Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Before I commence my remarks on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005, with the current Chair and the past Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters here, let me say that I worked in a nonpartisan way on the proposal of the former chairman for four-year terms. The negative comments that I am going to make about this legislation should not be interpreted as obviating the fact that many of us worked together to improve the Australian electoral system.

This bill is the first instalment of this government’s agenda for radical changes to Australia’s electoral laws. Its agenda was foreshadowed in the recommendations of the majority report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters of which I am deputy chair. We debated the report last October. In our minority report, the other opposition members and I warned that, if the recommendations of the majority report were put into law, this would be a retrograde step for Australian democracy. We warned that the Howard government, now in control of the Senate, would seek to rig the Australian electoral system for its own advantage. We warned that this arrogant government would use its position of complete parliamentary control to seek to entrench itself in power through extreme legislation. Sadly, this is what we are seeing with this bill, which is no doubt the first in a series of such bills.

This bill deals with three of the central recommendations of the majority report. They are recommendations which work most clearly to the electoral advantage of the government parties. These are: first, tougher identity requirements for enrolment and to cast a provisional vote; second, the early closure of the electoral roll; and, third, increasing the amount that can be donated to a political party without that donation being declared. The effect of these changes, if they are passed by this parliament, will be to make it harder for ordinary Australians to enrol and to vote but easier for individuals and corporations to make undisclosed donations to political parties.

The government calculates that these changes will benefit the coalition in two ways. First, it calculates that the majority of those who will be affected and indeed disenfranchised by the enrolment provisions of the act will be potential Labor voters. Given what we know about the demographic patterns of voting in Australia, it is probably correct in that assumption, although I think the National Party may be unpleasantly surprised at the effect of these changes on country people, especially in remote areas. Second, the government knows that the donation disclosure provisions will greatly benefit the Liberal Party partly because it is a party which attracts the majority of its donations from corporations and high-wealth individuals and partly because, as the party in power, it will be the preferred option for those seeking political influence and favours through undisclosed donations.

These changes represent the reversal of more than 150 years of democratic progress in Australia, progress towards a more democratic, inclusive and transparent electoral system. Australia has always been an innovator, indeed a world leader, in electoral reform and democratic processes. As a result Australia has one of the most open electoral systems in the world, which has the highest reputation for integrity and transparency. Now, for the first time in memory, an Australian government is going to wind back some of these features of our electoral system for no good reason other than for short-term partisan advantage. The government is going to do these things on the basis of allegedly preventing electoral fraud, as the current chair suggested before. The government knows quite well that the inquiry that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters conducted last year, like every other inquiry the committee has conducted, found no evidence whatever that electoral fraud is a problem in Australia.

The committee travelled all over Australia. We heard witnesses with all political views, as well as expert opinions from party officials, the Electoral Commission and academia. Government members of the committee had every opportunity to put evidence of serious electoral fraud or malpractice before the committee. No witness or submission to the inquiry produced evidence of fraudulent enrolment. There is not any evidence that fraudulent enrolment exists on any measurable scale or any evidence that it has affected the result in any specific seat, let alone that it has influenced the result of any federal election. Government members of the committee themselves had to concede that there is no serious problem of electoral fraud in Australia. The Australian Electoral Commission has repeatedly made public statements about the integrity of the electoral roll and the electoral system generally. An AEC Electoral Backgrounder of October 2001 said:

It has been concluded by every parliamentary and judicial inquiry into the conduct of federal elections, since the AEC was established as an independent statutory authority in 1984, that there has been no widespread or organised attempt to defraud the electoral system ... and that the level of fraudulent enrolment and voting is not sufficient to have overturned the result in any Division in Australia.

This is from our independent statutory authority, the AEC. A leading Australian authority on the electoral system, Professor Brian Costar of Swinburne University, wrote in the Canberra Times last December:

If there is a fault in the current Australian electoral procedures it is not rampant enrolment fraud but the very real perception of secretive influence-peddling produced by the excessively free flow of political money.

This bill does nothing to tackle that problem; indeed, it seeks to increase the flow of political donations. Instead the government uses the red herring of electoral reform to disguise its real political agenda, which is its own electoral self-interest. At an earlier time, Professor Costar said of the report:

If Federal Parliament adopts some of its key recommendations, the right to vote will be significantly restricted, thereby diminishing Australia’s well-earned reputation as a world leader in democratic practice.

Indeed, we are proceeding down that line with this legislation. Emeritus Professor Colin Hughes, a highly respected former Australian Electoral Commissioner, wrote in the Independent Weekly last November:

The thorough review of the electoral roll conducted in 2002 by the Australian National Audit Office concluded that “overall, the Australian electoral roll is one of high integrity, and can be relied on for electoral purposes”. There are adequate safeguards in the current electoral laws and procedures to deal with any future attempts at fraud without stripping the vote from hundreds of thousands of citizens.

