Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker McMullan, we have had this debate here in the past, as you well know. The last time I spoke on this legislation in its previous iteration was in May 2004. At that time I described the proposals as a thinly veiled attempt by the government to disenfranchise people who they believe might not otherwise support them. I remain steadfastly of that view. The matter of funding is important, and if I have time I will address it. But the key issue in this debate is participation. The spirit of the Commonwealth Electoral Act is the enfranchisement of the citizens of Australia to exercise their democratic rights. The proposed changes are a complete repudiation of this spirit. In fact, they constitute, in my view, a denial of fundamental rights.

The government tell us they are presenting the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005 to ensure the integrity of the electoral roll and the electoral process. They need to be reminded that the integrity of the electoral roll is based on the right to be enrolled and the right to vote. This bill attacks those rights in the grossest of ways. The argument about electoral integrity is a smokescreen for the government’s attempts to marginalise those Australians who they believe will not vote for them.

This debate presents a good opportunity to remind the House and the government of Australia’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, because in my view this bill breaches them. The ability of a person to cast a vote and have a say in choosing their government is, after all, a fundamental human right. Article 25 of the covenant provides:

Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, ... without unreasonable restrictions:

(a)

To take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or indirectly, through freely chosen representatives;

(b)

To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors;

Frankly, I am most concerned that this legislation breaks that obligation under article 25. This bill represents a violation of the fundamental rights of Australians to participate in their democracy. Under the proposed amendments, the burden of obtaining proof of identity or a prescribed witness in order to enrol will fall clearly and disproportionately heavily on non-English speakers, Indigenous Australians, young first-time voters, itinerants, and people who live in remote areas, due to language, cultural, bureaucratic and/or other geographical issues.

I am concerned about the removal of voting rights for people serving full-time prison sentences of any length. This is something that I take to be a flagrant breach of the ICCPR. I am very concerned about the proposal to reduce the close of rolls period. There is always a rush for people to get on the roll or update their enrolment. These new measures will make it even harder for people to get on the roll. The government agree that there is a rush to enrol once an election is called. The AEC agree. It is always a busy time, but the government response to avoiding the rush is simply to stop people enrolling.

That, in my view, is fundamentally undemocratic. It is a clear violation of the right and opportunity, without unreasonable restrictions, to vote and be elected at genuine periodic elections. These new provisions are a clear recipe for the disenfranchisement of Australians come polling day. The best way to protect the integrity of the electoral roll is to ensure that the Australian Electoral Commission is truly independent and has the resources to maintain an accurate and up-to-date roll at all times. Yet, one of the first actions of the coalition government when elected in 1996 was to cut the AEC’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Electoral Education Service. The effect was to reduce the number of field officers employed by the Australian Electoral Commission. As well as working on maintaining the roll, these officers provided invaluable education programs to encourage participation in the democratic process.

The coalition want to make it harder for citizens to get on the roll and vote on polling day. They want to create an atmosphere of mistrust and confusion and to alienate voters. Their claims of protecting the integrity of the electoral system are simply a smokescreen. Election after election, the official reports of the Australian Electoral Commission find no evidence of voter rorting. It exists only in the twisted minds of those who want this process restricted. The AEC wrote in October 2001 in Electoral Backgrounder:

... there is no evidence to suggest that the overall outcomes of the 1984, 1987, 1990, 1993, 1996 and 1998 federal elections were affected by fraudulent enrolment and voting.

It warned:

... ill-informed and biased criticism of the electoral system ... has the potential to undermine public confidence in the integrity of democratic processes and the legitimacy of governments.

On balance this bill will do more to harm the right of Australians to vote than it will to protect the electoral processes from fraud and multiple voting. The Commonwealth Electoral Act should serve the people of Australia by making it simple and straightforward for people to get on the roll and stay on the roll. We need to give the AEC the resources to maintain the integrity of the roll rather than strip the rights of Australians to vote.

