Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens support the Do Not Call Register Bill 2006 and the Do Not Call Register (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2006. This legislation is groundbreaking legislation and it deserves support. As other speakers have said, the harassment that people get, particularly at mealtimes, from people making unwanted calls—many of them coming from outside the country—to try to get them to sign up to some scheme or other or to buy some product or other goes beyond the pale. The disadvantage is that the people who are most at home are most affected. The people who are out and about the most miss a lot of those calls. I guess I have just discovered an ameliorating factor for failing to get home very often—but I know where I would rather be.

We will be supporting the legislation. We will also be supporting the amendments, insofar as they would prevent political calls being made to canvass people at election time or between election times and to try to gain political favour. We do not support legislation that allows that. There are conventional ways of advertising to people on their way to the ballot box, and the harassment of getting highly technologically charged and impersonal calls from political parties or politicians is not a good thing. However, we part company with Family First when it comes to polling. If Family First has the means to fractionate polling, we would look at it more seriously. But Australia is a democracy, and opinion making is very often led by asking a sample of people how they think about what the politicians are doing.

Those opinion polls often come up with surprising results. They show trends. They showed the trend, for example, against the government in the Iraq war; mind you, there was majority opinion against the war before the government supported the Bush administration in going to Iraq. They show the favour or disfavour of the government and political parties, that is for sure, but that is not so important as the issues. For example, some remarkable polling quite recently showed that Australians believe that West Papuans have a right to self-determination. Going back to the East Timor issue, it is the same: both the big parties were in favour of the Indonesian dominance of East Timor but the polls showed that Australians felt differently about that.

It is important that we know when representative democracy is failing to be representative, because democracy is also under the power of influence of big money. That means that politicians, particularly the executive, can get it very wrong. How can you put a ban on opinion pollsters ringing people at home to find out what Australians think? How can Family First argue that that is a healthy thing for democracy?