Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs and Settlement Services) Share this | Hansard source

When we were last here debating the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Close of Rolls and Other Measures) Bill 2010 I made reference to the rather fanciful comments of the member for O’Connor. Those allegations about massive corruption in Australian political life owe more to parallels with US bossism, whether it was Huey Long, Doc Prendergast or Joseph Curran, and more to the films of Edward G Robinson et cetera and gangland Chicago than they do to the realities of this country. The truth is that we have a system in this country which has an unparalleled independent Australian Electoral Commission. We have heard in the course of the inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters their view of some of the reforms that are being introduced in this bill.

The United States can have gerrymanders administered by state administrations, whether Democrat or Republican. They can basically just gerrymander within that state to their own advantage. I was a member of a study group that was invited by the US government back in the early nineties and when we went to Nancy Pelosi’s office we were shocked to see a system which depended on election day on volunteers to run the polling booths rather than public servants. Older people are increasingly unable to do that. That is the kind of system that we do not have in Australia. As I say, we have an independent commission.

For many of those opposite what this issue is really about is the internal divisions on the conservative side of politics over compulsory voting. The reality is that deep down much of their agenda is to minimise participation in the political process of this country. There are those, predominantly in South Australia, who in the past have driven the need to get rid of compulsory voting. They cannot accomplish this because the National Party in particular has historically had a different view and there are elements in the Liberal Party who support compulsory voting. They cannot get away with that, so what we have is a pattern of undermining the credibility of the political system in this country. They are constantly coming up with the most exaggerated, extreme possibilities such as, ‘If this happened and that occurred, and maybe this also occurred and someone said this to another person, maybe this particular seat in the Australian parliament may be affected’.

When we look at the concerns those opposite have, there is not much credibility in the figures. Between 1990 and 2001 there were 70 cases of false enrolment. The truth is that multiple voting has been shown to be accidental, a person with an intellectual disability or an error of electoral officers rather than something perpetrated through fraud. The member for O’Connor was talking about people having trucks full of false clothes, moustaches et cetera running around the suburbs of Australia, turning up at polling booths and coming in and impersonating people. The truth, as I said the last time we were here, is that political parties in this country are finding it increasingly difficult to staff polling booths. Apart from branch stacking and factional fights, both parties find it very difficult to motivate the electorate to participate in our political life.

Obviously that is not just related to political parties. It is a reality of many community organisations in our society, from the Girl Guides to the Country Women’s Association to the local Rotary to the football clubs and to the tuck shops. These groups find it very difficult to involve people. The reality was put in a recent article in the London Review of Books by Peter Mair titled ‘The Parliamentary Peloton’ on 25 February this year. His description of political life in Britain is the reality to a large extent in this country:

The mainstream parties meanwhile struggle to gather the resources necessary to compete effectively for office. Parties can no longer rely on the efforts of eminent democrats, those activists who once persuaded voters to turn out on election day. Instead, they rely on professionals, experts, pollsters, marketing gurus and consultants, all of whom cost money and all of whose advice costs money to implement. Parties are now capital intensive, rather than labour intensive. But lacking activist labour, they have problems raising capital so they find themselves turning to a relatively small number of donors. The donors then lean on the party and the party, being organisationally weak and short of members, gives way.

He further commented—and obviously we know it is a system which is not compulsory:

Turnouts at elections have never been so low, while support for mavericks, populists and other ostensibly anti-party politicians has never been so high. Party membership has dropped significantly. Back in the 1960s when comparable cross-national data was first collected, more than 10 per cent of registered voters in European countries were members of a political party. Today, the figure is less than five per cent.

And if we delete Cyprus and Austria, which are characterised by high membership, it would be four per cent. This is the reality. For people to come in here and put forward some theory that the political parties have got the time on election day to organise this level of corruption and fraud, and to have people out there getting around, putting people on false enrolments, is preposterous. What this really is about is trying to reduce participation and trying to make sure that those groups that are most likely to be eliminated, those groups most likely to vote and those groups most likely to be disenfranchised are targeted.

If you look at page 148 of the committee’s report, for instance, it is interesting to read about the 10 most Indigenous seats in this country compared to the national situation. The average number of provisional votes in the 10 most Indigenous seats in this country is 1.76 per cent of the total vote and the national average is 1.23 per cent. In other words, it is half a per cent higher on average. It is not just one or two seats; it is not an aberration. In the most Indigenous seats in this country the level of provisional voting is half a per cent greater. It is a very significant difference. That is the kind of person that is targeted by many of the conservatives’ provisions. The attempt to make voting more difficult and the attempt to limit voting times for registration are all things essentially aimed at minimising participation. The most sorry example of this was in the 2004 US presidential elections in Florida where secretaries of state Kathleen Harris and Sandra Mortham managed to eliminate one per cent of the electorate. The member for Mitchell, who is very much a protagonist of this style of politics, smiles in agreement at their success in eliminating one per cent of the electorate and three per cent of the Afro-American vote by very duplicitous practices.

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