It came from the local member of state parliament. Ah – there’s an election next month. Once every four years,the MP must compete for letterbox space with the real estate agent wanting to sell your house and the plumber offering a fridge magnet as an inducement for fixing your pipes. If your No Junk Mail sign were taken seriously in 2023,you would not receive a single thing.
Illustration:Simon Letch
Instead of a brief life from junk to junk,unopened,straight to the bin,this local MP’s letter was taken into the home for inspection.
Its content,being the least interesting and most junkworthy thing about it,can be dealt with briefly. It started with four sentences about how “we’re delivering Our Plan for NSW”. It elaborated with three dot points. First,some grants to local schools and hospitals. Second,a hot-air bubble about “Guiding NSW through difficult times”. Third,another hot-air bubble about “Putting NSW first”. Then,four more sentences about “new ideas and thinking”,which was somewhat contradicted by beingprinted on a freaking letter.
But its complete absence of content was not the interesting thing. Nor were the two glossy postal vote application forms and one reply paid envelope that were thrown in for nothing. Every company (except for real estate agents) has moved to paperless post. Traditional post is decreasingly useful and increasingly expensive. Eliminating it would seem to be a no-brainer.
Same old story:a Cathy Wilcox cartoon from 2006.
The costs of this little operation from our “new ideas and thinking” man come to $2.65 in postage alone,plus skyrocketing printing and paper prices,so let’s say something like $3 per letter,excluding labour costs and the carbon footprint. There are 59,680 voters in the electorate,and no account is taken for duplication:if you have four voting-age adults in your house you get not one but four separate letters. Doesn’t sound like expertise in “managing our state’s finances” to me.
For me,the really interesting thing about this weird,obsolete,costly,redundant,vacuous and,worst of all,poorly punctuated communication,which I am one of the handful who actually opened and read,is that it is not paid for by the party it is promoting:it’s paid for by you and me.
The fine print confessed that these mail-outs are funded by “Parliamentary Entitlements”.Adocument whose sole purpose is to get the face of your local member smiling from your kitchen bench for a few days is not paid for by that member,but by your taxes.
This is not available to 90 per cent of election candidates. Their political advertising is funded by a mixture of what they can raise through public and private means. They have no taxpayer-funded entitlement for self-advertising,whereas the sitting member can make a choice:either spend their entitlement,which in NSW ranges from $54,030 to $151,820 depending on the size of their electorate,or pocket it as taxable income on top of the $172,576 they receive as their basic salary.
(Ministers and other office-holders receive additional extras,from $21,000 up to $244,000,atop their salaries.) The bottom line is that incumbent members have a war chest for mail-outs and other advertising before they even need to ask their party to put its hand in its pocket. If you were a really clever economic manager,you might trouser your entitlement rather than throwing it into people’s recycling bins.
The racket is not party-political,Coalition against Labor or vice versa. It’s a racket of sitting members forming a common vested interest against everyone else. Little wonder that it needs a massive popular groundswell,such as in the May federal election,for outsiders to unseat incumbents. The challengers start the race like Stawell Gift backmarkers,a mile behind the frontmarkers,except that in this race,it’s the wealthiest and best-resourced runners who start in front and the weakest who are penalised by the handicapper. Sounds a lot like life.
And yet,with such hefty advantages,incumbents choose to spend our money on their junk. Who are they aiming at? Some mythical elderly voter,who is both excited to open their junk mail and also inclined to change their vote based on three dot points and a smiling face? Show us the research that identifies one such voter,and we’ll give you a free ticket to join them in the 1960s.
That this is paid for by us,not by them,is self-evidently undemocratic and a questionable use of power. But here’s the most interesting thing of all. If all voters agreed that if the law were changed to force the parties and not us to pay for this,which you imagine they would,it would be directed more economically and intelligently,why hasn’t such a popular change already happened?
Is it so obvious and popular a change that somehow it slips beneath attention? Is it only matters that divide the community,such as poker machines,that excite enough argument to influence votes? Is the unanimous response to an antiquated taxpayer rort just a resigned shrug and an acceptance that this is how things will always be?
Members are advised they are not permitted to use their communications allowance for the production and distribution of publications that they intended to distribute in a state election year from January 26 to the election date – the “blackout period”. But we’ve been in election mode for months. By now,they’ve already made ample use of the public purse for electioneering via letterbox.
The next month will be a season for cheap populist gimmicks. Daniel Andrews won voters’ hearts Victoria by promising to remove level crossings. Someone who promises to stop making us pay for our own junk mail might win a lot of votes at a fraction of the cost. Your letterbox could then return to the real estate agents and tradies (though you’d have to wonder,at the moment,if a tradie who needs to advertise can really be any good). I wonder if the same is true about politicians. At the very least,they could give us a fridge magnet.
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