Political parties face hard questions on how they use our personal data

THERE are hard questions to be asked about how political parties use our personal data.

WHILE the Gillard government has linked its push for privacy reform to media ethics, there are hard questions to be asked about how political parties use our personal data.

The idea that both major political parties have far-reaching information on tap about every one of us who votes must really frighten conspiracy theorists the nation over.

It should also concern ordinary voters less cynical about the political process, because the powerful voter-tracking software that parties use to compile information for campaigning purposes has little or no oversight.

Compiling, storing and using this information would be illegal if politicians had not exempted themselves from privacy laws in 2000, against the advice of the then federal privacy commissioner, Malcolm Crompton.

Voter-tracking software is made possible because of the taxpayer-funded support political parties receive. Electoral allowances for MPs give them the means to buy the software: Labor's is called Electrac; the Coalition's is called Feedback. Political staffers operate the systems in MPs' offices: each member receives four electorate officers funded by the taxpayer.

The Australian Electoral Commission is required to send political parties electronic copies of the electoral roll, as well as monthly updates so the party databases remain up to date -- a practice the AEC has long opposed.

That information on voters includes their name, date of birth, age, gender, address and occupation (an optional requirement on the form).

For party databases, that is where the hard work begins. Given that the primary purpose of voter-tracking software is to help parties win elections, the key information they need is voting intentions and issues of concern.

For example: whether someone is a swinging voter or a strong identifier for one of the major parties; whether the carbon tax or health reform is the policy area that matters most to them.

This information is entered into party databases after door-knocking excursions, after telephone inquiries by constituents, as a follow-on from emails, telephone calls to electorate offices and when feedback to electorate surveys is received.

Electorate staff have been known to trawl through letters to newspapers and Facebook and now Twitter entries to add to the profile of voters in the database.

Don't think information is always obtained by consent: it usually isn't. Nor is it required because of a loophole in the law.

Because parties buy details about telephone numbers electronically from the White Pages, if you call an electorate office, but do not give your name, the staffer who answered your call can search for your profile in the database by using caller ID. If you rang from home, the staffer can hazard a guess which occupant you are -- hardly guaranteed to be accurate.

Once MPs develop a profile of who lives in their electorate they can refine their mailouts and target only those interested in the issues they are spruiking. They can exclude voters wedded to either side of the major party divide.

Candidates have access to the information as well, although they don't have the taxpayer-funded infrastructure and staff to maximise the benefits. That leaves volunteers to access voter information: an even more serious invasion of privacy than that of a staffer, who is at least professionally trained to do so.

Databases therefore provide an obvious incumbency advantage. Partly to help candidates compete with MPs when it comes to tracking the interests of voters, senators are allocated "duty" or "patron" electorates not held by their party to look after, which includes running the party database on voters in those areas.

Door knocking is made easier when an MP can read the profile of a resident first and then claim interests in similar policy areas. And telephone canvassing is used to compile information on voters, not always with appropriate disclaimers about the fact that what is said will be logged against the person's profile or that the call is more than a random one.

The databases allow staffers to make notes about voters who might be considered critical of the government. They may not receive best-practice service next time they seek assistance from their MP or even a minister. And there are no safeguards on the accuracy of the information and no internal tracking system to determine which staffer from an MP's office made the entry.

Pollsters also have access to voter-tracking software, which feeds more information on voters back into the party database. It is easy to question how it can be legal for parties to collect so much information without consent -- or even without people having the right to access what information is stored.

Political parties are excluded from the Privacy Act under Section 7C of an amendment made in 2000, and can therefore compile information on people without their consent. But because parties are technically private organisations -- not public bodies -- Freedom of Information rules do not apply, either.

That is why, when the Australian Law Reform Commission delivered its report into the state of privacy laws in 2008 it recommended political party exemptions from the act be removed, bringing oversight of Australian political parties into line with that in Britain and New Zealand.

Fortunately, in this and other representative democracies, political parties don't want to know how we vote and what issues matter to us to engage in some sort of political cleansing operation.

They do so only to win elections. But this base reason for major parties exempting themselves from privacy laws should not prevent us from expecting any government about to embark on privacy law reform to include its own conduct in such an inquiry.

Peter van Onselen has written more than a dozen scholarly journal articles about party databases as a university professor, and the study of databases was a case study within his PhD dissertation