Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I have just said that it is quite right and proper that donations from the trade union movement should be out there in the public arena. I am not resiling from that. Of course they should. I have never had a complaint about that.

The truth is that this measure is aimed, essentially, at making sure the Australian public has less knowledge of who is donating and why. Tax deductibility, we all know, once again, is more likely. I can only speak from my own experience and probably that of the adjacent electorate of Parramatta, looking at the campaigns of the previous member for Parramatta, and at my campaign and my opponents’. The Labor Party is less likely to get donations over $1,500 at a local level, particularly, than the coalition. So to change the tax deductibility of donations is also, quite simply, quite crudely, quite obviously, related to trying to advantage the current government.

The other issue I want to talk about is the question of prisoners and their voting rights. I think the comments of Chief Justice McLachlin in the Canadian Supreme Court in Sauve v Canada are very telling:

... denying penitentiary inmates the right to vote is more likely to send messages that undermine respect for the law and democracy than messages that enhance those values.

That is the truth.

People are in jail for a variety of reasons. We know that Indigenous Australians—who, coincidentally, live 17 years less on average than other Australians—are severely overrepresented in the system. Are they professional heroin dealers and murderers? No. They are usually in jail for street offences, alcoholism and issues related to their poverty. Now we will have a situation where they will be denied a say in the political system.

I am not saying that the Liberal Party is going to go down this road, but we could look at the situation in Belarus. All of Europe has been campaigning over the jailing of Alexander Milinkevich in recent weeks because of the sham elections in Belarus. If we look at the United Kingdom, there was a huge political issue about the poll tax. Many people were jailed—for a political reason. And now, under this system, the government  would be saying that people who disagree with them could possibly be denied the franchise. I do not want to say that they are going that far, but this is a Pandora’s box that has been opened. If you start saying that anyone who is serving a sentence cannot vote in the Australian system then obviously there is the possibility that in a crisis, particularly with a dramatic political event in the country, people who object to the policies of the day—whether about the Vietnam war or whatever it was—could be denied their say in the political processes and their right to participate in changing that system. You could go around the world and find such examples—famous writers or people who were very wealthy in later life. A particular senator of this parliament served a term in Sydney during the famous IWW cases of the early part of the 20th century. A senator of this parliament had actually been convicted, as had another member in South Australia. These people, the government is saying, should not have the right to vote.

As I say, this is only the thin edge of the wedge. If we want to look at international comparisons, it is quite interesting to look at Europe. If we look at the countries that we would most associate ourselves with—the Western democracies—very few if any of them have these kinds of restrictions. Where do we find anything like this? We find similar restrictions in Hungary, Estonia, the Czech Republic et cetera—hangovers from the Soviet period, and maybe a reaction there.

So we have a situation where those that we would most like to emulate—progressive Western countries—do not have such restrictions. Where they do have these restrictions is in the United States. We have seen the situation in Florida where the President’s brother actually disobeyed Florida state law which says that people who have been jailed in Florida can never vote again—not just cannot vote while they are in jail but can never vote again. They basically got a private corporation, not an electoral commission like in our country, to scour the Florida electoral roll and they tossed off the roll people who had served sentences in any other American state. Those people could not get access to the legal system to get themselves back on the roll. And we all know that Florida was won by a very small vote. So that is the long-term outcome of these possibilities. (Time expired)

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