Malcolm Mackerras, who has often supported the government when it has been justified in various electoral matters and during various elections, in commentary said that if the recommendations of the report now embodied in this legislation were pursued they would be ‘a relentless pursuit of the electoral interests of the Liberal Party’.

It is a pity that the government does not listen to people like this who actually know something about the workings of the electoral system. It is interesting that both the quotes from those experts are on the Notice Paper as a result of a question that I put down on 9 November 2005 and that I had to ask the Speaker today to ask the Special Minister of State to provide some answers to the very serious allegations of Professor Hughes, Professor Costar and Malcolm Mackerras. Of course, there has been no answer from the government before this legislation came up. That is most significant. I bet it will be produced in the next few days when this bill is passed with the government’s automatic majority here and in the Senate. It is a pity the government does not listen to people like this, though, rather than the ideologues in its own ranks and some of the Liberal Party machine men who had a hand in drafting this extreme legislation.

The first section of the bill I want to look at is the tougher identity requirements. The bill proposes that all claims for enrolment and transfer of enrolment will be subject to new proof of identity requirements. Anyone enrolling to vote or updating their enrolment will have to provide their drivers licence number or, if they do not have a drivers licence, an identity document such as a birth certificate or a passport, the authenticity of which must be attested to by an enrolled elector in a prescribed class. If they do not have a drivers licence or suitable identity documents, they must produce statements from two enrolled electors who have known the elector for more than one month, and these witnesses must themselves provide a drivers licence or identity document.

It is astonishing that the then Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance and Administration, Dr Sharman Stone, in introducing this bill in the House last December, provided no justification at all for this proposal. I would have thought that a proposal which will clearly make it more difficult for people to enrol to vote, and to change their enrolment details, needs clear justification from evidence that the current law is inadequate for preventing demonstrated abuse of the electoral system. But the parliamentary secretary produced no such evidence because of course, as we know from the committee’s report, no such evidence exists.

What will be the effect of this provision? It will make the process of enrolment and updating of enrolment more complicated and time consuming. Even though more than 80 per cent of adult Australians have a drivers licence and some of those who do not have a drivers licence will have a passport or a birth certificate, there is a significant group of people who do not possess any of these documents. They will have to go through the two-witness process, and quite inevitably some of them will find it too difficult and will not enrol. The Soviet Union used to call this ‘salami tactics’. Slice by slice, the government is restricting voting rights in Australia.

Many elderly people in particular do not have drivers licences. They will be impacted. It will seriously inconvenience people living in remote areas since the required witnesses cannot be relatives or people who live with the elector. Other groups likely to be disadvantaged are people whose first language is not English, Aboriginal Australians or first-time voters. Even the majority of electors who do have the correct documents will have to go through a more complex process than at present, and some of them will not bother. The result of this will be an increased level of nonenrolment and incorrect enrolment. The knock-on effect of that will be an increased rush of people trying to enrol or to correct their enrolment details when an election is called. These people, of course, will fall victim to the next proposal in the current bill, to close the rolls on the day the House of Representatives writs are issued, which is usually the day after the Prime Minister announces the election; thus the bill will increase the number of people seeking to enrol at the last minute while at the same time making it more difficult for them to do so.

Let me now turn to the section of the bill dealing with the early closure of the rolls. This section will have the effect of disenfranchising anyone who has not enrolled by the time the writs for an election are issued and of potentially disenfranchising all voters who are not enrolled at their correct address by depriving them of an opportunity to correct their enrolment details. Once again, the parliamentary secretary offered no justification for this change, so we must fall back on the arguments used by the government members of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in their majority report.

The majority report claimed that the current seven-day period for updating enrolment details ‘presents an opportunity for those who seek to manipulate the roll to do so at a time when little opportunity exists for the AEC to undertake the thorough checking required ensuring roll integrity’. The majority report also stated that, since the law currently required everyone who is eligible to enrol to do so and to keep their enrolment up to date, there should be no need for a ‘period of grace’ to allow people to do what they had done previously.

One shakes one’s head with wonder at how the government won the last few elections since 1996 with all of this apparent concern about the integrity of the electoral roll. It is based on a complete chimera and it is a phoenix of an argument. The government have obviously won the elections and won them fairly and there has been no substantial electoral fraud, as the AEC and various experts have attested to.

The first of the arguments is completely spurious. There is no evidence that any significant number of people seek to manipulate the roll. Who are these people? Why was no evidence about their nefarious activities brought before the committee during its inquiry into the 2004 election? The fact is that these people exist only in the propaganda of the Liberal Party. I happen to believe that the AEC is the body best qualified to inform us of any problems with the integrity of the electoral roll. The AEC has emphatically told the inquiry, as it has told previous inquiries, that there are no such problems which cannot be addressed under the present legislation.

