The words “It’s never been a more exciting time to be Australian” have been scrubbed from the government’s Ideas Boom website after a complaint it may breach advertising guidelines, Labor has said.
On 15 February, Labor MP Pat Conroy wrote to the auditor general complaining about a $28m government advertising campaign which centred on variations of the words which he said was a political slogan “attributable to the prime minister”.
Labor claimed the words had featured prominently on the Ideas Boom website but had all but disappeared after the complaint.
Conroy said the government has questions to answer about the hidden slogan.
“I referred this advertising campaign to the auditor general because I’m concerned it breaches the guidelines on government advertising,” Conroy said.
“When it launched, the slogan was plastered on the main page of the website as well as being the first line in the policy document. Since I referred it for audit, the slogan has been hidden from the website and there’s no navigation to it.
“I suspect that somebody realised this is Malcolm Turnbull’s political slogan and removed it. Either that or they’re just not excited any more.”
Conroy said he had lodged freedom of information requests to determine who directed the slogan be removed and whether it was done to avoid a breach of the advertising guidelines.
“The government have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising in an election year and in this case they’ve blatantly repeated the PM’s tagline,” he said.
A spokesman for the innovation department played down the language shift in comments to the ABC.
“The national innovation and science agenda website undergoes regular updates to support and reflect the latest phases of the advertising campaign,” he said.
The sentence “There’s never been a more exciting time to be an Australian” still appears in the national innovation report.
A TV ad, titled Welcome to the Ideas Boom, features the tagline: “Welcome to the most exciting time in Australia’s history.”
A spokesman for the innovation minister, Christopher Pyne, said the words “It’s never been a more exciting time to be Australian” slogan had never appeared in any paid advertising.
He said the “welcome to the most exciting time in Australia’s history” tagline which appeared in TV ads had been developed in line with a whole-of-government process for communication campaigns, including independence guidelines.
