we get to a vote—hopefully today so that it can go through the Legislative Council next week. I commend the bill to the house, and I commend the member for Bragg for bringing it.

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (11:20): I rise to support the Electoral (Government Advertising) Amendment Bill brought to this house by our deputy leader, the member for Bragg. This is an incredibly important principle, and I support everything the member for Morialta has just said on this topic as well. It is easy to think that the government is out of control on this issue, but the unfortunate reality is that the government is completely in control on this issue. The government knows exactly what it is doing.

Former premier Rann and the current Premier are very deliberate with regard to leading their teams in the expenditure of taxpayers' money to promote their Labor Party policies and agendas. This is not what taxpayers' money is meant to be there for; there are rules and regulations already in place that the government continues to ignore, continues to scoff at. It seems that every year the Auditor-General comes up with some finding in regard to this area, saying that the government is behaving inappropriately.

For me, the most stark example is the government's current energy plan. The government itself has budgeted money to advertise its plan in addition to the $550 million of taxpayers' money that it wants to spend on its plan, a plan to fix the problems the government itself has created. This whole issue of government advertising is disgraceful. I believe it is $2.6 million that the government has budgeted to advertise its energy plan, $2.6 million of taxpayers' money that could very well be spent in far better ways on behalf of the taxpayer.

How many community groups, how many interest groups, how many other areas of policy would benefit from $2.6 million of expenditure going towards their programs and interests and the positive things they need? Remember, this advertising the government pursues is on top of the media coverage that already exists. The media spends an enormous amount of time delving into, sharing information about, asking questions about, and sometimes supporting or sometimes not supporting government positions, government policies, government expenditure.

Why on earth is there a need for the government to be spending—outside of rules and regulations that already exist—taxpayers' money to promote its agenda, as well? The answer to that is very straightforward. When the government advertises, it puts only the government's side of the story forward. The government is not being questioned by journalists, its members are not in an interview, live on radio, with someone from the opposition with a range of perspectives being put forward, being questioned. When the government does its own advertising that is just it, it gets to shamelessly pump out its own message using other people's money.

As the member for Morialta pointed out, we are seeing, quite sensibly, restrictions on expenditure going to elections in South Australia because that is an environment where, again, there is a level playing field. All political parties, all candidates, can spend up to a cap to promote their cause with regard to trying to get elected. The government is quite happy to participate in capping expenditure to promote a government cause when it is in the confines of a level playing field, yet when it is not a level playing field, when it is in government, when only the government has access to taxpayers' money to spend, it does not want any caps at all.

The government does not want any rules. It does not want anything whatsoever to bind it. They want to be able to spend as much money as they possibly can, putting their view forward. This is a very shameless thing. There are rules and regulations in place about when a member of parliament, particularly a member of the government, can have their image or their voice or their name used in any way in regard to advertising. The Auditor-General regularly says that the government is flouting those rules, yet the government continues to do it.

So where are we at? The member for Bragg, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, has put this bill forward so that we can address this and bring another layer of regulation, rule-setting and law-making into this parliament which the government then might abide by. It is in stark contrast to what the government wants to do which is just to continue to break all the rules. We are bringing this in very fairly and in a very open-minded way so that, regardless of who is successful at the next election, the government would be bound by these rules that we bring in.

We are not silly. We understand that if we are elected next time around, we would be bound by this legislation which we bring forward now. It is not only about trying to give the government a hard time and trying to close a government loophole and trying to stop them from wasting taxpayers' money, but hypothetically if we were elected, we would continue to do it. No, absolutely not. It is nothing like that. We are saying that if we were elected, we would also stick with these sorts of guidelines and rules, and that is why the opposition is bringing this forward. We believe it is what is best for South Australia. We believe it is what is best for South Australians and their money.

Keep in mind that every single cent that this government spends, whether it is on their own advertising or whether it is over half a billion dollars of taxpayers' money to fix the electricity crisis that the government itself created, in all these types of expenditure the government is spending other people's money. The government is spending South Australian taxpayers' money. We on this side of the house are all about trying to reduce the cost of living burden that this government has forced on South Australians over the past 16 years.

We want people to have more money in their pockets and for the tax they are obliged to pay to the government to be spent wisely by the government. This is very much about making sure that taxpayers' money is spent wisely and that as little money as possible is taxed on South Australians. I guarantee that you could ask any South Australian in any corner of the state—go from the Adelaide GPO all the way to any of the New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, Northern Territory or Western Australian borders—not one person would say, 'Yes, I am happy for the government to charge me taxes and then to use that money to advertise the government's own agenda.' You will not find a person who thinks it is a good idea.

People understand that their tax money needs to go to government programs, whether it is a very positive program in a portfolio or whether it is on energy, as it is at the moment with the government spending half a billion dollars to fix its own stuff-ups. People understand that their tax will go to government programs. They do not want their money to be spent by government, Liberal or Labor, on promoting its own agenda. They are fed up, sick and tired with the state government having done that for 16 years and getting bolder and giving less regard to the rules that already exist every day and every month that goes on, as this current government is doing.

This is a very good bill. It would be absolutely shameless of the government to refuse to allow this to come to a vote. If the government honestly believed that spending so much taxpayers' money on the government advertising its own agenda was the right way to go, then the government should allow this bill to come to a vote and they should put themselves on the record, member by member, saying that they actually believe this is the right way to spend taxpayers' money. If they do not believe that it is the right way to spend taxpayers' money, then they should allow it to come to a vote as well.

The most shameless thing the government could do would be to try to push it off, kick the can down the road and hope that this can all be avoided, that it disappears and does not have to be dealt with before the next election so that they are not on the record as having to say, 'Yes, we support it because we accept that what the opposition is proposing is the right thing to do,' just as much as they do not want to be on the record saying, 'No, we do not support it,' because they do not really want to be on the record anywhere clearly articulating that they think that what they do is right when they know what they do is wrong.

Debate adjourned on motion of Ms Cook.