Late last month a piece of retrospective legislation passed through the Parliament agreed to by the major parties, making one law for political parties and Members of Parliament and another law for all the rest of us. The issue was privacy.
Every federal politician can now demand to be provided with an electronic version of the electoral roll. It will contain all the details individuals provide to the Australian Electoral Commission.
This information was provided by individuals to the Australian Electoral Commission for the purpose of getting themselves on the electoral roll to vote.
The Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act which apply as a matter of law to Commonwealth instrumentalities are:
Information will be collected for purposes that are lawful, stated and relevant to the functions of the collecting organisation.
People will be aware of what personal information is being collected about them and the purpose for which it is being collected, and that it is kept accurately and securely. They will have access to it to check its accuracy.
Personal information shall be used only for the purpose for which it was collected and other limited reasons like safety and law enforcement.
There is nothing in there about handing it over to MPs to use for the purpose of getting themselves re-elected with targetted political mail-outs or handing it over to political parties to push their own agendas. The commission advised MPs of that some months ago. The response of the MPs was to pass the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act forcing the commission to hand over the roll.
It was the continuation of the pattern on privacy matters of one law for the pollies and one for us. Earlier last month, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee reported on the Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Bill. It aims to apply the privacy principles to the private sector, including charities and other non-profit groups so that information collected for one purpose is not misused for another – such as credit-card spending habits and health information. Guess what. Political parties are to be exempted from its provisions. Also the Coalition’s mates – small business — will be exempted. And the Coalition’s other mates – employers – will have employee record-keeping exempt.
Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Compton has argued that, “”If we are to have a community that fully respects the principles of privacy and the political institutions support them, then these institutions themselves must adopt the principles and practices they seek to require of others.”
But MPs are already using this information in a targeted political way.
The Member for Canberra, Annette Ellis, recently did a mail-out to 10,500 people over 60 in her electorate (using the information on the roll for addresses and to sort ages). The mail-out was about what she called the Government’s failure to meet the promise to pay retirees compensation for the GST. I don’t want to pick on Ms Ellis. MPs across the spectrum are using this information this way.
Ms Ellis argues that it helps her do the job she has been elected to do and it was up to her as an MP to use the information responsibly. Fine. Corporations argue that way, too. Saying that information on credit cards helps them target useful information to consumers. It would also help the media do its job to inform the public to have access to a full electoral roll.
Giving MPs access to the electronic roll is unfair at election time. It gives the sitting member further advantages. Ms Ellis acknowledged that.
I don’t object to MPs having the roll, provided everyone else gets it. I object to the hypocrisy not the so-called breach of privacy.
The Democrats gamely objected. They also objected to the exemption for political parties from the new private-sector privacy regime with Senator Natasha Stott-Despoja rejects this, saying that Members of Parliament “”should be subject to the same legal responsibilities as another citizen”. Exactly. We have had a month of public outrage against politicians’ privileges. Why should they be exempt from care about privacy as well as having phone and car privileges that no-one else gets?
The modern trend with information is damnable. Privacy and commercial in confidence is too-often invoked to conceal things which should be public or would be harmless in the public domain. Meanwhile behind closed doors, data is being misused to make decisions affecting people’s lives (credit-worthiness, insurance risk and so on).
As for the need for political parties to check that the roll is legitimate – twaddle. The commission is charged with that task. And as events in Queensland show, political parties are more likely to abuse electoral information than put it to fair use.