Saving the forests, one leaflet at a time

Posted on April 27, 2007 by

Our ‘no junk mail’ sticker tends to stop most unsolicited mail, but occasionally someone ignores it. In a neat irony, I opened the mailbox today to discover a leaflet from the Greens’ candidate for the Senate, Kerrie Tucker.

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9 Responses to Saving the forests, one leaflet at a time

  1. Crunchy Peanut Butter says:
    April 27, 2007 at 9:59 am

    Take out an AVO. That should do the trick. CPB

  2. Junketeer says:
    April 27, 2007 at 11:45 am

    Political leaflets have a special status, and are not considered junkmail.

    “The Commonwealth Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000 commenced on 21 December 2001. This Act has relevance to addressed and unsolicited advertising material. Under this Act, once a person makes a request to an organisation not to receive direct marketing communications, it is illegal for that organisation to contact the person for direct marketing purposes. A request to remove one’s name from a mailing list is also enforceable. These provisions fall under the new national privacy principles outlined in the Act. Businesses with a turnover of less than $3m per year are exempt, as are political parties and local councils.”

  3. The Speaker says:
    April 27, 2007 at 2:19 pm

    Andrew:

    Kerrie Tucker isn’t an MLA.

    She was four years ago.

    Deb Foskey, the public housing rorter, is your current Greens MLA from memory.

  4. Andrew Leigh says:
    April 27, 2007 at 5:47 pm

    Whoops, thanks. It was Tucker, but it was for the Senate, not the assembly. I’ve corrected the post.

  5. fred says:
    April 27, 2007 at 9:40 pm

    That’s a worry.
    I’ve done the leaflet trick for the Greens a few times and policy and protocol was NOT to put pamphlets in letterboxes with a junk mail sticker no matter whether they are considered junk or not.
    But, in defence of the Greens, it has been noticable that Greens pamphlets have been printed on recycled paper and most [I'd say all but I could have missed someone] other parties are not.

  6. Nathan says:
    April 28, 2007 at 1:53 pm

    Standard practice on ALP campaigns I’ve worked has been to ignore ‘No junk mail’ signs, on the grounds that a lot of people don’t consider political mail to be ‘junk mail’, but to respect signs that say ‘No unaddressed mail’ or ‘No unsolicitied mail’.

  7. conrad says:
    April 28, 2007 at 6:14 pm

    “On the grounds that a lot of people don’t consider political mail to be ‘junk mail’”

    I’d love to know what percentage of people you are talking about here.

  8. Bruce Bradbury says:
    April 28, 2007 at 10:10 pm

    This calls for some cost-effectiveness analysis. ;-) Given some objective (eg not chopping down trees to make paper) does putting a leaflet in your box help achieve the objective? On the one hand we have the tree cut down to make the leaflet, on the other the trees saved if the leaflet makes you change your vote, the vote changes the result, and the different election result changes some relevant policy.

    Similar arguments might apply to the cost of Gore flying to Australia to talk about greenhouse effects.

    Interesting, however, neither side of the debate is interested in making these sorts of calculations. Eg Gore talks about how he has ‘offset’ his air travel rather than how his travel might be helping save the planet. Why is this?

  9. Andrew Leigh says:
    April 29, 2007 at 6:18 am

    BB, you’re right – I could imagine the Greens rep standing in front of our letterbox thinking ‘well, on the one hand, they said they didn’t want junk mail’. On the other hand, the kinds of people who say they don’t want junk mail are surely more likely to be Greens voters…

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