Do Not Call Register for New Zealand?

In New Zealand, Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff has urged a legal review to consider the setting up of a national 'do not call' database similar to that in the US and Australia.

Shroff has raised the matter informally before but is making formal recommendations to the Government for the first time. The country's Law Commission is in the middle of a review of privacy law, four years after the last review. Shroff said the Commission should look at this issue 'quite hard' as there was 'widespread concern about the intrusion of cold-calling'. She suggested New Zealand could learn from the experience of Australia and the US, and pointed out that more than 145m people had signed up to the US register since it began in 2003. Australia and Canada introduced systems in 2006 and 2007 respectively.

Marketing Association head Keith Norris countered that the system was 'pretty good already' and that a government-run register would be 'just another way of expanding a government department and spending more of the taxpayers' money'. He denied that telemarketing was expanding so rapidly in the country as to require urgent review.

According to Shroff, 'though self-regulation is the preferred option, the association's register applies only to its own members, begging the question of whether those currently outside should be controlled by legislation.

The US version of the register prevents direct marketing but allows charities, market research and political polling. US advocacy body CMOR helped to get the exemption for MR, although it split with CASRO over the strategic question of whether asking for an exemption was wrongly indicating that research was 'commercial speech' in the first place. The fact of exemption does not of course mean that all members of the public distinguish between research and telemarketing when called: in January 2006 a Harris poll revealed that of the 76% of US adults signed up to the national Do Not Call registry, 13% mistakenly believed that survey research firms and pollsters were not allowed to call numbers on the list, while 63% weren't sure and only 24% 'knew' they were allowed to do so.

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.