Online Political Campaigning

The effectiveness of online political campaigning is contentious. While many politicians view the email templates available from political lobby groups as spam, some of the larger online campaigns have seen great results - GetUp!'s 2006 petition to seek more funding for the ABC accumulated 75,000 signatures and the national broadcaster subsequently received an extra $88.2 million. Scott Richardson reports.

There’s no doubt one of the great things about the Internet has been the ability to communicate. In recent years we’ve seen lobby groups using online petitions and email campaigns to get their message to politicians.

One of these campaigns was from the NSW National Parks Association (NPA) who on their website set up a generic email template to send to state MPs including the Premier Morris Iemma.

The NPA got an unexpected response from the Government’s IT staff telling them to stop their emails, which they labelled spam.

“We are experiencing a high volume of spam from an IP address registered to your organization,” the email to the NPA was reported to have said.

“The pattern and content of these email constitutes spam under the Commonwealth Spam Act of 2003. Please investigate and take action to prevent further spam from these addresses.”

However the Spam Act (2003) only seeks to stop forms of commercial electronic messages not emails sent from individuals. Section 44 expressly states the Act isn’t to be used to stop the constitutional right to freedom of political communication established by the High Court in Lange v ABC: “This Act does not apply to the extent (if any) that it would infringe any constitutional doctrine of implied freedom of political communication.”

Although it appears that any attempt by the NSW Government to take action would be stopped in its tracks, it is nonetheless a worrying sign; worrying in the sense that the Government will try and deter people from writing about genuine concerns and worrying that elected representatives see emails of concern by their constituents as spam.

The spam debate arose when the political advocacy website GetUp! began in 2005 and Coalition MPs received some 15,000 emails in a few days.

On his website Democrat Senator Andrew Bartlett says, “I know many MPs genuinely think of email ‘campaigns’ as basically equivalent to spam. I think this is silly but I guess it says something about the different way many people perceive communication by email compared to letters and phone calls. That said, I’ve known MPs who thought that any time they got a heap of phone calls or letters from people complaining about their actions or views, it was the result of an organised campaign by their political opponents.”

This week it was reported that in New Zealand a woman’s email to Telecom NZ was blocked because her first name, Gay, was tagged as an offensive word and “inappropriate for business-like communication.”

The case demonstrates just how easily emails can be sorted and ignored.

It still seems uncertain whether email campaigns are an effective way of expressing political opinion and grievances. It’s up to us to continue to think of creative ways to express our views and to make sure our opinions aren’t destined for the junk folder.

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Celebrating Talkback

There is no doubt that talkback radio is an important barometer of public opinion in Australia. But at what point does talkback move from vehicle of free speech to mouthpiece for the inflammatory and discriminative? Scott Richardson muses on the question as talkback turns 40.

This month is the 40 year anniversary of talkback radio in Australia. It was April 1967 when Mike Walsh began his program 2-Way Radio on 2SM.

Revolutionary as it was at the time, talkback is now entrenched in Australian broadcasting. According to Commercial Radio Australia over 50 commercial stations in Australia run talkback shows with one in four Australians tuning in.

However with the controversies in recent years over shock jocks such as Alan Jones, is talkback really a bastion of free speech as the shock jocks claim? Or is it just a weapon for petty grievances and prejudice?

Talkback hosts will tell you free speech is the name of the game. John Laws himself has said that talkback is “a way of really keeping in touch with Australia.”

Indeed, when John Howard went on Charles Woolley’s Across Australia, Terry Hicks rang in and put his questions directly to the Prime Minister who agreed to talk to him on air. “I never refused to take a call from anybody,” the PM said.

Mark Day’s blog on The Australian news website put it well: “Talkback is a worthy and legitimate tool for news-oriented radio. Used to seek out expert opinion or to hear politicians’ justifications for the decisions that affect our communities, or as a way of informing people about what’s happening in their back yards, it is invaluable.

“Used as a method of generating cheap programming - a pot-stirring host inciting his listeners and inviting them to come on air to rant in response - it sinks instantly into a world of the trite and the trivial.”

There is always plenty of colour in talkback of course. Stan Zemanek has called Germaine Greer “a grub, a bitch, a bitter and twisted old tart.” Jones described the men that bashed the Cronulla life savers as “Middle Eastern thugs.”

So what is the alternative? Have the Australian Communications and Media Authority determined for us what can and cannot be broadcast or printed as it did with their Alan Jones ruling?

When there have been incursions of free speech such as the blocking of a site parodying the Prime Minister or the serving of writs by logging company Gunns there are (rightly) many jumping up and down.

But when people like Jones gets similar treatment, who wants to defend what seems to be the indefensible?

The answer is simple – you don’t have to. The point is their right to say it even if what they say is arguably ignorant, uninformed or downright racist and inflammatory.

We need to take heed of Voltaire’s famous adage, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

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