Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the majority report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. I say at the outset how much I enjoyed the experience of working with this committee, particularly the good relationship that there is between members. I mention in particular the chair Daryl Melham, and the deputy chair Scott Morrison. I want to thank the secretariat: the secretary Steven Boyd and inquiry secretary Kai Swoboda, technical adviser Terry Rushton, research officer Margaret Atkin and administration officers Renee van der Hoek and Natasha Petrovic—and I apologise to any of those whose surnames I might have mispronounced inadvertently. Their work is reflected in the excellence of this report that we are discussing today. I also thank all the people who made submissions or gave evidence to the committee, in particular the AEC who gave a great deal of their time to help our consideration of the 2007 election.

As the previous speaker, the chairman of the committee, mentioned, there has been dissent by members of the coalition on eight of the report’s 53 recommendations. They have objected to recommendations 1, 2 and 3, which are to do with ‘enabling the franchise’—in other words, enabling people to vote. The majority view is that people should not be impeded in exercising their obligation to vote. Our system should be about every person eligible to vote being encouraged, not discouraged, and being enabled to exercise, not prevented from exercising, that obligation.

Recommendation 1 relates to the time the rolls close after the calling of the election. The existing legislation allows for writs to be issued on the day the election is announced, meaning that the rolls could close to new enrolments that night. That is not what happened in the 2007 election. The Prime Minister chose to wait a few days so that people had a better chance to enrol than they might otherwise have had. The former government gave themselves the opportunity to close the rolls on the day the election was announced but did not have the courage to use that opportunity. I suspect that they knew, as we all knew—and there was plenty of publicity about it at the time—that to do so was morally wrong.

I quote from the dissenting report relating to this provision. The coalition members say:

… these changes … greatly assisted the AEC in identifying and discounting fraudulent enrolments.

I have no recollection of the AEC giving us that evidence and I note that the minority report does not cite any evidence. They go on to say that the provision ‘permits calculated fraudulent enrolments to take place’. Again, there is no citation. Whilst I am no calculated fraud, I would suspect that anybody who was calculating a fraudulent exercise against the integrity of our roll would not leave it until the last minute to do so, so I suspect that that is not valid. In their submission they say:

… the number of people missing the close of rolls deadline in 2007 was 100,370 compared to 168,394 in 2004.

This is as if to present the early closure of the rolls as a good thing. One hundred thousand people is more than a full electorate quota. More than one full electorate of people did not get the opportunity to vote because they missed the close of rolls. Too many people have been excluded by the large number of existing rules. Existing rules have to be changed to allow people to be included. Those of us who are elected members, those who work for us and those who work for our parties live and breathe politics and electoral requirements 24/7. The majority of the citizens in this country do not. In fact, it is unfortunate but people in this country feel voting to be something of an imposition. It is easy for us to understand, or it should be easy for us to understand, why enrolment lapses occur.

Recommendation 2 goes to the provision of identification by provisional voters. According to the coalition members of the committee, proof of identity is:

… an important deterrent that acts to prevent citizens from failing to maintain their enrolment or who may seek to engage in multiple voting.

Pardon? I really do beg their pardon on this one. Firstly, there is no evidence—historical or since the introduction of the POI requirements before the 2007 election—that there has ever been any systematic fraudulent multiple voting. There is no evidence—quite the contrary. I refer anybody who is listening to or reading this debate to pages 16 to 22 of the report, which are titled ‘Multiple voting myth’. It is beyond me why the coalition continues to flog this dead horse.

Secondly, as for a deterrent to prevent failure to maintain enrolment details, give me a break. People are not obsessed with the processes as we are. In fact, knowing that all you have to do to get a vote is turn up on the day with your drivers licence, fill out a provisional form and send it away is going to do quite the opposite. People will even allow their voting to lapse. If we tell them that that is what they have to do, that is what they will do.

The authors of the dissenting report then go on to acknowledge that some voters are removed by Electoral Commission administrative error and suggest a ludicrous remedy. They suggest that if, subsequent to casting a provisional vote, the AEC determines that the person’s absence from the roll is its error, that vote should be allowed to go forward and the voter not have to turn up on a later date with his proof of identity. The question here is: how is the voter going to know that the AEC has determined that it is its error that he or she was not on the roll and decide that they do not have to turn up with their proof of identity?

Just under 34,000 people were unable to provide their proof of identity on polling day. About 7,000 subsequently provided that information, as they were requested to do, within the week. Twenty-seven thousand votes cast were not counted. Again, far too many people who ought to have been able to lodge a valid vote were not counted. The safety net of the automatic inclusion of provisional votes in certain circumstances—and the chairman of the committee covered this quite well just moments ago—is rejected by the minority report. There are some 90,000 votes elsewhere, maybe, but, through this, 75,000 are perhaps those that count. One hundred and seventy-five thousand votes—100,000 too late to enrol and 75,000 provisionals not counted—are far too many Australian citizens denied the right to vote.

The dissenting report concentrated largely on those provisions that make it easier for people to exercise their obligation to vote. Notably, it did not oppose recommendations 5 and 6, which make it easier for votes cast by post by people in remote parts of Australia to be included—in other words, a lessening of the provisions in that regard, which means that rural and remote Australians can have a relaxation for their votes.

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