Politicians from both sides have railed against the practice but there is no ban in the federal sphere

Why Australia needs a ban on taxpayer-funded political advertising before elections

More than a decade ago, in the relatively benign setting of the ACT’s local parliament, a politician stood up to deliver a stirring speech on what he described as an “insidious undermining” of democracy.

He spoke of a deep imbalance in the political process. One that allowed governments to misuse and weaponise their access to the vast public resources of the state to boost their own political prospects.

The ill he railed against was the use of taxpayer-funded political advertising – disguised as government information campaigns – in the lead-up to elections.

Such a practice, he said, left oppositions at a “massive disadvantage” at the critical stages before an election.

Taxpayers funded $174m in government advertising last financial year Read more

“It is an insidious undermining of a fundamental, democratic principle: the level playing field,” he said.

That politician was Zed Seselja, then the Liberal ACT opposition leader, speaking on a 2008 proposal to ban politically-motivated government advertising three months out from territory elections.

His bill, which he described as “one of the most progressive and protective of its kind anywhere in the world”, ultimately became law, though the ban was reduced to 37 days.

Seselja, of course, has since taken a seat in federal parliament, rising through the Coalition ranks to sit as assistant finance minister.

Yet, the problem of which he spoke has never gone away at a federal level.

Time and again, the federal government’s advertising spend curiously spikes in the lead-up to elections. This year was no different.

The most detailed data publicly available on government ad spending comes from an Australian National Audit Office report published in August.

It clearly and consistently shows increases in expenditure in the months leading up to federal elections, including ahead of the 2019 election.

The ANAO found that “campaign media expenditure increased in the lead up to the last six federal elections”.

The latest finance department annual report shows $140m was spent on government advertising last financial year.

Separate reports on government advertising show $100.1m was spent in 2016-17 and $157m in 2017-18.

The spend was higher still – shock, horror – during the year of the last election, when $174.7m was spent.

Voters could not have missed the various publicly funded ad campaigns running in the build up to May’s vote.

Perhaps the most contentious was Powering Forward, a $27.2m campaign boasting of the Coalition’s energy policies and the reduction of power bills.

The ads, which included the line “we’ve turned the corner on electricity prices”, were ubiquitous across television, newspapers, radio and social media, including in the two months before the election, when $11m was spent on the campaign.

Labor complained the slogans mirrored Coalition campaign messaging, and the Guardian revealed earlier this year the majority of that money was spent despite repeated warnings the campaign was proving ineffective.

Another $14.1m was spent on the government’s jobs advertising campaign between November and March. A small business ad campaign ran between February and April, at a cost of $4.3m, and the government spent $16m on a campaign spruiking the government’s 10-year infrastructure package.

Experts such as Melbourne University’s professor Joo-Cheong Tham have long warned of the dangers of pre-election government advertising, a problem he says is seen on both sides of politics.

“It is part of a sordid history in which public resources have routinely been abused for electoral advantage,” he warned earlier this year.

There is nothing illegal about using government advertising in this way. Unlike the ACT, and New South Wales, which has a two month pre-election ban on government advertising, there is no pre-election ban.

Politicians from both sides have thundered against the practice. In 2007, then opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, described it as “a sick cancer within our system. It’s a cancer on democracy”.

Little has changed.

The current system loosely controls campaigns via advertising guidelines, which stipulate that they ought not be “conducted for party political purposes”.

Campaigns worth more than $250,000 are subject to added scrutiny by an independent communications committee, which found earlier this year that Powering Forward was not in breach of the requirements.

They are also subjected to regular audits by the auditor general, who assesses whether they are value-for-money and meeting advertising guidelines.

Integrity campaigners say the current measures are not enough.

The Centre for Public Integrity has advocated for a ban on government advertising for two years after the previous election to “stop the spike in soft advertising in election years”.

Tham, much like Seselja before him, believes a ban should operate for at least three months before each federal election.

“Government advertising to reinforce positive impressions of the incumbent party is a form of institutional corruption – it is the use of public funds for the illegitimate purpose of electioneering,” he said earlier this year.

For what its worth, Seselja says he stands by his 2008 efforts to stop what he describes as “the shameless self-promotion of the ACT Labor government using government advertising to promote individual government MLAs with very little by way of thorough process”.

But Seselja distinguishes that from what he describes as the federal government’s legitimate advertising efforts.

“This is not in any way comparable to the federal government spending money on advertising for legitimate areas of importance, including Defence recruitment and public health campaigns all of which occur after going through robust processes, an important part of democracy,” he said.

Like most integrity matters, reform becomes a distant prospect once oppositions of both stripes take government.

Clarification: an earlier version of this article used figures on government advertising expenditure that were not directly comparable. The figures have been updated to reflect this.