Senator Andrew Bartlett
Wednesday, August 24, 2005
 
Power, Corruption and Lies (with your $$$$$)
A Senate Committee Inquiry heard evidence last week about whether the current controls over Government use of taxpayers’ money for advertising are adequate. As I wrote last month, if there is one thing more offensive than some of the half-truths and misleading weasel words that the Government is using to try to sell their workplace policies, it’s that they are effectively stealing the public’s money to do it.

Tim Colebatch quite rightly labels it a form of corruption. Given that, I wish a few of the corporate media outlets would take a moral stand and refuse to run the advertisements – by taking payment for them, they are in effect in receipt of stolen property.

The
Democratic Audit project at the ANU has just released this paper by Sally Young which outlines the different ways Governments get unfair political advantages from misusing taxpayers’ money for advertising. It includes an assessment of a potential effect of this corruption which has not got so much attention – “the role that such advertising plays as a major source of revenue and an ‘information subsidy’ for the media organisations who receive it.”


“Through advertising, the state ‘effectively gives subsidies to media organizations by reducing the effort required to discover and produce information for their audiences’. Since the Howard government took office in 1996, $929 million has been spent on federal government advertising. In the same period, state and territory governments have spent $2.148 billion on advertising. (At the state level, the NSW and Victorian governments in particular, are big spenders.) Government advertising therefore constitutes a significant proportion of commercial media outlet profits and this is particularly true for television stations.”

While job advertisements and tender application ads may be mundane in content, they still form part of the ‘rivers of gold’ of classified advertising which is a major source of income for newspapers. It is also important to note that government advertising can be used not only as a form of patronage—or a reward for favourable coverage—but also as
a punishment.
I recall Joh Bjelke-Petersen withdrawing government advertising from the Courier-Mail in the 1980s because of critical coverage (something that would be harder to do now because there is no alternative daily paper in Brisbane). Most Governments these days would be less blatant about such blackmail, but it would be naïve to the think that these sorts of threats aren’t made behind the scenes.

All of this just gives an extra reason why there needs to be an independent mechanism for determining use of public money for advertising expenditure – something I hope the Senate Committee Inquiry is able to recommend. Whilst it is the Coalition engaging in the corruption at federal level now, it is reasonable to suggest that Labor would be doing the same thing if they were in power. Whichever party is in power, the commercial media have a vested interest in this spending continuing. If they are genuinely committed to a fairer, more honest and open democracy, they would be working together to promote reforms and refusing to accept funds for such blatantly unjustified uses as promoting the Government’s workplace policies.

UPDATE (1/9): This Editorial in The Australian describes the Government’s use of taxpayer’s money to fund advertisements on their workplace relations policy as a “rort”. I wonder if that means they will refuse to run any of the adverts? It would certainly send a powerful message if they did.



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