David Penberthy: Craig Kelly’s annoying texts have highlighted politicians’ spam scam

As strange as it sounds, Craig Kelly’s uninvited text messages have opened Australians’ eyes to a big scam, says David Penberthy.

This might sound strange, given what an irritating pain in the backside he is, but Craig Kelly has done us all a favour.

Like many Australians I have now received several unwelcome text messages from this impertinent, jumped-up little man, peddling his warped take on Covid, vaccines, and the management of the pandemic by the major parties.

Kelly is the former Liberal MP now serving as Clive Palmer’s United Australian Party member for the western Sydney seat of Hughes. He is a former furniture salesman who now postures as an expert on Covid.

I say that with no disregard for those who work in the furniture industry. Heaven forbid, I come from a long line of good men who spent their lives working with their hands making and selling furniture. I have three uncles who are cabinet makers, one of whom turned his humble business into a major commercial enterprise.

But in much the same way I wouldn’t ring the renowned immunologist Professor Peter Doherty for advice on buying chairs, I reckon that when it comes to disease control and pandemic management, suburban furniture salesman Craig Kelly brings limited insight on how to steer us through the pandemic.

Craig Kelly with Clive Palmer make some kind of point in Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

How has Craig Kelly done us a favour? By bombing hundreds of thousands of Australians with his ludicrous text messages, Kelly has exposed a completely unacceptable state of affairs where political parties continue to be exempt from the Privacy Act and the Spam Act.

In what could be fairly described as a mutually accepted rort by the major and minor parties, everyone in politics appears to have agreed to defend the exemption for their own base political ends.

They want to be able to use our private details for targeted mail outs, robocalls, spam texts - the finely calibrated targeting of voters by any means necessary in must-win seats.

The result for most of us is that we simply get annoyed.

The issue with Kelly is worse because the more feeble-minded or uneducated recipients of his texts may find the content alarming, and draw statistically baseless conclusions about the minuscule risks from being vaccinated versus the much graver and deadlier danger of contracting the coronavirus. His actions have fed into vaccine hostility and vaccine hesitancy.

And like his mining magnate mate Clive, cashed up as he is with his Chinese billions, you sort of wonder whether there is even a policy agenda there at all, or just a desire to remain in politics and wield influence and, in Kelly’s case, continue to draw a salary from the taxpayer after his former party was lining up to dump him.

There are free speech issues at play here, of course. I know that media groups across the entire industry in this country (including this one) have had internal debates about whether to accept advertising from the United Australia Party.

Whatever commercial dimension, there is to the discussion, there is also view that it is risky for media organisations to start going down a path where you can pick and choose which political advertisements you can run.

This is what democracy looks like, and the alternatives to letting parties freely advertise can be found in totalitarian states and places such as the former Soviet Union, where advertising was banned completely.

Advertising is also passive in that you either look at and respond to the content of an ad, or simply read the article above and turn the page, or make yourself a cuppa when the ads come on TV. But the drift into the personal space of accessing people’s private telephone numbers and bombarding them with unwelcome messages is something else entirely.

Not only does it stray into our private lives and private time, it has the effect of alarming or confusing people who might regard these messages not for what they truly are - a cheap grab for a vote - but as a grave and important message from the government which must be heeded.

Craig Kelly with another bloke who has interesting views, Pete Evans. PictureC: Olivia Caisley

It’s the political version of those spam calls we now get all the time, saying the Australian Taxation Office needs to upgrade our bank details, or that our NBN will be disconnected unless we provide a credit card number.

In the same way that these shonks play the averages, needing only 0.1 per cent of people to respond to justify their business model, politicians do the same.

If a small number of people click on Kelly’s link, or listen to the Liberal Party robocall saying Labor will bring in an inheritance tax, or stay on the line while some scary voice actor who’s been paid by Labor tells them WorkChoices is coming back, these intrusive tactics have done their job.

Laughably, Federal Parliament recently had the opportunity to review the Spam Act and decided not to, arguing that it would have a negative impact on charities, which are also exempt. What a convenient little excuse that was. It sounded noble when it had the effect of masking the true intent of this racket.

The galling thing is how private individuals can often be stymied in the most absurd ways under the Privacy Act from finding out information about themselves or their loved ones or people they intend to employ, so they can run their business.

If you’re in politics though, you can pay private data collection agencies which hoover up people’s private information from social media, and hey presto you’ve got a handy stack of numbers so you can go to work on your political campaign.

So a big thank you to Craig Kelly. This is a rort and it’s one that has to stop.

My hunch too is that whatever benefits political parties think they accrue from these exemptions would be greatly outweighed by voter gratitude if they were the first party to promise a stop to it all.