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

As I was saying, in discussing the Tax Laws Amendment (Political Contributions and Gifts) Bill 2008 you have to look at the Liberal Party’s attitude to transparency in contributions. With the $10,000 threshold you could have given $10,000 to seven different state or territory branches—you could have donated $70,000 without transparency. You also have to look at the early closure of the rolls, where many hundreds of thousands of people were disenfranchised. And you have to look at the very strange changes to provisional voting which, the Electoral Commission has shown, disenfranchised large numbers of people. The former government claimed that this change was necessary to protect the integrity of the electoral roll and prevent electoral fraud. This was always a spurious piece of deception designed to conceal the partisan self-interest of the Liberal Party.

Let me reiterate what I repeatedly said during the inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters into the 2004 election and during the debate on the Howard government’s legislation. There is no evidence at all of any significant electoral fraud in Australian federal elections and thus no merit to the coalition’s claim that these regressive changes to the legislation were required to protect the integrity of the electoral roll. These claims were nothing but a fig leaf for the coalition’s naked self-interest. The Australian Electoral Commission, the independent statutory authority charged with safeguarding the integrity of our election system, whose commissioner was appointed by the Howard government, said in October 2001:

It has been concluded by every parliamentary and judicial inquiry into the conduct of federal elections, since the AEC was established as an independent statutory authority in 1984, that there has been no widespread and organised attempt to defraud the federal electoral system … and that the level of fraudulent enrolment and voting is not sufficient to have overturned the result in any Division in Australia.

This view was shared by Emeritus Professor Colin Hughes, a highly respected former Australian Electoral Commissioner, who wrote in 2005:

The thorough review of the electoral roll conducted in 2002 by the Australian National Audit Office, concluded that ‘overall, the Australian electoral roll is one of high integrity, and can be relied on for electoral purposes’.

There are adequate safeguards in the current electoral laws and procedures to deal with any future attempts at fraud without stripping the vote from hundreds of citizens. That is precisely what happened at the last election: 60,000 fewer people than the previous election got their provisional vote. (Quorum formed)

The regressive changes introduced by the Howard government’s 2006 legislation can be reversed by new legislation. I hope and expect that Senator Faulkner in the other house and the green paper and then the white paper process will see such legislation in this parliament by 2009.

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