WHAT a wonderful thing that the federal government, indeed politicians of all political stripes, are taking such an astute interest in citizens’ rights to privacy.
Unfortunately I expect they are going to be wholly inconsistent and show concern only about the principle as it relates to the role of journalists and businesses, not themselves.
The greatest infringers of citizens’ rights to privacy in this country are political parties, which use powerful and invasive databases to track voters. They have done this for years by creating legal loopholes in existing privacy laws that would otherwise have made the practice illegal.
In 2008 the Australian Law Reform Commission completed a report that included creating greater legal rights to privacy. Among other things, it called for protection against the disclosure of private facts or correspondence relating to an individual’s private life. Three years on and the ALRC report and its recommendations continued to gather dust on the responsible minister’s shelf, all but forgotten by our political leaders.
Until, that is, the News of the World phone hacking scandal gave this government the opportunity to dust it off and attempt to score some cheap political points by siding with everyone really in seeking to ensure Australians weren’t exposed to violations similar to those that occurred in Britain.
But here is the sting in the tail. There is no evidence whatsoever that News Limited in Australia is engaged in phone hacking or anything of the sort. That didn’t stop Julia Gillard slurring the company by suggesting it had “hard questions” to answer. There is, however, ample evidence of political parties violating voters’ privacy.
The first opinion article I wrote was on this subject, flowing from academic research that formed a substantial component of my doctorate thesis. A comparative international study by a pair of American academics, as part of the World Information Access Project, named Australia as the worst offender when it came to violating voter privacy.
The Office of the Victorian Privacy Commissioner raised concerns, as did the now defunct Australian Democrats through the Senate committee processes.
The Australian National University’s Democratic Audit has challenged the appropriateness of party databases and after every federal election the parliamentary committee examining the conduct of the campaign receives complaints about database usage from members of the public.
On every occasion, parties have chosen to ignore questions about their conduct.
If Greens leader Bob Brown and the Prime Minister were serious about issues of privacy they would put themselves under the spotlight.
Our political parties operate powerful software that tracks the issues and voting intentions of the public in a bid to target swinging voters for campaigning purposes. Based on information compiled, political offices can target their correspondence at individuals they believe are wavering in their support. It also allows them to identify strongly aligned voters on either side of the main party divide, which further provides the opportunity for political staff to ignore correspondence from voters whose views they don’t believe can be shifted to support the party they work for. So much for elected officials representing us all.
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