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

The defence budget is one of the largest items of the government’s appropriations and one of the most important. In the current security environment, with increased demand on our defence forces in our region on top of extremely expensive commitments in the Gulf and Afghanistan, it is appropriate that defence spending has risen and that equipment and personnel of the ADF should be upgraded. I make the point that, like other members on this side, I am a strong supporter of the defence budget, which constitutes only seven per cent of what we pay in transfer payments. Again, it is an extremely expensive item of appropriations which is overwhelmingly justified. Whether they are Centrelink payments or other pensioner payments, they are entirely justified.

Unfortunately, this government has a dismal record when it comes to responsible management of the defence budget. The Prime Minister has used the Defence portfolio as a dumping ground for ministers he is trying to get rid of—Ian McLachlan, John Moore, Peter Reith and Robert Hill. These ministers, in my view, were asleep at the wheel and the results have been predictable. At least now we have a defence minister who seems to take some interest in the portfolio, although his record so far is not much better. Just because parliament appropriates a very large sum for Defence each year does not give the minister a blank cheque. The money, in my view, is not being responsibly spent and accounted for to this parliament and the taxpayer.

This week we have seen the latest irresponsible rhetoric of the defence minister with his talk of scrapping the Seasprite helicopter program, which has so far cost the taxpayer in the order of $1 billion. As the honourable member for Hunter, the shadow minister for defence, has said, any decision to scrap the Seasprite project would be an admission of failure by the Howard government—an admission of failure to manage this project.

This government has been in power for nearly 11 years. It cannot evade responsibility for this matter. It cannot blame the Keating government, as some on that side have tried to do. The facts are that in 1994 the Keating government took a decision in principle, the correct decision, to buy helicopters that would operate from something that was called the offshore patrol combatant, which we were going to build in conjunction with the Malaysian navy. Unfortunately, the Malaysians decided to accept another ship that was provided to them by the Germans, which had a very large inducement paid with it, and Australia lost out. That was probably the stage—when this government took over the implementation of the project—at which the Seasprite should have been scrapped.

The contract to buy the Seasprite was signed by the Howard government in 1997. If there were problems with the Seasprite, it was the responsibility of the Howard government to know about them and fix them. Now, after a decade wasted and $1 billion spent, the minister, in what I can only describe as his Napoleonic style, is considering scrapping the whole project, despite the fact that, as we were advised, the problems with the Seasprite have largely been solved and full airworthiness certification could be achieved by 2010 for a cost of a further $35 million. I have no firsthand knowledge about that, but that is what we have been advised.

The minister now needs to explain to this parliament and to the Australian people what will happen if the Seasprite is scrapped. What are the alternatives the minister has in mind? How much will they cost? When will they be available? Does the minister think we can afford to wait another decade? The point is we have naval ships that need helicopters, either for surveillance or air defence or for air-sea attack, and they simply do not have them.

The honourable member for Hunter said this week that buying replacement helicopters would cost at least $1.5 billion. That is on top of the $1 billion already spent, which cannot be recovered because the terms of the contract which the Howard government signed preclude us from suing the contractors. That is right: this brilliant, free-enterprise government signed a contract which contained no clause that said we had a right to sue if the contract was not met. The figure of $1.5 billion seems to me to be a conservative estimate for the replacement of helicopter capacity. Military hardware has not become any cheaper since 1997. Even at that cost, replacement helicopters will not be available before 2010 and probably not until 2012 or 2015.

The Seasprite is the latest in a long line of defence procurement debacles under the current government, at a time when the policies of this government have put a great strain on our defence budget. Some of it is unavoidable; some of it is avoidable. This kind of irresponsible waste and bungling is simply not acceptable.

Another example is the joint strike fighter about which the minister has even now not told the House the full story. He has not told us of the impact that further delays to this program will have on our air capability, the cost to the taxpayer or the implications for our national security of the prolonged delay in replacing the F111s, which are 40 years old and nearing the end of their operational capability.

The government’s incompetence has already cost the taxpayer $3 billion through what I thought was a forced acquisition of the Super Hornet as a stopgap measure, although I notice in another backflip today the minister says he is not going to buy these stopgap aircraft. The thing that is really odd about that is: what will happen between the end of the F111 and the proposed acquisition of the joint strike fighter? Will Australia have no Air Force? It does not make sense to me.

