Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is important that whenever an election is called, the government that is elected as a result of the counting of the votes is in fact the government elected by the Australian people. That is why the Liberal and National parties when in government, and now in opposition, have always sought laws which maintain, protect, encourage and enhance the integrity of the electoral roll.

There are five elements to the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Close of Rolls and Other Measures) Bill 2010, three of which the opposition is prepared to accept and two of which the opposition is not prepared to back under any circumstances. The five schedules will, firstly, restore the close of rolls period to seven days after the issue of a writ for an election; secondly, repeal the requirement for provisional voters to provide evidence of identity before their votes are admitted to scrutiny; thirdly, enable pre-poll votes cast in an elector’s home division to be counted as ordinary votes whenever practicable; fourthly, allow the Australian Electoral Commission to process enrolment transactions outside the division for which the person is enrolling and enable electors to update their enrolment details electronically; and, fifthly, restrict the number of candidates which can be endorsed by a political party in each division.

The opposition strenuously opposes schedule 1 and schedule 2, but is prepared to support the amendments proposed as a result of schedules 3, 4 and 5. Consequently, I will focus my attention on the two schedules which the opposition is not, in any shape or form, prepared to accept.

It really is important, as I said at the outset, to guarantee that we have an election result which is what the people voted for. The amendments moved by the former government, when in office, sought to improve and maintain the integrity of the electoral system. There is no doubt that there is an ongoing obligation on the part of Australians to enrol to vote. It is an obligation under Australian law that when a person moves to a certain locality within a certain period of that move the person is required to register to vote either for the first time or to move his or her enrolment from the previously enrolled address.

I am someone who personally believes in voluntary voting. I think that it is quite wrong that in a democracy people can be jailed, as has happened in the past, for failing to vote. People are often fined, and if they do not pay the fine then they go off to jail for a default period. I see that as being the antithesis of democracy, and I think Australia is one of only two or three English-speaking countries throughout the world which has compulsory voting. I do, however, support the concept of compulsory enrolment. There is a requirement under the law of Australia that people who are eligible to do so enrol at the address where they are currently residing. I support that, and if people observed the law of Australia then they would be enrolled whenever an election was called.

This particular bill seeks to give people a window of opportunity of seven days after the issue of the writs for an election to get on the electoral roll or to amend enrolment arrangements. The difficulty with that, of course, is that it means that people who are ill intentioned are able to, using nom de plumes, lodge a multiplicity of enrolment applications and, because of the imminent arrival of the election date, the Australian Electoral Commission, which is highly professional, simply will not have the time to check out the bona fides of those people seeking to get on the electoral roll.

It would be very easy for someone in a marginal seat who wanted to rort the electoral roll to simply sit down with a few friends and think of a few hundred nom de plumes, post away the enrolment forms and get on the electoral roll in the period between the issue of the writs and seven days after. The Australian Electoral Commission, which would be flooded by these applications for enrolment, both genuine and nongenuine, simply would not have the manpower to process these applications, taking into account all of the checks and balances which ought to be applied.

So essentially what would happen is that these people would automatically go on the electoral roll, the election day would arrive, and these people—or their nom de plumes—would be able to vote. What could happen is that an army of people could be organised, particularly since the abolition of subdivisional voting. That is, subdivisions seem to have gone from federal divisions. Once when a person voted outside his or her subdivision it was necessary to cast an absentee vote. Now, of course, people in a division are able to go to any polling booth—and many divisions have anywhere between 30 and 90 polling booths—and cast a vote.

Unfortunately, given the laxness which the current government wants to introduce into the Electoral Act, it would make it much easier for the government to hold the large number of marginal seats which it holds as a result of the 2007 election. So it could be that this particular provision is designed to enhance the possibility of the return of the Rudd government at the election later this year. If this particular schedule becomes part of the law of Australia, it will be a green light to people to rort the electoral roll. It will be a green light for people to think of any number of nom de plumes and get them onto the electoral roll, because the Electoral Commission will simply not have the time to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. As a result, we will see a significant threat to the electoral roll of Australia and, of course, that increases the chances of the result as declared on polling day not representing what people actually voted for.

The present arrangements seem to be ones which are working well. The electoral roll presently contains a high degree of accuracy and integrity, and what the government is proposing will give the opportunity to the rorters to in effect reign supreme and will enable those who want to bring in fraudulent enrolments to do so with impunity. What will also happen, of course, if we return to the pre-existing arrangement that there will be a seven-day window of opportunity to enrol, is that citizens will become more relaxed about updating their particulars and maintaining their enrolment during the ordinary course of the year, as they will have the opportunity to delay any action until an election is called. This position was reaffirmed in the Liberal-Nationals senators’ minority report on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters committee inquiry into the conduct of the 2007 federal election and matters related thereto.

So we are not going to apologise in any way, shape or form for opposing schedule 1, dealing with amendments relating to the close of the rolls. We also oppose, as I indicated before, schedule 2, which relates to amendments concerning evidence of identity for provisional votes. The previous government, in our effort to make sure we had integrity of the electoral system, moved to stop fraudulent voting by persons impersonating other voters by requiring that people who claim a provisional vote at an election be required to produce evidence of their true identity and their enrolled address, either on polling day or, if they did not happen to have it on polling day, in the week following.

Who on earth, if he or she is a reasonable person, could object to that particular arrangement? Do the government really want anybody to come up and say that they are John Smith, Jane Doe or Joe Bloggs and claim a provisional vote in the name of that person and be able to do so without proving that he or she happens to be the person that he or she is claiming to be? I find it breathtakingly amazing that the government can stand up in the House and say that they support amendments of this nature—amendments which in effect will help to tear up the integrity of the Australian electoral roll.

