Alongside who authorised it and address at the very beginning of the SMS. It would also push the spin down a line or two.
Those more knowledgeable than I have suggested that it would end up in the High Court. Of course you raise a valid option that the High Court might protect only one mechanism for communication in any one era. That would seem arbitrary to me and unsatisfactory for other reasons but again: I’m not saying what the High Court would decide.
Lib/Lab is using robocalling at election time themselves. Would they have any credibility banning SMSs but allowing robocalling?
A better option is to filter it in the phone. So you receive it but you never see it.
If you’ve gone beyond SMS to MMS (?) then, sure, but that is in the realm of general IT security. You don’t need any new laws to deal with malicious payloads, or if you do, it won’t end up in the High Court, and any half decent phone should be protecting against malicious payloads already.
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Of the sender or of the authoriser?
The sender is not ideal because the sender is typically a service provider and simply can’t be unchanging and also would mean that you would overblock (although many people wouldn’t care about that).
Also, an unchanging phone number doesn’t make a lot of sense even for the authoriser. I mean unchanging over the very short term, OK, but unchanging forever doesn’t really work.
By analogy with printed electoral matter, it should require both phone numbers. (For printed matter the current legislation requires name and address of the authoriser and name and address of the printer.)
For the record, current legislation for electoral matter on the internet requires only the name and address of the authoriser. (I have no idea whether that also applies to SMS and/or MMS.) SMS obviously comes up against hard limits on the total length. So it would simply be impossible to require too much information, leaving nothing for the message.
A fun option: Issue each registered political party with a unique short alphabetic code and require that any electoral matter sent by SMS or MMS begin with that code. Then you can block based on that code and a political party could only subvert that block by letting its registration lapse and registering effectively as a new party. (Renaming the party would not change the code.)
Example: “AEC.UAP:” begins all of Clive’s electoral spam.
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Their own
that would be set to reject all incomings 
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No, the sender is the sender, not the service provider. My phone number is what comes up if I send someone an SMS. Unless I deliberately use a technique to mask that or set someone elses number.
Which would constitute illegal behaviour.
I think you may have missed the point. If I am going to send a text message to 2,000,000 people, I don’t send it one by one from my own phone. I use a bulk text sending service. This is not the telco or its number. This is not me or my number. I give the service one copy of the content of the text message, a (very long) list of phone numbers and we have an agreed rate per text message (which goes down as the number of victims goes up).
There is no sending number. (When you personally send a text message, the sending number that is used, is not an actual sending number but rather a number that the recipient could use to reply to your phone. That doesn’t apply when it is never intended that anyone would reply and there is no phone that is sending, hence why the sender can come up as blank or as a name.)
I think it makes more sense to require a phone number of the authoriser.
That way a political party can’t game the system by using one bulk text sending service today and another bulk text sending service tomorrow.
PS Another way that using the sending number is problematic is that one political party could spam everybody via every sending service and get a large number of voters to block that sender … and, doing that early on in an election campaign, they could prevent all other parties from reaching the same voters.
However the SMS are sent, and it makes no difference whether it is an individual sender or a bulk sender, the sender number that shows up on the recipients phone must be an identifiable and legitimate and registered number to the political party.
Blank is not allowed. No number, or private is not allowed. Characters that do not constitute a callable number are not allowed.
Using a number that is not belonging to your party is not allowed.
I think that would cover things.
So it’s the number of the authoriser, not the number of the sender.
The test that applies in respect of electoral matter and the address of the authoriser is that it must be the street address in Australia “at which the person can usually be contacted during the day”. So I guess you are suggesting something similar in respect of a phone number (and which of course rules out the things that you wish to rule out, like non-numerics or blank).
However it should be obvious that there are loopholes in the above as it would apply to phone numbers and that is perhaps why it is not currently tackled in legislation.
In any case, it seems as if the primary purpose of the current legislated provisions is accountability, not blocking.
‘They’ want to know who sent it - and that isn’t a problem here because there is no attempt to deceive in that regard. We all know who sent it. There is no dispute about who sent it.
Good points. But all moot because what this party is doing, and the way they do it with SMS sender making it hard to block, is all legal.
I expect laws will not be changed, because other political parties will do the same come next election time.
Get used to spending some time each day deleting garbage.
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His operators are waiting for your calls.
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Not confirmed if it works, but
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Meanwhile.
58m ago58 minutes ago
By Michael Doyle
KEY EVENT
TGA threatens Craig Kelly with legal action over misleading COVID texts, Kelly says action is defamatory
ABC News: Matt Roberts
By political reporter Jane Norman
The nation’s medical regulator has demanded rogue crossbencher Craig Kelly stop distributing “seriously misleading” information about COVID-19 vaccines.
Mr Kelly, who quit the Liberal Party after spruiking unproven remedies for the virus, has been spamming people with text messages containing a link to what he claims is the Australian government’s COVID-19 vaccine adverse events report.
Lawyers for the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) have today written to Mr Kelly accusing him of breaching copyright and “demanding he stop distributing incomplete extracts of the report … which the TGA believes could be seriously misleading”.
“The TGA has acted in an effort to ensure that the public receives accurate information about adverse event reports,” the TGA said in a statement.
"It is alleged that extracts were selectively taken from the Database of Adverse Event Notifications on the TGA website by the United Australia Party and used by the United Australia Party in text messages to members of the public.
“The reports are subject to copyright and the extracts distributed by the United Australia Party have removed important information about the reports and the TGA’s copyright statement.”
On Monday, TGA boss John Skerritt indicated the regulator was investigating whether Mr Kelly’s messages had fallen foul of the law.
“We are looking through, with advice from the Australian Government’s Solicitor, whether an offence has been committed because it does have an Australian government logo,” he told 730.
Mr Kelly has previously conceded the messages might be annoying, but argued there are worse ways of getting attention.
“If people don’t like a text message there, they’re much less intrusive than the old method of cold telephone calls,” he said.
“If someone doesn’t like it, it’s just a microsecond swipe of the finger and the message is gone.”
Craig Kelly says TGA legal action ‘defamatory’
Craig Kelly has accused the national medical regulator, the TGA, of putting out a “misleading and deceptive” media release about its legal action against him.
“The letter I have received from Maddocks Lawyers in Canberra on behalf of the TGA, only has raised an issue of an alleged copyright infringement and nothing more,” he said.
"The TGA’s media release is defamatory and I’m seeking urgent legal advice.
"In particular, the TGA’s media release creates a false impression that the correspondence I have received from Maddox includes a reference to the text being “seriously misleading” when in fact, the correspondence from Maddock Lawyers makes no reference to this point.
“Ultimately the frivolous copyright issue is a disgraceful diversionary tactic by the TGA.”
Mr Kelly said he would “virgorously defend” himself against the alleged copyright breaches.
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I often wonder whether children get more embarrassed by the ill advised conspiracy laden claims that their parents propagate, or if they would be more embarrassed to watch their parents on screen if they were top porn stars.
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“Ask Rupert” brought to you by the Fox.
Depends on their upbringing?
Dynasties are made of such stuff as are family breakups.
P.S.
The second option is more likely to broaden ones outlook, albeit briefly, or even if one closes the eyes and lets the imagination go elsewhere. It’s not as easy to do for the first?
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whether an offence has been committed because it does have an Australian government logo
It ‘worked’ against The Juice Media. Look carefully at the same logo as it (now) appears on their web site. LOL. Rolls eyes.
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All the youtube videos have
including the text ‘Not the Real Logo’. I love their work!
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Love the video.
Didn’t last very long.
