Clive Palmer’s new friend Craig Kelly is a spammer. He has sent out a huge volume of spam texts to randomly selected phone numbers, harassing people with pleas to join Palmer’s Potemkin village of a political party.
Under the gloriously named Spam Act 2003, someone can’t send you an advertising or promotional text message unless they have your permission, they provide contact details and a way to block any further texts.
Oh, except that political parties exempted themselves from the act. Just like they exempted themselves from the do not call register for spam phone calls.
Indeed, political parties have given themselves a pass for anything to do with infringing your privacy or your rights to live without being harassed. They’re not even subject to basic privacy laws, which is why they have detailed profiles on every single voter, and you’re not allowed to see what they have about you or how they use it.
But back to Kelly. You could of course return the favour. You can call his Sydney office on (02) 9521 6262 and ask his office, politely, to stop spamming you (remember the appalling allegations made about working in Kelly’s office — please be nice to his staff).
You can call his Canberra office as well, if anyone’s picking up there, on (02) 6277 4366. And if you still have a fax, you can fax him on (02) 9545 0927. Some people might be cruel enough to suggest that you do the old black paper loop trick — get a long sheet of black paper, or stick together some sheets, and feed it into your fax, then tape the ends so it becomes a permanent black loop going around, and fax him that for a few hours. But the Commonwealth is paying for his toner supplies so you’d really only be hurting yourself.
But since Kelly is spamming people’s mobiles, why not call his mobile on 0458 150 211? Your short messages will, conveniently, be sent to him as a text — or you can text him directly.
Or here’s another idea. Why not become a member of UAP? You can either sign up a completely fabricated identity (or someone you hate), or sign up yourself. Who’s up for a mass act of political trolling whereby lots of people join a far-right party of wingnuts and anti-vaxxers and then disrupt it from within?
If people don’t want to join mainstream political parties any more, why not join a party ironically, for the shits and giggles, for the pleasure of making the lives of Kelly and Palmer just a little more difficult? Every time they boast of rising memberships, you’ll know it’s rubbish, because you’re one of them.
Time to hack Kelly and the UAP. Oh, and don’t forget to text or call Kelly and say hi.
I am sure many Australians have a brief message for Kelly.
The one that means sex and travel?
I read this after I sent a text saying exactly that! Well predicted!
Drop Dead would be favourite – from the look & sound of him, apoplexy is a real possibility.
But it makes no difference. Palmer and Kelly are not the sensitive types.
Join the party under a false name that is not on the roll – and then the AEC does an audit against the role. Fun!
Apologies for writing roll as “role”. My bad.
Probably works both ways.
Many noms-de-guerre having a role on the roll would help have the UAP deregistered.
Please excuse my complete ignorance of Australian electoral law. Would a high proportion of members with false names or not on the electoral role be grounds for the AEC de-registering the party?
You have to have 1500 unique members on the roll (used to be 500 before Labor and Libs changed the rules). By unique, they cannot be members of other parties. If you hade 1500 members, but 750 were joke members, or were members of other parties your party would be registered. The AEC would contact the individual with two parties listed against them and ask them to choose who they wish to be counted against. Due to privacy laws the party would not be allowed to know who were the dodgy members.
This would be a lot easier if the AEC provided a SaaS party management tool, which made life easier for both sides, but would see the demise of micro-parties, but help the likes of the TNL (The New Liberals).
For UAP the 1500 member requirement no longer applies. By having Craig’s bum on the green leather they are now registered via the “member in parliament” option.
Good pick up.
You are correct, yet another advantage to incumbency no matter how incompetent.
I forgot about that. The “Parliamentary Party” excuse. I would have thought with the “reforms” that the LNP and Labor rushed through, they would have gotten rid of them. I know it was on the cards.
The key target of course was the New Liberals, Liberal Democrats, and any resurrection of the Democratic Labor Parties.
How many people would need to sign up in order to expel Kelly from the UAP?
I doubt the members have any ability to control the “party”. Remember when the members of Pauline Hanson’s party discovered membership did not include any say.
From the evidence, it seems political parties are the biggest drawback to our political system?
I’m not sure about this. Parties create support networks for candidates that would otherwise not have the support network or money to run a campaign. What concerns me is that many parties become cliques, and members loose touch with society.
Even the “Independents” have “Friends or Voices of Wentworth / Indi, etc” to back them up.
What an odd idea – having locals support their local representative aka MP.
That would cause revolution in the Hole-in-the-Hill.
I’m all for it.
I’m entirely with Klewso on this. The original concept of parliament was each member represented the electorate of the relevant constituency. The emergence of parties corrupted this concept beyond recognition. The support network you refer to that gives party members such an advantage is just one example of the parties’ corrupting influence. To provide that service to its candidates the parties must seek donations, bribes in reality, which makes them beholden to their paymasters, further advancing the corruption. The whole point of modern representative democracy is to put parliament under the control of vested interests who buy influence with the major parties and their MPs, and in return get their wishes granted. The interests and wishes of the general public or the country are an irrelevance.
A healthy representative democracy would not have parties and not have elections. MPs in the legislature would be randomly selected from the eligible population. They would in consequence actually be representative. Of course some other arrangement would be necessary to decide who runs the executive government, and for that elections and therefore parties are perhaps unavoidable.
A good idea ,but then individual MPs could be bought cheaply by business and corporations.
That would be a lot more representative of us than what we have now with a concentration of corruption.
The main problem with that is that the pollies want us to think they are there to represent us, when in fact they are ruling us, in the same way kings and queens used to rule their subjects in the old days.
If you want to see how political parties distort the concept of ‘representation ‘ take a look at our one time friends across the ditch. With the MMP system and rampant if stupid political correctness (did you know that because Maori migrated to a different climate they understand ‘climate change’ -I kid you not) the idea of representative democracy is being replaced by party control (a penalty if you ‘desert’ the party after being elected) and diminished debate. Mind you the brilliance of the opposition helps. But take a look at the Hare-Clark system to see what improved voter representation might look like and note how the major parties hate that system – must be better then eh?
At the last NSW State election I was spammed by Mark Latham. I would receive 4 to 5 text messages plus emails a day. He would use different phone numbers and email addresses every time. Like a professional spammer. I went to his web-site but it had no contact details. No email, no phone number, zip- nothing. I called the spammer hotline and was told that in Australia politicians not only have a right to lie, as well they have the legal right to spam who ever they like. 🙁
that is a disgrace how can a politician be above the law
Because they write the laws.
Similarly, they exempted themselves from Truth in Advertising legislation which applies to everyone else.
They also have access to the electoral role, not just names & addresses which is public but date of birth which helps them craft their lies… sorry, message.