As government continues to try to keep the law of the country up with technological developments, gaps inevitably open for opposition politicians to be seen as ahead in their thinking compared to the party in power.
Green Party IT spokesman Nandor Tanczos has wasted no time jumping on the latest unsolicited online promotional vehicle, "spit" — Spam via Internet Telephony.
Tanczos says he can understand why older mass-marketing vehicles like junk mail and telemarketing were left out of government thinking on antispam legislation, "However the rapid uptake of Voice-over IP (VoIP) is likely to mean the inundation of our phone lines by spit," he says. “With the ready availability of home phone numbers on the internet through online phone directories, it’s easy for software to scan the net for numbers and make mass pre-recorded advertising calls.
“It’s going to annoy the hell out of people to be subjected to this new kind of invasive and costly spam, and we’re likely to see people stop listing their numbers in the phone book, It would be a shame to lose an excellent contact directory system as a result of too little foresight.
“I will be approaching the minister [Associate IT Minister David Cunliffe] to suggest including phone marketing in the proposed spam legislation with an opt-in system, as preferred by the majority of [antispam legislation] submitters.”
Meanwhile, Tanczos has pushed ahead marketing himself online with his own website. Like most things about the man it’s scarcely a regular Parliamentary site, with liberal references to his Rastafarian beliefs as well as his current and pre-Parliamentary political statements.