Politics

Heads Up, You Might Soon Receive A Call From A Robot Cory Bernardi Asking You To Vote No

Dystopian future, hello.

by Sam Langford  28 September 2017
cory bernardi

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

Cory Bernardi’s most recent attempt to campaign for a No vote in the marriage equality postal survey led to him being trolled so spectacularly that almost $300,000 was raised for an unrelated charity. Undeterred by this epic failure, he’s now plotting a horrifying robot return.

We wish we were joking, but seriously, Cory Bernardi has announced plans to robo-call 1 million people to let them know why he’ll be voting No. And if you live in Victoria or South Australia, the person picking up those calls might just be you.

Related

While Bernardi told Sky News the calls are just him “polling an electorate”, audio of the call obtained by Nine features a long spiel on “radical gay sex education”, “gender ideology programs”, and other misleading reasons to vote No in a survey about none of these things. There’s a name for this: push polling, and it’s very much a form of campaigning.

There are many, many reasons why this is a spectacularly dumb move from Cory, but perhaps chief among them is the fact that earlier this week he was up on his high horse about unsolicited texts from the Yes campaign being an invasion of privacy.

An ordinary person might think having a robot version of yourself call a million home phones is therefore also a breach of privacy, but according to Cory, not so. He told Sky News “it’s not invasive like sending text messages to unlisted numbers” because “mobiles are more personal space”. We’ve run some complex maths, and it seems like the logic checks out.

Bernardi told The Sydney Morning Herald that the robo-calling campaign is being funded by his party, the Australian Conservatives, and was not connected with the Coalition for Marriage, which has produced lots of the material for the No campaign. While estimates have put the cost of the campaign at around $50,000, Bernardi refused to disclose the figure, saying that would be “like asking how much pocket money I give my wife — or how much she gives me, I should say.”

That statement alone seems like a pretty good argument for getting rid of “traditional” marriage.