Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Hotham is mumbling under his breath, but I will put it to him this way: in the past you had to go to your local booth to vote and your name only appeared at the local booth so that your name could be crossed off; now you can go to any booth in the electorate. Quite frankly, I think we should update this and use computers to make sure that a person can vote only once. We have long heard from the Labor Party, ‘Vote early and vote often.’ In one instance after an election I found out that one person had voted four times and five dead people had voted. They were recorded as voting but they were dead. Someone voted for them. Of course, we would not know which way they voted, but that is an anomaly and it should not occur. I think that if we had a computer system whereby those people who had the right to vote could be crossed off or eliminated from the computer once they had voted then they could not vote more than once in an election. I strongly support this bill. I do not think it is outrageous; I think it goes to the core of some of the issues we are trying to address. I think that it will give us a better and fairer voting system in Australia.

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