The Federal Government has spent over $700,000 on radio advertising for its Industrial Relations ‘Work Choices’ advertising campaign.

The campaign explaining the new legislation has been running for only a couple of weeks. It is aimed at informing workers of the changes to the Industrial Relations Act, and at countering some very effective union advertising against the legislation when it was going through parliament. When the legislation was being introduced the government was criticised for not pushing its side of the story strongly enough, but the recent campaign now seems to be doing just that.

Media planners and monitoring agencies have estimated total spending on the campaign to be almost $15 million so far. The biggest chunk of the money, an estimated $4.7 million has gone on metropolitan tv ads, with press receiving about $900,000, ahead of radio on $710,000. Regional and pay tv together received about about $1 million worth of ads, while about $100,000 has been spent on on-line advertising.

The figures, compiled by ACNielsen but not publically released, have been leaked to The Australian. When radioinfo rang to confirm the figures with ACNielsen, account manager Warren Gilmer referred us to Harrold Mitchell and Partners, where the leak is thought to have come from. No one was talking at Mitchells.

Critics of the spending say taxpayers’ money is being spent on government propoganda, but radio stations are happy that they are seeing a share of the spending no matter what the motivation for it is.

The radio industry has mounted a concerted campaign behind the scenes in Canberra over the past year to convince government about the value of radio advertising. It seems to have paid off in this campaign.