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

I rise today to speak on the Electoral and Referendum Legislation Amendment Bill 2006, parts of which outline further arrangements to disenfranchise Australian voters. The Labor Party, as has been said, will support the bill because parts of the bill do provide that a few more people will be able to vote, and it does ensure that ADF personnel serving overseas and sight impaired people will be able to vote. Whilst it does have some deficiencies, which I will come to, on balance, the whole package, as has been said previously, does take us forward.

The bill deals with a number of matters which the government did not deal with in the earlier bill, the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005. That bill has now been enacted, and we are beginning to experience the difficulties people are facing as they seek to enrol to vote.

Ever since I have been in this place—and I served for many years on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters—I have always been about enfranchising people, not disenfranchising people. Every recommendation when we were in government—and the honourable member for Brisbane was on this committee as well and was a distinguished chair—was about enfranchising, not disenfranchising people.

We did not have a paranoia about the Electoral Act. Indeed, a number of legal cases—Snowdon v Dondas in particular—have basically put to bed the idea of the constitutional right to vote, which was never there for the territories; it was in terms of the original states. Basically the right to vote and the ability to vote are now contained in the Electoral Act, fair and square. Governments have, through cunning amendments to the Electoral Act, the capacity to disenfranchise voters—by the use of red tape, by closing the rolls early or by closing the time that postal votes are received early—and it can have quite a marked effect. The last big effect was, I think, the early close of rolls in 1983, which disenfranchised—

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