There has been a great deal of cynicism in relation to politics, and we saw the One Nation and Pauline Hanson phenomenon. Ordinary, decent Australians felt disempowered from the political process. They felt disconnected from the political process. They felt that they could not have a say. They felt that politicians were not listening to them. They felt that the thought police were out there, stopping people from talking about issues that ought to be talked about. While I do not want to revisit the issues raised by Pauline Hanson in the parliament or in the media, I think it is important that we have a situation where people can have confidence in our electoral system. People will not move to extremist forces if they have confidence that the government of Australia is in fact the government that the majority of the people of Australia actually voted for.

That is why it is incumbent on all of us, regardless of where we happen to stand in the political spectrum, to strongly support laws that maintain the integrity of the electoral system. We only have to turn our television sets on any day of the week or any night of the year to see that in other parts of the world elections are contested and in some cases international election observers are called in because there is a worry by the people in the country that the electoral system does not have integrity. As an Australian, I am particularly proud that we do have in our electoral system more integrity than most other countries. I think that we can always continue to improve—to dot the i’s and cross the t’s in our Electoral Act. It is a work in progress, of constantly improving the accountability and integrity mechanisms.

The Howard government was prepared to do that. I find it incredibly concerning that the current government seems to want to roll back the clock to give, in effect, open season to the rorters in the same way that their open door policy and their demolition of our border protection policy has laid out the welcome mat for people smugglers. That is a matter that is increasingly of concern to the Australian people. Under the arrangement proposed by the government under schedule 2, there will effectively be no consequence for breaching the Electoral Act, the benefits of enrolling correctly will be reduced to nothing and there will be no disincentive for anyone who fails to correctly enrol, leading to a situation where the whole basis of the AEC’s continuous roll update program is severely undermined.

Any proposal such as that contained in the bill before the House—to weaken the rules relating to proof of identity for provisional votes—should be opposed because it rewards people who have been lazy and helps make fraudulent voting easier. Regardless of where we stand politically, any action by any government to bring in laws which encourage fraudulent voting ought to be strongly opposed. The policy of the former government was strongly reaffirmed in the opposition senators’ minority report of the Report on the conduct of the 2007 federal election and matters related thereto.

Frankly, Australia embraces an electoral philosophy that gives all eligible citizens a right to cast a vote on polling day. I believe they should have a right and not an obligation, but under our law they have a right ‘and’ an obligation. That means that they are required to exercise their democratic responsibility to help choose a government of the day. It does nothing to encourage confidence in the electoral system when we have a government which is prepared to introduce amendments to that electoral system which clearly militate against the integrity of the electoral roll. I have often said that Australia is the envy of nations throughout the world. The integrity of our electoral system is another attribute of this nation which enables us to strut the world stage and help encourage sound governance, good electoral practice and democracy around the world. If the amendments proposed by the government are brought into effect, it means that we as Australians will have slightly less ability to say that we are a country which has one of the best systems in the world, because we will have a government which is moving down the same road that many governments overseas have gone down. Those governments have, of course, been quite rightly criticised by the current and former governments in Australia.

It is very important that we know that people on the electoral roll are real Australians. We need to know that they are really entitled to being on the electoral roll. We need to cut back every opportunity for electoral fraud by reducing the chances for dodgy names to make it onto the electoral roll and by making sure that each voter casts only one vote. I know it has often been said in relation to those on the other side that it is important to vote early and often! I do not believe that most of our colleagues opposite would support that, because I believe that most of our colleagues on the government benches share our wish to have integrity in the electoral system. But their wish is totally at odds with the proposals contained in schedules 1 and 2 of the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Close of Rolls and Other Measures) Bill 2010. Nobody in the House wants cats, dogs and goldfish having their names registered on the electoral roll. It does not help the integrity of the electoral system. I am not suggesting we are going that far; however, what we are seeing is death by a thousand cuts. We are seeing the integrity of the electoral rolls slashed by schedules 1 and 2, currently before the chamber. If these two schedules become law then the government will be emboldened to further erode the integrity of the electoral system.

I believe that it is important that the government reconsider this matter. While many things separate the approaches of the government and the opposition to life and politics and our visions for the country, there are overriding principles which should bring us together as a country. Let’s face it: we are one of the oldest democracies in the world. Someone told me we are the sixth-oldest democracy in the world. We have freedom, stability and a way of life that makes us the envy of people throughout the world. We have an electoral system which, up until this bill, has been respected around the world. I am not saying we cannot make it better, but we should be moving in the direction of improving the integrity of our electoral system and not in the direction of shredding the integrity of our electoral system. So the amendments before the House are, in fact, extremely unhelpful. They undermine our capacity to stand at world fora with integrity. They undermine our capacity to be seen as paragons of best practice. They undermine our capacity to hold our heads high amongst the ranks of those who support democracy. I see the bill that is before the House as sad, because it is a first step in undermining the integrity of our electoral system. No doubt there are many countries in the world that have electoral systems with less integrity than our electoral system would have even if schedules 1 and 2 became part of the law, but this is a nail in the coffin. This is a first step towards tearing up the integrity of the Australian electoral system.

I see this particular change as bizarre, undesirable and just something that the government ought to reconsider, because our core values as a nation support the principles of integrity and electoral justice whereby when people vote for a government that is the government that is actually elected. I just believe that trying to force through the parliament these amendments contained in schedules 1 and 2 of the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Close of Rolls and Other Measures) Bill 2010 is an action which ought to be opposed. I think these amendments are retrograde. I think they are unacceptable. They will be repudiated by the people of Australia and they do no credit to this government. They do no credit to the electoral consensus in this country, which has sought to maintain a bipartisan sense of integrity in the electoral system. I oppose schedules 1 and 2, I support the other three schedules and I hope that the government will reconsider the retrograde, undesirable elements of the bill before the chamber.

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