Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to speak on the important Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Close of Rolls and Other Measures) Bill 2010 today and indeed to follow the new member for Bradfield. I would like to commend him on some of the statements he has made, in particular wanting to support one aspect of this bill, which is the important addressing of the question of multiple nominees of a party as happened in the Bradfield by-election.

I am standing here stunned to hear that the member for Bradfield is quoting as his poster boy former American President Ronald Reagan. I am standing in the chamber thinking: what is it that President Reagan has to do with electoral politics? I am thinking back to my time in Washington, because I was there in the eighties during the second Reagan administration and I spent a lot of time involved in the Iran-Contra hearings. What does this have to do with electoral politics? It had a lot to do with the electoral politics in Central America, particularly in Nicaragua. It was an interesting tangent for the new member for Bradfield. But I will come to why I am prepared to support this bill. I think it does go a very long way to restoring our democracy to health after what I would describe as the malaise it endured under the previous government.

As other speakers on this side of the House have observed, this is a bill that restores the status quo ante on voter enrolments after the announcement of an election by pushing back the close of the electoral rolls to seven days after the issue of the writ—the period of grace, as I think member for Isaacs told us earlier in this debate. This is in line with recommendation 1 of the inquiry into the 2007 federal election by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, where the member for Banks presides with a very steady hand. It is a right and proper thing that he does so, because restoring access to the franchise is the first and foremost aim of this bill.

Again it has been interesting to be in the chamber while the other side, principally the member for Bradfield and others, have been demonising the Labor Party over matters that have nothing to do with a federal election. In fact, by contrast, the previous government did many things, I think, to outrage the decency of fair-minded Australians. The change pushed through the parliament in 2006 by Senator Eric Abetz, the then Special Minister of State, to bring forward the close of rolls is up there among the outrages, and for those on the opposite side it is a long list. There was the wrongful deportation of Australian citizens and children kept in detention under the policies of the member for Berowra. There was the wheat for weapons scandal in Iraq that happened on the watch of the former member for Mayo. Then there was the lengthy detention of Dr Mohamed Haneef presided over by the member for Menzies. Those on the opposition benches certainly set the bar very high when it comes to outrageous behaviour and the denial of fundamental democratic rights. But I think the disenfranchising of thousands of Australians is definitely up there among the great outrages perpetrated by the previous government.

I remember the 2007 campaign vividly. One of the first public events I had in Bennelong was a seminar at the Epping Club. I entitled that seminar ‘Integrity in government’. As members who are familiar with northern Sydney, and that would certainly be the member for Bradfield, the Epping Club is a long way in both distance and mindset from, say, something like the Randwick Labor Club. The Epping Club is not the red centre of Sydney. But on a cold night in July 2007 there was standing room only in the Epping Club to hear Senator John Faulkner speak with his characteristic passion about Senator Abetz’s changes and about how the Howard government had been playing fast and loose with our democratic traditions.

The former government was full of rhetoric, as we can all recall, about the benefits of freedom and democracy in other parts of the world. At the same time, it was pushing through changes that eroded the ability of Australian voters to exercise their fundamental democratic freedoms. As the Human Rights Commissioner, Graeme Innes, has noted, the changes have the potential to disenfranchise:

… many Australians—particularly those who are marginalised, such as young people, new Australian citizens, those in rural and remote areas, homeless and itinerant people, Indigenous people and people with a mental illness or an intellectual disability …

In fact, it was only the hard work of the Australian Electoral Commission, through a $24 million advertising campaign, that prevented the former government from disenfranchising even more Australian voters in 2007. The figures speak for themselves. As the joint standing committee has noted, almost 280,000 people successfully enrolled or changed their enrolment in the week before the rolls closed for existing voters on 23 October 2007. As we know, the election was called on Sunday, 14 October. The writs were not issued until the Wednesday even though the election was announced on the Sunday. If those writs had been issued the following Monday and the rolls had closed, as they could have, on Monday, 15 October, 17,000 of those 280,000 enrolment transactions would have been made. As it was, more than 100,000 people missed the close of rolls deadline in 2007, either by failing to enrol or changing their enrolment details. Admittedly that was fewer than in the 2004 election, as the member for Indi pointed out, but she failed to point out that it was because of that $24 million AEC campaign and the fortuitous timing of various public holidays after the election announcement on 14 October.

