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

The context in which we are looking at this legislation, the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Close of Rolls and Other Measures) Bill 2010, is that, according to the latest facts reported to us by the Australian Electoral Commissioner and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are 13-plus million people in Australia who are eligible to vote but 1.39 million who are not on the electoral roll. I have full confidence in the Electoral Commission’s ability, with this legislation and other measures recommended by the Joint Committee on Electoral Matters and the minister, to turn that tide around over time. That should be our top democratic priority. We have a compulsory voting system and it is outrageous that almost 1.4 million Australians, out of a population of eligible voters of over 13 million, are off the electoral roll.

The proportion of Australians voting at successive elections has been dropping over the years because of a very simple fact. As members of parliament, we know that it is legislated that the Electoral Commission must advise people when it becomes aware of a change in their address through the process known as continuous roll update and it is then incumbent on the voter to advise the AEC that they are at the new address. This is very problematic, because increasingly these days, with younger people travelling, snail mail is not returned and, if the process is left over time, more and more people are taking themselves, completely inadvertently, off the electoral roll. The measures in this bill help that by giving people extra time after the election is called to enrol. This particularly affects young people, who do not have politics at the forefront of their mind. The statistics for 18- to 25-year-olds not on the electoral roll are quite frightening for the democratic process in Australia. It is something we need to work hard to reverse.

I might remind you, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, that the previous government, the Howard government, was elected in 1996, 1998, 2001 and 2004 exactly on the kinds of laws that we are proposing to put back on the statute book. There was nothing dodgy about the election of the previous government at those elections and therefore the changes that it made at the 2007 election can only be deciphered as being for the reason of gaining for itself narrow, partisan political advantage. We are simply reverting to an electoral system that existed at those previous elections. Of course, those elections were won by the previous conservative government, making a slightly more level playing field. These changes are long overdue in this parliament. I hope they pass the Senate and are not blocked by people seeking to perpetuate a narrow, partisan political advantage against the democratic interests of the vast majority of the Australian people.

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