Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to voice my strong support for theElectoral and Referendum Amendment (Close of Rolls and Other Measures) Bill 2010. Leaving aside Indigenous battles and the Eureka Stockade incident of 1854, internally here in Australia we enjoy a very healthy democracy. It has endured. It has been stable and strong since Federation without civil war or major crisis. There was only one big hiccup on 11 November 1975, which I will not dwell on. In fact, Australia is one of the longest standing continuous democracies in the world. It is certainly in the top five. When citizens head to the polls in Australia, governments come and go without a shot being fired. Tears are shed—there may have been a few on the other side on election night 2007—but lives are not lost. To paraphrase Malcolm X in one of his speeches, ‘When it comes to the bullet or the ballot box, we wholeheartedly chose the ballot box.’

We should be proud of our great democracy and we should strive to protect and uphold it. As Joni Mitchell said, ‘You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.’ Here we have people who whinge about having to vote. Some of the 10 million or so people who voted on 24 November 2007 whinged about having to do so. You should have some of my constituents, particularly some of the Hazari people from Afghanistan, talk about their involvement with democracy, especially about some of the journeys they had to undertake to get to a polling booth, especially when they were being discriminated against. Since the fall of the Taliban in 2002, Afghanistan has been in transition to democracy and is still developing accountable public institutions and electoral processes.

I want to particularly focus on Afghanistan. Last year the presidential election in Afghanistan was an admirable achievement for a country going through some tough times, but there was a very low voter turnout and those who did vote risked their lives to participate. They travelled through valleys and experienced incredible circumstances to get to a polling booth. Unfortunately, the results were marred by allegations of intimidation and fraud. Yesterday, I heard on The World Today on the ABC that the position of the Canadian head of the international election watchdog commission had been terminated by the president for doing his job. Apparently, now the president will be choosing a new watchdog.

Afghanistan’s transition to democracy continues and hopefully the forces of good will ensure a more robust and transparent election next time around. You will recall the 2000 Al Gore defeat in the United States and the problems with hanging chads and the like in the Florida electoral process. So when we look at places like Afghanistan, the United States or Iran and many other countries around the world, we should be especially thankful for our democracy and, as members of this parliament, we must do whatever we can to protect the democracy that we have inherited. That is why, through this bill, we are undoing some of the previous government’s work which I firmly believe had a negative impact on our democracy as a whole.

It is no secret that former Prime Minister John Howard enjoyed being the Prime Minister, so much so that when his mates started tapping him on the shoulder he refused to budge. Worse than that, he also started to make some subtle changes to the very electoral processes that had put him in power to further enhance his re-election chances in 2007. In my opinion, this is unforgivable. The coalition were prepared to put bad power before good government. These changes were bad for democracy overall, because they were about intentionally excluding certain people from voting. We heard from the member for Melbourne Ports, and it was stated in one of the submissions to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, that analysis of the empirical data showed that the people most likely to be excluded were those who would vote Labor or Green.

If you are John Howard and you are reaching for a fourth term, what do you do if you are on the nose with young people—that particular cohort? Perhaps young people particularly care about climate change, so what do you do if power is more important than principle? You amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act before the 2007 election to close the electoral roll to new enrolments on the very same day that the writ is issued. It was the best way to keep pesky young people off the electoral roll and out of the electoral process and hopefully keep John Howard’s shaky grip on power.

As you know from your own circumstances or from your own electorates, young people are actually much more likely to change address. They tend to rent, rather than to own homes, and they go where the wind takes them, or where friendships take them. You see them on the weekend, lined up and knocking on the doors of their friends with utes, asking to move from one place to another. You see them on Saturdays, moving from place to place. So this was quite a strategic and tricky manoeuvre by the current opposition. It was subtle, but it was mean and tricky, and responsible governments should flee from any similar attempt to manipulate electoral processes or to water down our democracy. This House, and all that it represents, is bigger than all of us. It was not the finest moment for those opposite; that is for sure.

The Rudd government believes that a healthy democracy relies on giving all eligible adults the opportunity to vote. The fact that at December last year almost 1.4 million eligible voters were not on the electoral roll tells us that too many people are fed up with the political process and they do not want to jump through the hoops to get on the electoral roll. 1.4 million people—that is about 15 members of parliament. Look around the chamber and think of how many MPs that is and the voices that would not get a chance to speak in this parliament. A third of these unenrolled eligible voters were aged between 18 and 25. That is about five MPs—for example, the members for Bowman, Dickson, McEwen, Swan and Mayo—who would not have had a chance to speak because of those young people who did not have a voice in this chamber.

What motivated this incredible change to the process that got the Howard government elected in 1996, 1998, 2001 and 2004? What incredible things forced the removal of 1.4 million people? Look at the report from the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters entitled Report on the conduct of the 2007 federal election and matters related thereto. On the day about 10 million people voted in that election and the total number of votes, when you count them all up, was 12,987,814 votes. How many multiple-voting occasions were there, if this is about cleaning up the roll? Let us look at it: the hot number of actual multiple-voting occasions referred to the Australian Federal Police out of that 12,987,814 was 10, which was 0.0001 per cent. Ten occasions were actually referred to the Australian Federal Police, and of those how many that resulted in prosecutions? Zero!

It is disgraceful to think that for those sorts of results you could wipe 1.4 million people’s votes out. It is shameful. The Rudd government wants to ensure that all people who want to be enrolled to vote have a reasonable opportunity to get on the roll, and we want to remove any unnecessary roadblocks. The suggestion from those opposite is that people who turned up without ID can go down to the electoral office and show the returning officer their ID. How many did it? How many actually turned up to their electoral offices in the next couple of days? It was something like four per cent. So, even though they had turned up to vote and to participate in the democratic process, how many then actually got in their cars—and if you are outside of a city you might have 100, 200 or 500 kilometres to go—to drive to that office within five days of the vote? You are just not going to do it. That is just a reality of the political process. Most Australians are not that passionate about elections or politicians or the like. That is the reality

The Rudd government wants to ensure that people do have a reasonable opportunity to vote. It is why we made an election commitment to restore the close of rolls to seven days after the issue of the writ for an election. This is a much more appropriate time, a reasonable time, a common-sense time. This bill delivers on our commitment that we took to the Australian people in 2007.

As I said, the Howard government introduced changes to close the electoral roll to new enrolments at 8 pm on the day of the issue of the writ. As it turned out, it was eight o’clock on a Sunday night when you would have had to sort out your details. It meant that people who move around a lot, young people and potential first time voters who are not aware of the process and who do not just turn up to the same polling booth every year, were excluded. They were not able to get on the roll and, consequently, they were not able to take part in the election in 2007.

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