Certainly the F22 has no stealth capacity. It would be easily matched by some of the aircraft being acquired from the former Soviet Union by countries to our north, and I think we ought to have an air superiority aircraft that would enable Australia to defend itself in the worst-case scenario of a conflict with these new, modern air forces.

This government’s mishandling of our defence acquisitions program is becoming a real threat to the sustainability of the defence budget and to our defence capability. The government seems to think it can go on wasting millions of dollars on failed defence procurement projects without any financial consequences. But the resource boom is not going to go on forever, giving us ever-expanding government revenues. Sooner or later the buck must stop somewhere.

I point out that these are not just the views of members on this side. We might for some reason be suspected of having partisan motives in our criticisms, but the same cannot be said of Australia’s leading defence policy centre, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which has issued a highly critical assessment of the government’s defence and national security policies. The report said that the government’s mismanagement of the Defence portfolio was undermining the safety and security of Australia. It highlighted the lack of planning, the failure to match our ambitions with proper funding and what it called a collapse in financial accountability.

Labor has been calling for a new Defence white paper to set out the government’s views on defence challenges facing Australia and how we are going to meet them and pay for them. This call was made last year by the honourable member for Barton and has been repeated by our new spokesman on defence, the honourable member for Hunter. I support that call, which I know is also supported by senior serving members of the ADF, and now the ASPI report supports that call.

I turn now to the government’s activities in electoral matters—something that has been of interest to me since 1998, when I became a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters when first elected to this House. Until last year I was deputy chair of JSCEM but made way for my colleague the senator from Western Australia. As I am already occupying the position of whip, I cannot now hold those two paid positions simultaneously. Previously, as deputy chair of the committee, and together with my Labor colleagues, I issued a minority report following the government’s inquiry into the 2004 federal election campaign. Major changes to Australia’s electoral enrolment were contemplated by the government on the—and I can only say—fraudulent claim of protecting the integrity of the electoral roll. Again, I feel like a robot repeating this, but I will keep repeating it until the next election, and I will keep repeating it through the media, as a lot of people are interested in how this disgraceful plan to close the electoral roll on the day the election is announced came about.

In 1983, when former Prime Minister Fraser and a previous conservative government ran Australia, nearly 300,000 people lost their right to vote after they closed the electoral roll on the day the election was announced. We had an inquiry immediately after the last election at which no evidence—not just little or infinitesimal evidence, but no evidence—was adduced that said the electoral roll in Australia had serious problems with it. The committee went to hearings all around the country. We considered these matters very carefully. We asked witnesses to provide us with this evidence. No evidence was provided. There were lots of complaints and lots of issues about other things, but to make a decision to change the requirements of Australian democracy for hundreds of thousands of people based on no evidence is a scandal.

In the period between 1990 and 2002 there were six electoral events—five elections and one referendum—and at each event 12 million Australians participated. So six events times 12 million voters is 72 million individual votes by Australians in that period. The Australian Electoral Commission, the body officially charged with looking after the integrity of the electoral roll in Australia, found that in that entire period, 1990 to 2002, there were 72 proven cases of electoral fraud in Australia. Most of them were to do with re-establishing people’s rights to get a motor car licence in northern New South Wales, vis-a-vis Queensland. They had nothing to do with political chicanery.

One in one million votes were proven cases of electoral fraud, and they were not done for political reasons. On that basis, we are now going to prevent hundreds of thousands of Australians from being able to use the normal period that they are used to using—and, I am very proud to say, Labor put into practice after the chicanery at the 1983 elections—which is the week after the election is called, to fix up their electoral enrolments, to find out the right polling booth to go to and to provide the Electoral Commission with some information so that the election can be conducted with some order. I predict that there is going to be chaos at all the booths, and the responsibility for this will lie squarely with the government. The names of the two relevant ministers, past and present—Nairn and Abetz—will stand for ‘chaos’ in terms of Australian electoral history, because that is what they are bringing to the Australian people.

We predicted that these changes would lead to the disenfranchisement of hundreds of thousands of Australians. In our report, we were highly critical of the government’s decision to change the Electoral Act to close the rolls on the day the writs for the House of Representatives were called rather than to allow a period of grace of five working days for voters to enrol or change their enrolment details, as the act has allowed since 1984. New evidence has emerged that the Australian Electoral Commission supports that contention even further.