I have grave fears for the people of my own electorate of Lingiari should this bill be passed. Lingiari is sparsely populated and covers an area one-sixth of Australia’s land mass—an area of 1.34 million square kilometres. The electorate includes the Indian Ocean territories of Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands. The electorate has a substantial Indigenous population, with 45 per cent of the people counted in the electorate in the 2001 census identifying as Indigenous. The census also identified a younger population compared with other electorates. For many in the electorate of Lingiari and for the bulk of the Indigenous population, English is a second or even third or fourth language.

In Lingiari in the 2004 federal election approximately 45 per cent of votes cast were cast at mobile polling booths. The turnout of voters in communities serviced by mobile teams was 56.07 per cent; the total turnout was 78 per cent of enrolled voters in the electorate. The informal vote at the static booths in the towns was four per cent; the informal vote for the mobile booths was 7.5 per cent; and the informal vote overall was 6.8 per cent.

You do not have to be too smart to appreciate that, based on that data, there is a real issue with ensuring greater participation of people in the electorate in the voting system and ensuring that when people participate they have the skills to vote correctly. These amendments in no way address these more important objectives of our democratic system. What they will do, on the other hand, is minimise the opportunity for Indigenous people to vote. Not only will we get fewer voters turning out, but a larger proportion of the votes will be informal.

That is what they desire. It is a fundamental political objective to minimise the role of Indigenous people in the voting system—in the Northern Territory, at least. They know why that is: based on the results from those mobile polling teams and across the Territory generally, 75 to 80 per cent of Indigenous people vote for the Labor Party and not the government. That is what it is—crude, simple politics.

I will just make an observation. If the changes to the closing of the rolls proposed by this bill were in effect prior to the 2004 election, 3,749 people in the Northern Territory who made new enrolments or who transferred or updated their enrolment in the seven days following the announcement of the election would have been excluded from voting. That is the impact of this legislation.

In terms of young people, in the lead-up to the 2004 election there were 835 new enrolments in the NT. When the changes this bill proposes were discussed in 2004, I was sent a letter by the Youth Action and Policy Association, which stated:

We believe that this bill will effectively exclude thousands of young people from voting. It has been well established that young people 18-24 years have the lowest enrolment figure of any eligible age group. According to recent information from the AEC, only about 60% of 18 year olds are currently enrolled to vote.

It has also been proven that young people are far more transient than other age groups and often leave their enrolment to the last minute. Young adults having reached the age of independence, are often moving out of home, or between rental accommodation due to their employment and education prospects.

We believe that this bill unfairly targets young people and will effectively limit the political voice of young people across the nation. In the first week of the 2001 election campaign, 83,000 first time voters signed up in the 7 days after the election was called ...

If this legislation had been in place in 2001, what proportion of those 83,000 would have actually cast a vote? My guess is that close to 80 or 90 per cent—perhaps 70,000 or 80,000 of those young people who enrolled to vote at that time—would not have been able to vote. This is a recipe for undermining the democratic rights of Australians.

Indigenous Australians in remote locations often do not have equitable access to services like regular mail—they might have a twice-weekly mail service if they are dead lucky—to be able to send enrolment forms or receive correspondence about their enrolment from the AEC. That is if they are aware of what their rights as citizens are. Because of the abolition of the education service that was in place prior to 1996, a lot of young Indigenous people will not know of their obligations as citizens and how they are to enrol to vote. The government took no cognisance of this when it drafted this legislation or, if it did, deliberately chose to ignore it and instead pursued the objective of ensuring that these young Indigenous Australians do not get the right to vote.

Many of those people in the Northern Territory in particular have poorer literacy and numeracy skills arising as a direct result of decisions taken by the government to limit their access to education. They are extremely disadvantaged young Australians. To illustrate this, only 34 per cent of Indigenous year 5 students in the Northern Territory achieved the national reading benchmark compared to 71 per cent of non-Indigenous students. I have reservations about benchmarking, but this figure clearly reflects the disadvantage Indigenous people are at when it comes to participating in the electoral process in terms of literacy and understanding the forms they will be required to fill in. The disproportionately high number of Indigenous people in jail, which I will refer to later, is also of concern. Then there is the issue of Defence Force personnel. Defence Force career rotations mean that personnel are constantly transferring between states. In the Northern Territory the number of enrolments transferred between states in the seven days before the 2004 election was 1,439.

