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

Okay. The committee chairman covered the youth enrolment procedure, where we have recommended that the schools and universities be paid a bounty, if you like, a sum of money, to ensure that young people are enrolled. That simply shifts the costs. The AEC can continue the processes that they run now—large advertising processes, material into the schools and visits to the schools—to encourage youth enrolments. That is probably going to cost more and be less effective than inviting the institutions to ensure that eligible students are enrolled.

The bottom line here is this: we have compulsory enrolment with the object of compulsory voting in this country. If we are going to compel citizens in this regard then the corollary is that the government is compelled to ensure that citizens can perform that compulsory act without undue difficulty.

There are a couple of other issues that have been raised, but I want to go to this ludicrous suggestion that we should consider the introduction of optional preferential voting. I have had some experience of this. I was elected to the Queensland parliament under compulsory preferential voting and unelected from the Queensland parliament under the process of optional preferential voting. But it is my view that optional preferential voting is the worst of all possible voting systems, with the possible exception of plurality, which we know as ‘first past the post’. What we know today as compulsory or full preferential voting was invented in Australia, and internationally it is known as the ‘Australian ballot.’ The purpose of the Australian ballot was to ensure that a person elected enjoyed the preferential support of greater than 50 per cent of electors. On the one voting occasion it duplicates the run-off system in vogue in many parts of the world. As an elected member of this parliament I take great comfort from the fact that I have the demonstrated support of more than 50 per cent of the voters of Longman, that more people preferred me rather than my opponent as their representative.

By contrast, an examination of the 2001 Queensland state election, won by a landslide by Premier Beattie, shows that 16 or 17 of the government MPs did not have that demonstrated support. After the distribution of preferences that had been allocated by voters, the total votes for those MPs was fewer than 50 per cent of the formal votes cast in their electorates. In effect, by exhausting their votes, voters are saying to the successful candidate that more than half of them prefer the other main candidate or that nobody represents them. This is a distortion. Optional preferential voting distorts the proposition that we should be electing parliamentarians and governments that enjoy majority support of electors. It certainly does not distort it to the degree that plurality or first past the post does. But evidence in my home state shows that, in each election since the introduction of optional preferential voting, an increasing number of voters are opting to ‘plump’ or to simply indicate a first preference, and in that regard optional preferential voting is slowly morphing, inevitably, into first-past-the-post voting. I do not see any large clamouring for first-past-the-post voting.

In the few remaining moments allocated to me, I wish to say something about the use of technology in relation to our electoral system. I do not want to sound like I am an iconoclast, but I think it is time—sometime this century, preferably sooner—that we start to make greater use of online provisions in people’s dealings with the AEC. I undertake some online banking with one of Australia’s major banks and I am happy that my money is secure via that process because of the account number, password, secret questions and SMS provisions. I think these provisions are an excellent way of looking towards introducing online transactions, at least in a small way initially and later on to a full online voting system.

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