The statistics are astonishing. At the end of 2004, there were 13,114,475 voters on the electoral roll. At the end of 2006, there were 13,081,539—a drop of 33,000 over a year. Why has this happened? Why is it important? The main reason that people go off the electoral roll is that they change their address or forget to update their enrolment. When the AEC notices that a person is no longer a resident at their earlier address, it quite rightly removes them from the roll. The AEC has stepped up its work of checking the roll so that the rate of removal is rising. In 2005-06, nearly half a million people were removed from the rolls. My colleagues the members for Bendigo and Chisholm will have noticed when they get their update from the AEC every month that more people in their electorate are being taken off the roll than are going on it. This is happening in all of our electorates right across Australia.

A secondary reason is that people who die or who leave Australia are rapidly removed from the roll. Also, the proportion of people who become newly eligible to enrol—they have turned 18 or have become Australian citizens—is falling. If the level of enrolment is falling at the rate of 30,000 a year—and it will be higher than that because the population is growing—at the end of a three-year cycle, we will end up with 100,000 people who may not be enrolled or who may be incorrectly enrolled. In the past, this would not have mattered much because, when the election was announced, these people would realise that they were not enrolled at their new address or were not enrolled at all and they would use the five-day period of grace to enrol. They will no longer have that option.

This is an election year and, of course, a certain number of these people will take action to get themselves enrolled well before the election, but many will not. The government says it will ask the AEC to run an awareness campaign before the election to encourage people to enrol. Australians have always run these campaigns and they have some success, but we manage to get enrolment up only to the level it has been, and it will not go higher than that, and that was in the previous circumstances when voters had a period of grace. I support the enrolment drives. I support the AEC and their advertising campaigns. But I have to ask: does the AEC know the date of the election? I think not. I have heard lots of government members gabbling around the House saying that it will be held in the first week of November, but I do not think they know. Most people expect it to be in late October.

Under our system, the Prime Minister can call an election whenever he likes. There is speculation that the Prime Minister is seeing his political position deteriorating and that he may opt for a snap early election—perhaps straight after the budget. All of these things are possible and all of them are an argument for Gough Whitlam’s great vision for Australia of a four-year fixed term. Like other democracies, we could go to our elections with our professional Electoral Commission fixing up enrolments, with citizens knowing they can come at a regular time, and with government not determined by such a short-term process as our current three-year term or by the whim of a Prime Minister of whatever political party.

What would happen to the AEC’s awareness campaign in the current circumstances? Enrolment would not happen; possibly several hundred thousand people will be caught out by having no time to enrol. Apparently, members opposite say, ‘Serves them right; they should have enrolled.’ We say that most Australians have higher priorities in life than politics and they should not be disenfranchised for the crime of not paying attention to the date of the 2007 election.

This country has a very good system of democracy. Our compulsory voting system gives us a very high participation rate but it also gives us the double duty of ensuring that our democratic franchise is as wide as possible. With our voting system being compulsory, we cannot possibly target for disenfranchisement, by neglect or difficulty, groups of young people, Aboriginal voters and people who quite often change their address who are more likely to live in rental properties. Some people like me who are cynical might think there is in all of this a deliberate plan or the black hand of Crosby Textor, who, in a Liberal world view and in an attempt to permanently disenfranchise voters with a propensity to support the Labor Party, is trying to cut out, salami style, union affiliation, Aboriginal voters, young voters and those in rental accommodation—people whom the government thinks this process will disenfranchise.

My suspicion is that the Liberal Party research team has advised the government that the majority of people who will be eliminated under these circumstances will be Labor voters; so freezing them out of the political process would be to the government’s political advantage. Current and former ministers’ plans have to be seen in this context. There is no other way of describing it than as a disgrace. It is a negation of the principles of democracy in this country and I am very proud that Labor has opposed these changes. We now oppose them all the more, having seen in the AEC report evidence of their likely effect on the level of enrolment.

Just as I know the shadow minister has made this pledge to the House, I make this pledge in the Main Committee: if after the election we are in government, we will repeal the harmful changes that have been made to the act. That will be a great thing for Australian democracy, along with our other plans for a referendum on Australia becoming a republic, looking at ideas such as four-year terms and many other democratic initiatives that will be seriously undertaken by a modern, reforming Rudd government. I can see a great democratic future for Australia and it is not going to be under this government; it will be under a new government.

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