Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yesterday I described the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005 as putrid legislation—and that is what it is. It is putrid legislation because, for the first time that I can recall in my time, we have a government bringing legislation into this House—with the prospect of success because it has control of the Senate—that is about disenfranchising people, not about enfranchising them. The second limb of the bill, the triple-dipping component—that component relating not to public funding, the money we get from our parliamentary entitlements, but to fundraising—will hide the money that goes to political parties and political candidates, because of the threshold increase.

I served a number of years on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. My philosophy throughout the whole of that period was to have maximum disclosure and transparency. I was one of those who argued for low threshold levels. I also did whatever I could to ensure that people were able to vote.

I said yesterday that I regard a couple of the provisions—namely, the proof of identity requirement for provisional voters and for people enrolling or updating, and the early closure of the roll when the writs are issued—as the equivalent of the ‘hanging chad’ provisions. We all remember what the hanging chad provisions did in Florida: they disqualified a large number of voters and resulted in the election of a President who, it was subsequently found, did not have a majority of the votes. That is a manipulation of the system. These are not benign provisions that this government is introducing into the Electoral Act, which is now the only qualification for people voting.

There is no constitutional right to vote anymore. That has been overtaken by the Electoral Act. So you can actually stop people from exercising what was their entitlement by bringing in red-tape provisions that will disqualify them or remove them from the count. The last time a roll was closed was in 1983 when Malcolm Fraser ran to the polls to try and overcome the election of Bob Hawke as leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party. That is the last time we had the closing of the roll when the writs were issued, and 80,000-odd people were disqualified from voting.

The second submission of the Electoral Commission, dated 30 June 2005, to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters inquiry into the last election contained a very interesting table on page 11, ‘Table 5: Close of rolls enrolment transactions by type—States and Territories—2004 federal election’. It showed that there were 78,816 new enrolments in the seven-day lapse period for enrolment—the ‘safety net’, as I would like to call it, when it comes to enrolment.

We get told by the government that these provisions are all about the integrity of the roll and stopping the possibility of fraud. As the member for Melbourne Ports pointed out, an inquiry was held in 2001 by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in which the Australian Electoral Commission testified that it had compiled a list of all cases of enrolment fraud for the decade 1990-2001 and that there were 71 cases in total, or about one per one million enrolments. The member for Melbourne Ports points out that those 71 false enrolments were carried out for reasons not connected with a desire to influence federal election results; he contends that they were in the main in order for disqualified Queensland drivers to get back their drivers licences.

This government is bringing in a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. It has gone over the top in this instance. When one looks at the people who will be disenfranchised, it is mainly young people. Yes, they are a little bit slack in becoming enrolled. Of the 78,816 new enrolments, 37,007 were aged 18, 14,132 were aged 19, and 13,058 were aged 20. That is a lot of voters, and they are not all Labor voters. This government has not brought forward any evidence of fraud—any evidence of people voting who should not have been voting—to bring about an electoral change that is going to affect on average 70,000 voters at election time. It is a matter of fact that it takes until you get to 25 years of age for the enrolments to be pretty full enrolments for age categories. The band from 18 to 25 gets progressively better. By the time you get to 25 years of age it levels out. This government cannot point to any election to show that this has resulted in an improper election result. I am of the view that the maximum number of eligible voters should be allowed to vote at election time.

We have not seen an electoral system that has disadvantaged the Liberals. The Liberals have done quite well out of the current system. What we are seeing is the Liberal Party seeking to, in effect, get into the Electoral Act and purge sections of voters that they think might not necessarily be their types of voters—on spurious grounds. I come from a background of the defence side of the criminal law. It was always up to the prosecution to prove their case and to argue their case, not to just come in with suspicion and wild theories—and, quite frankly, prejudice, which this government seems to have done as the basis of their justification.

The other electoral enrolment provisions that I find offensive are those relating to documentary proof of identity for provisional voters and new voters. At the last election there were about 180,000 provisional voters. So what you are doing is introducing another layer to basically rule people out if they do not have a drivers licence or a prescribed identification document. What is that going to do for Indigenous people? It will basically bounce them out of the electoral system when, again, this government has not shown massive fraud in what is currently a good electoral system. On a whim, on the basis of prejudice, this government is going to cleanse from the voting list thousands and thousands of people if they are not able to produce a level of identification that it is happy with. I find a remarkable that a government would go down this track. In terms of the limited provisions that the government allows for enrolment after the issue of the writs, the explanatory memorandum at page 11 says:

44.           The proposed amendments provide that the date for the close of rolls shall be 8.00 pm three working days after the issue of the writ.  However, for new enrolments and re-enrolments, the roll will close at 8.00 pm on the day on which the writs are issued (note that there are two exceptions to this as outlined in paragraphs 45 (b) and (c) below).

45.           The roll will close at 8.00pm on the third working day after the issue of the writ for people:

a) currently enrolled but who need to update their details;

b) who are not enrolled but would attain 18 years of age between the day on which the writs are issued and polling day; and

c) who are not enrolled but may be eligible to be granted a certificate of Australian citizenship between the day on which the writs are issued and the polling day.

The close of roll transactions by age—and this will involve other transactions—were put in table 7 of the submission by the Electoral Commission. That table is actually quite informative. There are up to 345,177 transactions across Australia for ‘Close of roll other transactions by age’ for the 2004 federal election. This is going to introduce quite a bureaucratic red-tape nightmare for electors at the next election.

We are also going to have the best politicians that money can buy, but we are not going to be able to see the money. Last night we saw members of the Liberal Party trawling their wares around this House, coinciding with the budget, by having fundraisers with tickets at $1,000 a head for ministers and $600 a head for backbenchers. I do not have a problem with the Liberal Party having fundraising activities but, under the new provisions, a lot of that money will not be able to be disclosed; it will be hidden. I think it is quite a grubby operation, bringing in threshold increases in effect that are designed, I think, to give a different income stream. As a result of the raised threshold levels, coinciding with tax deductibility limits being increased from $100 to $1,500—in other words, the taxpayer is going to underwrite the donations to political parties—I can see the Liberal Party and the National Party, the new millennium foundation, going out there and picking up the professionals and saying to them, ‘We want you to donate this money. Your identity is going to be secure. You can help us when it comes to the next election.’

I do not mind them doing that. What I object to is the lack of transparency. If people want to put up money to fund political parties or candidates that is fine; that is the basis upon which we run our democracy. But you get into trouble when you hide that sort of money. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, who is at the bar table, knows very well that for years the Liberal Party has sought to hide its funding so that its donors are not known. But, for my part, if transparency is there you can see what influence is exercised.

I think expanding tax deductibility from $100 to $1,500 is a rort and that increasing disclosure of political donations from $1,500 to $10,000—and these figures all have CPI components—is an outrage because people could donate tens of thousands of dollars in such a way that they would not be exposed. I say that is corrupting our electoral system. It is introducing a cancer into our electoral system that will spread. It will turn our electoral system into one which will be criticised—a system which people will question.

We have one of the best electoral systems in the world, with public funding and compulsory voting. With the way the system is conducted at the moment, we are the envy of the world. We get election results, and tight election results, that people can accept. But this is being done for partisan political advantage. It is all about prejudice in the minds of some. It results in our fellow Australians missing out on their entitlement—to go along at election time and have their votes counted.

See this speech in context