Political parties violate our rights to privacy

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.

Parties even use telephone canvassing to load up their databases with information about the public.

The Labor Party software is called Electrac; the Coalition's is named Feedback. Every MP and candidate is given access to the software, as in turn are staff members and party volunteers.

Sensitive voter information - such as if you have contacted a local MP about a problem with Centrelink - is freely perused by sometimes callow staff who may simply be curious about the background of a person contacting an electorate office. Some voters have their file tagged with notes such as "difficult to deal with" or "never satisfied when helped", prejudicing their chances of getting good service from their MP.

Don't think that you can preserve your anonymity by refusing to give your name. They use caller identification to search the database for the property from which you are calling, allowing staff to take a guess and tag one of the occupants residing there as having made the remarks. Accuracy isn't at the forefront of how these systems work.

Political parties have exempted themselves from the Privacy Amendment Act (2000), which prevents other organisations from compiliing information without an individual's consent. When the legislation was enacted, federal Privacy Commissioner Malcolm Crompton said he did "not think that the proposed exception for political organisations is appropriate ... if we are to have a community that fully respects the principles of privacy and the political institutions that support them, then these institutions themselves must adopt the principles and practices they seek to require of others". Indeed the ALRC report the government is using to justify an inquiry into the media specifically calls for closing the political party exemption in the Privacy Act. By law, businesses and community organisations wouldn't be allowed to operate the databases on all of us the way the main parties do because, even without the adoption of privacy laws presently being debated, the software is so intrusive as to render it illegal.

Worse still, the operation of the voter-tracking software is achievable only because political parties use their privileged position as legislators to allocate taxpayer funding to their cause. Electoral allowances pay for the purchase of the software (which, incidentally, is owned by affiliates of the main parties, providing a nice little backdoor revenue stream at the taxpayer's expense). Political staff paid for by us are advised in manuals on how to use the software, not to let constituents view the material and not to advertise how it works to outsiders.

Perhaps worst of all, our politicians have taken their interest in violating our privacy to a level where they have created rules that require the Australian Electoral Commission (which opposes having to do so) to pass on the electoral roll with all our information (names, addresses, telephone numbers, ages and occupations) electronically to political parties, thereby making it easier for them to transfer it into an operable tracking system. Electronic updates of the roll are provided to political parties every month, so that if you move house you still can't escape the net.

And if all that weren't bad enough, you have no recourse to seek access to what they know about you in the database. No opportunity to correct inaccuracies. Political parties have no formal processes to fact check what is inserted against our names in their databases. They have no way of tracking who entered the information, either. If businesses operated that way they would be accused of a lack of transparency and due process, and be fined by the public watchdog.

So, in light of the long-term breaches of all our privacy by voter-tracking software, and the lack of protection and transparency to boot, it should be a welcome move by the government to take privacy rights more seriously.

But excuse me if I don't hold my breath waiting for our political leaders to start by taking a closer look at their own untoward activities. Instead, this is a blatant attempt to use the privacy debate to try to quash (implicitly or explicitly) scrutiny by the media.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor at the University of Western Australia.