I'm very glad you asked that.
The ASC is an excellent organization for monitoring and regulating commercial advertising, but if you look at the 14 criteria they monitor, many of them don't pertain to government advertising. Advertising about price discrimination, bait and switch, etc., aren't things you'd find in government advertising.
When I read that line in the testimony of the committee, I was surprised because it seems to me that if the external independent auditor is to have any teeth, it needs to hold government to account. Merely saying to the government, “You're in contravention of the standard”, is not really holding it to account, so that is a bit of a problem.
One other option that the committee may want to think about is the creation of an advertising commissioner, who would be an officer of Parliament who would be responsible to Parliament and provide data around all of these things that Professor Marland and I have talked about. That would make it transparent.