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

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters Report on the conduct of the 2007 federal election and matters related thereto is important. I want to begin by expressing my admiration for my colleague the honourable member for Banks and his judicious chairing of this committee. This excellent, extensive and, some people would say, exhaustive report on electoral matters which we are now considering is a reflection of his and the government’s leadership on this particular issue. I want to thank all other members of the committee, including the member for Longman, who just spoke, and of course the committee secretariat for their expertise and dedication in facilitating our work in so many different ways.

Australia’s electoral system is virtuous, particularly when compared with systems operating in many other countries, including our great democratic ally, the United States. The US has a system of redistricting, organised by the congress, which would never be tolerated in Australia, but it leads to all kinds of distortions, even in their great democratic system. I believe we have one of the fairest, most transparent and most efficient electoral systems.

The member for Longman pointed out the vacuous, non-empirical nature of the minority response to this report, and I do not want to dignify it by examining its non-evidence based prejudices. Instead, I focus on the combination in Australia of bicameralism, compulsory voting, preferential voting for the House of Representatives and proportional representation in the Senate, a system which is unique in the world. It combines the best of British Westminster heritage with the best of American federal representation, with added features of our own. Compulsory voting encourages civic participation and means that all Australians share the responsibility for choosing their government. The member for Longman pointed out the pitfalls of adopting optional preferential voting. Single member seats in the House of Representatives ensure that we usually have stable majority governments. Preferential voting gives all voters the ability to influence the results of their electorate. Proportional representation in the Senate gives minority parties a voice without undermining stable government. All Australians should take pride in our electoral system.

This great report will reverse the damage that the previous government did to the integrity, openness and fairness of our electoral system with its unnecessary, partisan, short-sighted and foolish changes to the Electoral Act before the last federal election—changes to the Electoral Act that had never been made before any other election because they were not needed. The system was fair and the changes at the last federal election were a political manoeuvre designed to try and give them a little extra edge when they thought they were going to lose it. The changes were based on an assertion which was completely and demonstrably false that there was significant false enrolment or other electoral fraud which made it necessary to bring in measures to make it more difficult for Australians to enrol to vote. Everyone knew this was a false assertion. I knew it, the Australian Electoral Commission knew it, respected election analysts such as Professors Brian Costa and Malcolm Mackerras knew it, and I am pretty sure the former government knew it. It was a cynical falsehood put out by the former government to provide a fig leaf of justification for their self-interested manipulation of the electoral system for their partisan advantage.

Let me go through again, like a parrot, the history of so called Australian electoral fraud. In the period 1990 to 2001, there were six electoral events, including a referendum, with 12 million votes cast at each of them. Altogether, 72 million votes were cast during this period. In that period the Australian Electoral Commission showed that there were 72 proven cases of electoral fraud—one case per million votes cast. That was the basis on which 100,000 Australians were disenfranchised at the last election by these terrible changes to the Electoral Act—a completely bodgie manoeuvre.

The report we are debating today confirms and documents the falsity of that claim and documents the harmful effects of the changes that the Howard government made. The report quotes the AEC’s submission:

It can be clearly stated in relation to false identities that there has never been any evidence of widespread or organised electoral fraud in Australia.

The report shows that the Howard government changes had the effect of disenfranchising tens of thousands of Australian citizens at the 2007 election, which is exactly what I predicted and other members of the then opposition said would happen when these changes were debated in the House. More than 27,000 provisional voters were rejected because they did not comply with the new tightened requirements. The number of formal provisional votes fell from 112,000 in 2004 to 42,000 in 2007. This decrease was entirely due to the changes made by the previous government. On the basis of past experience, we believe at least 50,000 people would have been enrolled in the traditional seven-day period of grace after the calling of an election, but they were prevented from doing so. Many more were disenfranchised by being taken off the rolls by the AEC when they changed address and then were deterred from re-enrolling by the more onerous enrolment procedures.

In 2004, 77,000 people were added to the rolls after the close of the rolls, because they had been incorrectly removed. In 2007 only 1,400 were able to do so. My estimate is that 100,000 Australians were thus prevented from enrolling or voting by the changes made by the previous government, about 700 per federal electorate. I believe the majority, possibly quite a large majority, of those disenfranchised people came from social groups more likely to vote Labor: first-time voters, new citizens, Indigenous Australians, people with poor or low literacy skills, itinerant workers and homeless people. That was, of course, the belief of the former government which led them to the lengths of disenfranchising their fellow Australians.

It might be thought that 700 votes per federal electorate, each constituency with between 90,000 and 100,000 voters, is not a significant proportion. Need we be reminded, however, that in 2007 the honourable member for McEwen was elected by a margin of 12 votes, the honourable member for Bowman by 64 votes, the honourable member for Swan by 164 votes and the honourable member for Dickson by 217 votes. I believe that all four of these members won their seats only because of the deliberate disenfranchisement of likely Labor voters by the former government. As it turned out that was not enough to save the previous government from defeat but if the election had been closer it might have been—and that was the very plan. I might say that I find it completely incomprehensible that newspapers like the Courier Mail focus on the undemocratic role of donations and lobbying in Queensland but they are not willing to look at the bodgie results produced by the electoral changes at the last federal election in their state, particularly in two seats in their state.

