A New Coat of Paint.

Queensland's opposition has accused the government of blue-washing the state. The complaint sounds parochial until you notice what it is actually about. For more than a century Queensland has advertised itself in maroon. This year's marquee government campaign, outlining what it says it has delivered for the state, arrived in blue: online, on television, on the radio, and through pamphlets in letterboxes across the state, at a cost to taxpayers of more than five million dollars. The opposition's objection was less about the policy than the palette. That, it turns out, is where this story becomes interesting.

Queensland spent an estimated $48.8 million on advertising last financial year, a few million shy of what Labor spent in its final year in office. The Premier was pleased to mention this at budget estimates, alongside the fact that his government had introduced a spending cap and then stayed under it. There is something to admire in a government congratulating itself for restraint against a limit of its own design. Few household budgets work that way. Try explaining to a bank that you deserve credit for staying under the overdraft you set yourself.

None of this is an argument for governments to stop talking to the people who elected them. A road safety campaign, launched after the state's road toll reached a sixteen-year high, is a defensible use of close to nine million dollars. A flu vaccination reminder is a defensible use of the $1.2 million spent on preventative health messaging. Nobody at The Honking Goose is proposing that Queenslanders be left to discover new laws through folklore.

The difficulty starts somewhere quieter than a colour scheme. Every campaign in Queensland is required, under the Code that governs such things, to be objective, factual, of direct benefit to Queenslanders and free of party political material. Sensible enough on paper, and considerably harder to apply once the subject of the advertisement becomes the government's own achievements rather than a road closure or a fire ant detection. A billboard announcing five hundred new nurses is entirely factual. It is also, whether intended or not, an invitation to feel warmly toward whoever employed them. Information answers a citizen's question. This kind of advertising answers the government's.

The Queensland Audit Office noticed something like this several years ago, with considerably more restraint than a pamphlet in the wrong colour. It did not find governments breaking rules. It found a framework leaning too heavily on internal certification, and recommended that the committee approving advertising campaigns diversify its membership to strengthen its independence. The recommendation was accepted. The committee remains, years later, a government committee, reviewing government advertising, on behalf of the government. Canberra runs something closer to independent oversight: a panel that sits outside the department it is judging, weighing in on any federal campaign over $250,000. Queensland has stronger paperwork instead.

The paperwork really has improved. Directors-General now certify a campaign's compliance after the final creative material is finished, not before, closing a loophole that once let departments sign off on an idea and let the wording drift afterward. Evaluations are more thorough. Reporting is more detailed. These are the kind of reforms an auditor is glad to see and a taxpayer is unlikely to ever notice.

Commercial advertisers spend their own money hoping to persuade you. Governments spend yours, and you were never consulted on the campaign, only billed for it afterwards. That asymmetry does not make government advertising improper. It does mean the threshold for restraint should sit considerably higher than it currently does, particularly given that the government spending the money is also the government judging whether the spending was appropriate.

Oppositions always believe the line has been crossed. Governments always believe they remain safely behind it. Elections resolve the argument for one side at a time, and only until the next campaign arrives.

The real question was never the colour of the pamphlet. It was when a factual account of what government has done becomes an argument for why it should be admired for doing it. Everyone agrees there is a line between the two. The argument, as always, is over where that line was last seen.