Climate Change Advertising

This is the ad being run by the current government on climate change, on televisions across Australia.

Political campaigning was something that the ALP complained about quite a bit before the election (see here and here).

Apparently ALP policy on the use of advertising in elections was to have independent scrutiny of advertising campaigns:

In 2007, Kevin Rudd made an election promise that campaigns over $250,000 would be scrutinised by the Auditor-General.

So now we have the policy in place. And what is the policy? From the department of Finance and Deregulation the policy [link to pdf] is:

A. all members of the public have equal rights to access comprehensive information about government policies, programs and services which affect their entitlements, rights and obligations;
B. governments may legitimately use public funds for information programs or education campaigns to explain government policies, programs or services and to inform members of the public of their obligations, rights and entitlements; and
C. government campaigns shall not be conducted for party political purposes.

To some extent these are just platitudes, but they to provide a guidance for what should and should not be in a public advertising campaign, and for that they should be praised. The only problem is that under these guidelines all the Howard governments would also get through. In that sense the Climate Change ads by the current government are no different to the Howard government ads.

The thing that distinguished the Howard government ads was not so much the content, but rather the amount of them and the proximity to the election, and these guidelines do nothing to address that.