Enrolling people and their staying correctly enrolled in the seat of Lingiari presents unique challenges for the AEC. You only have to observe the conditions which prevail in northern Australia at the moment with cyclones. Extreme cyclonic conditions, poor transport infrastructure, lack of telecommunications, ceremonial obligations for Indigenous people, death and other factors can cause large numbers of voters not to be present in their normal community of residence when elections are called. Given the large size and mobile nature of the population, maintaining an accurate electoral roll and conducting elections presents a challenge not found in the majority of other electorates across Australia.

It is absolutely irresponsible to propose the closure of rolls effectively at 8 pm on the day of the issue of the writs for an election. What this will do is disenfranchise thousands of Australians, particularly Indigenous Australians, who live in remote communities. The government makes no apology for that because it is a deliberate policy objective of this legislation.

This government has deliberately chosen to limit and weaken the AEC’s ability to fulfil a meaningful educative role. This is an absolute scandal and an indictment of the Howard government’s treatment of people that live in remote communities. Prior to 1996, when the government got rid of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Electoral Information Service, there were 16 full-time officers working on educating and enrolling people across remote communities, including three employed in the Territory. Their positions no longer exist. Who is to undertake this role?

The main population centre in the electorate of Lingiari is Alice Springs. It has no permanent AEC presence. AEC field officers, based in Darwin, are active in the electorate given that within Lingiari there are some 66 local government authorities, with many servicing small, isolated outstations, plus the special lease communities of Yulara and Jabiru. Given the mobility of the population it is difficult for the field officers to have contact with voters and potential voters from one election to the next. This is an indictment of this government. It is especially difficult for Indigenous community members to be aware of enrolment obligations and procedures and to have opportunities to enrol at the age of 18.

The member for O’Connor, in his contribution, said that people under the age of 18 were delinquent under the act if they were not enrolled. This government is delinquent. It is delinquent in not providing Indigenous Australians and people under the age of 18 with an opportunity to understand their obligations as Australian citizens to vote. If no-one has told them about their obligations, if they are not taught about their obligations, how do they get this understanding? Does it just come through the ether? Somehow or another, in walking around the community, it will be infused into their brains that they have got to enrol to vote and they have got to know how  to vote. How is this to happen? This makes an absolute mockery of this government’s belief in democracy. The government espouses our virtues as a nation of spreading democracy across the world, giving people the right to vote; but, on the other hand, through this very piece of legislation, it is taking away the right of many Australians to vote and to participate in the democratic processes that we expect all Australians to participate in as Australian citizens. That is an absolute indictment of this government.

I am very concerned about this. I spoke before of my concerns about people in prisons. Let us look at the target group here. In the case of Lingiari, we know who the target group is: Indigenous Australians. This bill will be particularly discriminatory to Indigenous people in incarceration. Let me give the House a snapshot of the circumstances of Indigenous Australians in jail. The majority of Indigenous prisoners in Australia are serving sentences of less than three years. Twenty per cent are serving six months or less, 24 per cent are serving six to 12 months, 42 per cent are serving one to five years and 16 per cent are serving five-plus years. In the Northern Territory about 80 per cent of the prison population at any given time is Indigenous. Think about it: 80 per cent. The Indigenous rate of imprisonment is 1,687 persons per 100,000 Indigenous adults. The non-Indigenous rate of imprisonment is 158 persons per 100,000 adults. Between 2002 and 2003 the Northern Territory recorded the largest proportional increase—21 per cent—in the Indigenous imprisonment rate.

Regardless of what these people have been sent to prison for, they are being targeted by this legislation. They will be denied the opportunity to participate in the democratic processes. This, in my view, is an absolute denial of their fundamental rights as Australians and in breach of our obligations under the convention I read out earlier. This denial of fundamental rights, as I have said, reflects the sinister intention of this government to rub out the voice of those people who will not vote for them.

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