The former government liked to talk about electoral fraud. As this report documents, it was a bogus claim. But if there was ever a clear case of electoral fraud in Australia, if there was ever a case of Australian voters been defrauded of their right to vote, cynically and deliberately, it was the changes made to the electoral laws by the previous government. The report recommends that the changes made to the Electoral Act by the previous government should be reversed. That is the policy we took to the last election and that is the policy to which we remain committed. The former Special Minister for State, Senator Faulkner, set in train a process of consultation leading up to the green paper setting out a timetable for legislation. The current minister, Senator Ludwig, is continuing with that process. We have seen the first stage of the government’s response to the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Political Donations and Other Measures) Bill 2009, which is currently, again, before the Senate. Now, again, we have this brouhaha in Queensland about lobbyists and donations et cetera, but it is the Liberal Party, the coalition in the Senate, that has already blocked changes that would make donations to political parties more open and transparent, and we hear nothing from the Courier Mail. I ask the editorial staff of the Courier Mail, will you please read the debates in parliament about the donations bill? Would you please pay attention to what is actually happening in this area?

The government remains committed to reversing the Howard government’s unfair and unnecessary changes to the Electoral Act, which closed the rolls immediately after the issuing of the writs and, as I repeatedly pointed out, which particularly affects younger people—deliberately so—and which required photo ID for people wishing to enrol, change their enrolment details or cast a provisional vote. The thing that I find the most outrageous and egregious about these changes is that the previous government was elected at all elections between 1996 and 2001 on the previous system. They did not claim that it was undemocratic then. The coalition were quite properly elected. Yet they invalidated the very system under which they were elected three times to try and benefit themselves at the 2007 election. All of those provisional voters who were allowed to vote in 1996, 1998 and 2001 were disenfranchised in 2007. It really is an anti-democratic outrage. The evidence set out in this report reinforces the argument that I and many others made for the repeal of those changes. I welcome the government’s continuing commitment to do this and I look forward to that commitment being translated into legislation as soon as possible.

I am going to take up my full amount of time by re-emphasising some of the other figures on the so-called ‘integrity of the roll’ issue. Let me go through some of the figures that were revealed to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters by the Electoral Commissioner. There were 17,000 apparent multiple votes at the 2001 election, for instance; 15,000 of those, or 88 per cent, were an indication from responses that no further action was required. These were tracked down, and they did not need to be pursued. There were 920 people whom the AEC got no responses from. Letters were undelivered or people were not able to be found.

So, at the 2001 election the AEC narrowed this down to a further 896 examples of what was thought to be multiple voting. People like the member for Sturt have railed about the integrity of the electoral roll at previous elections. Of those 896 multiple voters, 739, or 82 per cent, were elderly people who completely innocently, as a matter of confusion or because of poor comprehension, voted twice—at a mobile polling booth and then on the day. We know the kind of circumstances where this can happen without any kind of electoral fraud or malevolence by these elderly voters. This accounted for 82 per cent of the cases of multiple voting at the 2001 election, and it was roughly the same proportion at the 2004 and 2007 elections. There were only 138 cases referred to the AFP, of which five were accepted for investigation.

So out of 13.6 million Australian voters we have only five proven cases of electoral fraud, which the DPP decided, at the 2001 election. We have 1.2 million Australians unenrolled. That is a much more serious issue. At the last election 90-plus per cent of Australians voted, but the proportion is dropping over the years. As members of parliament all know, the AEC is almost trained to take people off the electoral roll. But we need to have a more modern process where we use all kinds of devices, such as the internet, particularly with young people, so they are able to send their re-enrolment details back in. People do not fill out handwritten snail mail these days and send it back to the extent that old-timers like the people sitting in this room do. We have to make some kind of provision for the changing nature of communications. A very good way would be to follow the lead of Mr Killesteyn—the new, savvy Electoral Commissioner—and try some of these electronic means of increasing enrolment.

In a compulsory voting system, we have a duty and a responsibility to ensure that the franchise is as wide as possible—not to restrict it, not to exclude voters because of possible perceptions of how they might vote at a federal election, and certainly not to do it in this blatantly bodgie kind of way where we used the system at three elections and then changed it at the last election. I am very, very pleased with this excellent, extensive, exhaustive report that the member for Banks has led the charge on. I think one of the great effects of this new government being elected will be to widen the democratic franchise to increase democratic prospects in Australia, I am very proud to add my name to support it and its recommendations.

Debate (on motion by Mr Hawke) adjourned.

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