In early August, the Australian Law Reform Commission recommended, in its massive privacy report, that the current exemption from the Privacy Act enjoyed by our political parties should be removed.
Special Minister of State John Faulkner said the Government would think about it, next year, after it considers higher priority recommendations from the Commission. The ALP, in its submission to the ALRC, opposed any changes to the current exemption.
The reason? “The exemption for registered political parties under the Privacy Act is essential to the conduct of election campaigns and facilitates the effective communication of the policies, ideas and visions which underpin our democratic processes.”
Yep, you read that correctly — “visions”. Stop laughing.
The exemption allows political parties to maintain highly-detailed databases about voters. The ALP’s database is called Electrac and the Liberal version is called Feedback. Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington have written extensively about them (for example, here). These databases are based on electoral enrolment information, provided to the parties electronically by the Australian Electoral Commission or state electoral commissions.
Remember that electoral enrolment, under our marvellous system of coercive democracy, is mandatory, so there’s no legal way out of this for anyone wanting to protect their privacy. The enrolment information is supplemented by telephone number data and any other publicly-available information about voters like birth and death notices. Ever written a letter to the paper? Made a submission to an inquiry? Posted something on the internet under your own name? It’ll be there.
And every time you come in contact with an MP, whether by approaching their office for assistance, or if they come and doorknock you, further information is added.
In NSW and Queensland, MPs generally have access only to the database for their own electorates; party head offices have access to the whole lot. It’s an excellent tool both for handling the flow of constituent inquiries that come through MPs’ offices, and for targeting limited resources during election campaigns.
And because of the political exemption in the Privacy Act, there are no restrictions on the usage or handling of all that information. Kudos to former Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja for being a lone voice in arguing that the exemption should be dumped whenever the issue came up before Senate inquiries.
Don’t forget that the Howard Government also exempted political parties from the requirements of the Do Not Call Register Act in 2006, meaning they can use their databases to call voters, and from the requirements of the Spam Act 2003, meaning they can clutter your in-box with even more improbable claims than those of penile enhancers and Nigerian scammers.
As I noted (Crikey, Monday 11 August, “Right to privacy sends media into a spin“) back when the ALRC released its report, Australia’s big media sector is at one with the ALP on retaining the exemption. The “Right To Know” Coalition — in this case, presumably, the right to know about you — argued that its freedom to report on politics might be constrained by removal of the exemption.
The sanctimony of the ALP in claiming it has the interests of democracy at heart when it argues for its continued right to compile and use vast amounts of data about voters isn’t unexpected. Nor is the deliberate confusion of the legitimate task of serving constituent needs with that of spamming and calling them during election campaigns.
But electorate office staff, who have used Electrac, provide an additional perspective. One staffer tells of how the database was used to weed out “vexatious” constituents, who would not be provided with assistance if the MP decided that they weren’t worth helping or were too much trouble or they simply didn’t like them.
Milton Orkopoulos’s electorate office staffer Gillian Sneddon recalls that, when Orkopoulos was first promoted to the NSW Labor Ministry, his wife began receiving calls from a man claiming he had had an affair with Orkopoulos. Kathy Orkopoulos asked Sneddon to try to track down the man using Electrac by entering the phone number from which the calls originated.
And we are told by an electorate office worker in Queensland that Electrac was used by a female Minister to find out whether a man in whom she was romantically interested was married, by checking who else resided with him. It was also used to keep track of a former staff member with whom she had fallen out.
That’s the problem with the political exemption. Putting aside the systemic breach of privacy that a database like Electrac entails, it relies on the goodwill and maturity of MPs and their staff to ensure that such a database isn’t abused. Most MPs, one suspects, can be relied on not to. But some — particularly at the State level — cannot.
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We used Electrac and Electsys to send out sympathy notes to families of deceased constituents and when local tragedies hit, the same. Fake outpourings of grief to people they’d never met sheeted home how impervious to sensitivities politicians are …if there’s a vote in it! We also used it to see who was branch stacking….and yes…it does depend on the MP as to whether the system is used for all the right reasons.
Bernard says “Remember that electoral enrolment, under our marvellous system of coercive democracy, is mandatory, so there’s no legal way out of this for anyone wanting to protect their privacy.” I beg to differ, at least here in Queensland you can apply for a “silent enrolment” which my brother has had in place for many years since leaving an abusive relationship. True it has to be applied for, but at least it is available. Personally, I have never been bothered by any excesive or intrusive contact but then as a political junkie I like to see what the other side is up to and the propaganda they are wasting their’s and our taxpayers’ money on.
Any wonder the infamous Orkopoulos tampered with the office database. Its just one of numerous ‘tools’ and benefits handed our MPs to arbitrarily manage and personally interpret. This laissez-faire approach to governance is what political parties rely on. Flimsy principles, guidelines and loopholes in the laws they make all serve their purpose. We’re permanently distraught about the state of the environment, social, fiscal welfare and infrastructure yet we just grin and bare the level of governance we’re getting. It should be installed as an essential service. We’re gobsmacked at the panoply of misfits who spilled out of the NSW, Qld and WA parliaments in recent times but we don’t test John Faulkner’s blind faith in the morals and ethics of modern MPs. It’s never placed on the agenda. Every system should be prudently tweaked particularly when it’s starting to look a little frayed. You’d think a long list of paedophiles, frauds, thugs, extortionists, pooners and snedgers taking seats alongside belligerents and inepts in our parliaments would cause alarm. Any correlation between the blown budgets and threats of credit-rating downgrades? If political parties are running short on skilled, tested and professional talent, not fussed on who they entertain they should declare they’re thin on competent candidates and and administrators and install relevant human resource recruitment and management practices. Privacy IS very much in the interests of all political parties when it comes to their own. As for those they represent – that’s another database.