Saturday Magazine

17 Feb 2025

Saturday, 15th, February 2025: National Truth in Advertising Laws are needed in Australia, Dr Yee-Fui Ng Associate Professor, Higher Degree by Research (HDR) Monash University

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Saturday, 15th, February 2025: National Truth in Advertising Laws are needed in Australia, Dr Yee-Fui Ng Associate Professor, Higher Degree by Research (HDR) Monash University

Macca and Ben talk to Dr Yee-Fui Ng Associate Professor, Higher Degree by Research (HDR) Monash University, about National Truth in Advertising Laws are needed in Australia.

The highly pertinent case of a little-known independent candidate in the Victorian seat of Wannon has exposed a gaping hole in Australia’s electoral laws, which allow for misleading political advertisements in the lead-up to an election campaign. It’s all entirely legal and is already being exploited to try to shape the outcome of the coming federal election.

Conservative activist group Advance Australia has widely distributed digitally altered flyers attacking independent Alex Dyson, who is challenging senior frontbencher Dan Tehan.

It’s part of a campaign to damage Dyson’s electoral prospects after he helped slash the Liberal Party’s margin in the seat at the last election to less than 4%.

The material depicts Dyson ripping open his shirt in a “Superman” pose, to reveal a t-shirt bearing the official Greens party logo.

https://theconversation.com/misleading-and-false-election-ads-are-legal-in-australia-we-need-national-truth-in-political-advertising-laws-249279

Yee-Fui is an Associate Professor and the Director (Higher Degree by Research) at Monash University.

Yee-Fui’s research centres on strengthening political institutions and enhancing executive accountability. Her work has focussed on the regulation and accountability of actors and institutions in the shadows of government, such as ministerial advisers, lobby groups and government corporations, utilising empirical, doctrinal and comparative methodologies.

Yee-Fui is the author of Combatting the Code: Regulating Automated Government Decision-Making in Comparative Context (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025), The Rise of Political Advisors in the Westminster System (Routledge, 2018) and Ministerial Advisers in Australia: The Modern Legal Context (Federation Press, 2016), which was a finalist of the Holt Prize. Dr Ng also co-authored Douglas and Jones’s Administrative Law (Federation Press, 9th ed, 2024). She has publications in leading Australian and international books and journals, including the Law Quarterly Review, Public Law, Federal Law Review, Melbourne University Law Review, UNSW Law Journal, The Oxford Handbook of the Australian Constitution, and The Oxford Handbook of Political Executives.