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     politics

This page considers privacy in relation to the activity of political parties and candidates, in particular the targeting of voters and donors.

It covers -

• introduction
• voting
• profiling

The 2007 Australian Law Reform Commission Privacy discussion paper, highlighted earlier in this profile, cogently comments that

In the interests of promoting public confidence in the political process, those who exercise or seek power in government should adhere to the principles and practices that are required of the wider community.

Consistent with non-exemption in the UK, Canada and other jurisdictions it accordingly recommends removal of exemption for registered political parties and for political acts and practices.

     profiling

The 'political purposes' exclusion in the federal legislation has attracted increasing attention, with some observers expressing concern about increasingly sophisticated profiling, in particular through large-scale multi-electorate databases created by political groups for fundraising and campaigning (including mailshots and polling).

Low-level databases - often drawn from electoral rolls - typically identify voters by electorate, with contact details and basic demographic information such as gender and marital status. Higher-level databases - maintained by party secretariats or commercial specialists - enrich that data by integrating it with public/private information from other databases. Database vendor Aristotle for example sells profiles about 110 million US voters that encompass each voter's party affiliation, education, ethnicity, occupation, income level, homeowner status, location and spending patterns (eg whether the individual has a history of making charitable or political donations, has purchased particular types of vehicles or is a catalog shopper).

In Australia the major federal political party databases are Electrac (ALP) and Feedback (Coalition). They are based on the Australian Electoral Roll - which under amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is not available to commercial or non-profit organisations - and are installed across electorate offices to track voters who are in mail, telephone or fax contact with members of Parliament. Much data input involves electorate office staff. It has been claimed that the databases are valuable in identifying swinging voters (up to 30% of voters in marginal seats).

Peter Van Onselen & Wayne Errington in the 2003 Electoral Databases: Big Brother or Democracy Unbound? (PDF) and 2004 Voter Tracking Software: The Dark Side of Technology & Democracy (PDF) suggest that the federal party secretariats target campaign resources (including telephone polling and direct marketing) at these swinging voters in marginal seats "at the expense of the majority of the electorate", thereby "skewing democracy" because

the system allows the major parties to treat voters who strongly identify with either major party, particularly against their own, with contempt.

It has subsequently been suggested that the Liberal Party has on-sold to its federal and state candidate databases containing private information about voters, in breach of federal electoral legislation.

   next page (Australian privacy cases 1)