The AEC has also refuted the government’s contention that enrolments during the period of grace are not subjected to proper scrutiny, thus making it easier for mysterious manipulators to wend their wicked way with the electoral roll. In his testimony before the committee, Mr Paul Dacey of the AEC stated categorically that the AEC applies its established procedures during the seven-day period after the writs are issued with the same degree of rigor as it does during a non-election period. It has to work a bit harder obviously because of the enrolments that come in, but we all know the AEC officials in our electorates and we know they do a fine job.

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters conducted an investigation into the integrity of the electoral roll in 2001. The AEC testified that it had compiled a list of all cases of enrolment fraud for the decade 1990-2001—71 cases in total or about one per one million enrolments. These 71 false enrolments were carried out for reasons not connected with a desire to influence federal election results. In fact, most of them were done in order for disqualified Queenslanders to get back their drivers licences.

Let me remind the House that between 1990 and 2001 there were five federal elections and a referendum, at each of which about 12 million people voted—a total of 72 million votes. The 71 known cases of false enrolment thus amounted to less than one vote per million people. Why would you change legislation, given that trivial level of fraud, and affect hundreds of thousands of people who will try to vote at the next election?

The majority report’s second justification is also quite absurd. Of course people should enrol and keep their enrolments up to date, but it is an inevitable consequence of a system of compulsory enrolment that a significant number of people do not enrol until they need to, which is when an election is called. This is no doubt very naughty of them, but to suggest that these people ought to be punished for their negligence by disenfranchisement is extreme and undemocratic. Professor Hughes rightly calls it ‘excessive legalism’ and argues that it ‘runs counter to the sensible, long-established practice whereby the Australian Electoral Commission does not pursue prosecution for non-enrolment if the neglect is remedied’. This is the ethos that we should be pursuing in a compulsory voting system.

The seven-day period for updating enrolment details was introduced as a result of the problems associated with elections up to 1983 when the roll closed at 5 pm on the day the writ was issued. At the 1983 double dissolution election, approximately 90,000 voters were unable to vote when they arrived at the polling booth on election day. Mr Ivan Freys, an AEC official, who testified before the committee about the 1983 election and the lack of time before the close of the rolls, told the inquiry:

It created a lot of confusion and a lot of provisional votes, and a lot of people go in to vote, find they are not on the roll and just walk out.

I think that is what the government wants. I have frequently quoted figures from the 2004 election, but I will do so again so that the House understands the enormity of what the government is proposing in this bill. At the 2004 election, 284,000 people enrolled or changed their enrolment in the five working days, the period of grace, between the issue of the writs and the closure of the roll. This total included nearly 80,000 Australians, mostly young people, enrolling for the first time. At the same election, 180,000 people cast provisional votes. Over the three-year election cycle, over two million Australians enrolled, re-enrolled or changed their enrolment. All of these people will be disadvantaged by the changes proposed in the majority report and as a result of this legislation and may be disenfranchised. It may only be a small proportion, but in very close seats and in Senate races a small proportion can be decisive. This is in fact what the government wants: just a little more, another slice, shaving off a little more—salami tactics, just as I described it.

Finally, let me turn to the section of the bill dealing with the disclosure of donations, which was well covered by the previous opposition speaker, the member for Prospect. I mentioned the mythical manipulators on the electoral roll. Here, however, we have clear evidence of the real manipulators of the electoral system: those who seek to buy influence through undisclosed donations and party officials who want to make it easier for them to do so. It is in this section of the bill that the hands of the government’s backroom people can be clearly seen. The object of these recommendations is simply to make it easier for corporate donors to give money to the Liberal Party without having to disclose it.

The opposition is firmly opposed to any change to the current disclosure regime. It is very misleading for government members to claim that 90 per cent of donations will still be disclosed if the threshold were raised to $10,000 as this is a measure of total donations, not a measure of the amount of each donation. Under this legislation, donors will be able to exploit the federal structure of the Liberal Party to donate $10,000 to each state and territory division, thus making an undisclosed donation of $80,000. If the current donors in the last round of the AEC disclosure contributed a similar amount to the Liberal Party, then millions of dollars would go undisclosed. Raising the disclosure threshold to $10,000 will allow large amounts of money to flow, without scrutiny, into the coffers of the Liberal Party.

The opposition also opposes the section of the bill which increases the threshold of tax deductibility for political donations from $100 to $1,500. As we said in our minority report, this is ‘an unjustified attempt to transfer private political donations into a taxpayer subsidy’. The reason the Hawke government introduced public funding for political parties was to create a fully transparent system and to prevent attempts to buy influence through undisclosed donations. These provisions will encourage individuals and companies to make undisclosed political contributions at taxpayers’ expense. The public has a right to know the sources of funding for political parties and we are opposed to changes which make it easier for individuals or corporations to make large donations to political parties in secret. These changes proposed in this legislation are a retrograde step for Australian democracy.

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