As a member of this House, I cannot say that I am proud of the fact that 100,000 Australians missed out on exercising their right to vote, and nor should any other member of the House. The overall number of voters who ended up being disenfranchised was greater than that 100,000. Again the report of the joint standing committee states that close to half a million electors were unable to exercise the franchise at the last poll. That is because they were either not on the rolls or because they were on the rolls but with incomplete or incorrect details. As the joint standing committee has pointed out, that included 31 17-year-olds who would have turned 18 on or before polling day and more than 4,000 18-year-olds who would have voted for the first time in the 2007 election. These young people were denied the opportunity to do so because of the changed arrangements.

I think these figures are the crucial context in this debate. They show up the straw man arguments of those opposite as they persist in their campaign to deny Australian voters the opportunity to vote—a denial afforded by early closure. The straw man in this case is the argument that somehow the integrity of the roll needs defending. ‘Defending from whom?’ you might ask. Perhaps from the sort of people who were distributing unauthorised materials in the seat of Lindsay during the last election campaign, and we know how that sorry episode turned out. I do not think that is the sort of mischief those opposite are worried about today. They are instead perpetuating the original flawed rationale that they used to justify these changes in the first place. They made the changes and they are sticking by them on the pretext that there are people who might mischievously cast multiple votes. I am pleased to say again that the joint standing committee’s report has well and truly torched the opposition’s straw man.

Earlier in the debate the member for Moreton made this point, but it bears reinforcing. There were 20,000 instances of apparent multiple voting in the last election. The AEC wrote to those voters. In more than 18,000 cases no further action was required. There were just over 1,000 admissions of multiple voting, but more than 80 per cent of those were due to confusion or poor comprehension. So what was the final wash-up? Ten cases were referred to the Australian Federal Police and there were no prosecutions. What does that tell us? It tells us that there was no problem, yet the opposition are prepared to disenfranchise tens of thousands—even hundreds of thousands—of voters in the name of their imagined scourge of multiple voting, a scourge for which not one person was prosecuted in the last election.

I note that the member for Cook, in his dissenting report to the joint standing committee, puts an interesting spin on early closure. He insists that bringing forward the closing of the rolls had a positive effect by actively encouraging enrolment. A positive effect? I think the member for Cook has spent enough time at polling booths to know just how positive voters feel when they turn up on election day and find themselves unable to do their civic duty. Those opposite must accept the reinstatement of the one-week closure. The report of the joint standing committee lays everything out with great clarity. There is no acceptable excuse of confusion or poor understanding available to those opposite. They must cease their reliance on disingenuous and sham arguments about protecting the so-called integrity of the roll at the expense of Australians who just want to exercise their right to vote.

What is wrong with embracing and restoring the fundamental rights of our democracy? It would seem to me that the best way to ensure the integrity of the electoral process is to ensure that we make enrolment simple and widely available to what is now a very mobile population in Australia. That is why I am glad to welcome another part of this bill that will allow the Australian Electoral Commission to modernise enrolment procedures by instituting online enrolment updating. So many of our daily transactions now happen online, such as banking, bill payments and many other things. Our electoral enrolment must be one of the last aspects of our lives where we have as yet been unable to update electronically. Everyone in this place knows how mobile we are. As the joint standing committee report observes, the last census showed that 43 per cent of people lived at a different address from where they had lived five years previously. This is very important for our democracy and I am glad to say that this part of the bill has bipartisan support, as it should.

I am glad as well that this bill will make it possible for prepoll votes to be counted on election night. There seem to be more and more close contests. The counting of prepoll votes as ordinary votes, I think, will give us more chance of knowing for certain the result in those close seats on election night. Having had to wait for 48 hours or more back in 2007, I am all for that.

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