On Saturday, for the second time that week, Crikey for PM’s campaign phone texted Kooyong independent Monique Ryan the following:
Having not replied the first time, Ryan texted us “no spam”. Which was fair enough. We texted the same message again the next day.
“NO SPAM,” she replied, firmer.
We didn’t reply, though we could have, explaining that at least we’d offered people the option (albeit a fake one) of opting out.
Unlike the unsolicited texts her campaign had been sending out:
You’ll be glad to know we weren’t just picking on Ryan. We sent the same incessant nonsense to:
- representatives of the Labor Party campaign, whose Queensland branch in 2016 sent out unsolicited mass texts from “Medicare”, claiming fraudulently that then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull had plans to privatise the agency. A spokesperson later claimed “Medicare” was supposed to indicate the subject of the text, rather than who sent it. The message, mysteriously, also didn’t include an authorisation, usually required of any political messaging;
- The Liberal Party, which, on election day in 2022, broke its own blanket secrecy regarding “on-water matters” to send masses of unsolicited texts to voters in marginal seats about the arrival of a boat of asylum seekers, linking the event with the possibility of a Labor victory;
- Clive Palmer and Harry Fong, who authorised the spam texts for the latest service to Palmer’s apparent kink for immolating money, Trumpet of Patriots. Palmer is one of the most prolific spammers in Australian political history — more than 5 and a half million Australians received unsolicited texts and robocalls from Palmer in the lead up to 2019. He received thousands of complaints. Millions more heard from him and the deeply unpopular populist Craig Kelly at the height of COVID. And again in 2022. And, sans Kelly, again in 2025.
And it’s not just texts. This election campaign, Crikey readers have told us about unsolicited emails from the Australian Christian Lobby, and particularly unwanted calls from Climate 200 on Anzac Day.
All of the bodies that people report this to — whether it’s the communications watchdog, the electoral commission, or even phone companies themselves — are essentially powerless.
* * *
Imagine the disappointment: you’re out, the sugar of dodgy pre-mix cocktail fizzing away in your veins, the lights of the street ablaze with possibility. Your phone hums in your pocket, but you find it’s not that person you were definitely vibing with earlier, but someone telling you who to vote in as mayor. This was the sobering reality faced by 75,000 nightclubbers in the Gold Coast, the night before the 2004 local council elections.
Various local nightclub operators had gotten together $16,000 for this pioneering use of spam texts as a campaign technique. Everyone hated it. The candidate the nightclubs were backing won. Twenty years later, we still don’t know if the win was helped or hindered by the texts.
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Every election, literally millions of voters are forced to ask a handful of questions: “How the fuck did these people get my phone number?”, “Why can’t I opt out?”, “Why do they think this intrusion will work?” and, most of all, “How the hell is this legal?”
To answer the last question first, it’s legal because political parties regulate what political parties can do during an election. The Spam Act 2003 prohibits the sending of advertising or promotional texts unless the sender has your permission, provides their contact details and gives you a way to block any further texts.
Except for political parties, which exempted themselves from the act.
As for your phone number or email address, there are a variety of ways a party or individual might have obtained them.
You may have contacted your local member years ago about an issue you care about, or filled out an online petition for the party that required those details. They may have software that generates phone numbers at random. They may have straight up tricked you, sending you a “postal vote application” that implies it’s an apolitical clerical procedure but which asks for your contact details, which are then sent to party headquarters, not the Australian Electoral Commission. They may have scraped it from your social media activity, or bought it from companies that have done the same. They also can access to whatever is recorded on the Australian Electoral Commission electoral roll.
But while you can be certain that every political party has a file on you collecting as much info as they can, you can’t know what they have or how they got it. Why? Because political parties have also exempted themselves from the Privacy Act.
So does spamming, one of the most openly loathed political tactics, actually work?
Toby Ralph, a marketer and political strategist who worked on all of former prime minister John Howard’s campaigns, told Crikey (after a throat-clearing pun about “Dutton dressed up as spam”) that achieving “the right balance between persuading and pissing off punters” was still “guesswork, and people are still learning what works and what doesn’t”.
“You try to waggle the rheostat to make information penetration greater than annoyance and voter turnoff,” he said.
But there is only one lesson Ralph is sure of when it comes to spam: “It’s pretty clear that when Clive Palmer-style carpet bombing happens, it does more harm than good. His results make that unequivocal.”
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