Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As we have seen recently in the Middle East and North Africa, the desire for democracy is a universal and fundamental value that people are willing to fight and die for. So it is important that we protect the basic democratic rights of all Australians. The most important of these is the right to vote. It gives me great pleasure to speak in favour of the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Enrolment and Prisoner Voting) Bill 2010, which re-enfranchises the tens of thousands of Australians who were affected by the actions of the Howard coalition government.

We should not be having this debate, of course. The primary reason we are doing so is the lengths to which the Howard government went to massage the criteria for enrolment in such a way as to meet its own political ends. It comes as no surprise, then, that again today we have had the coalition approaching this bill with some rather spurious arguments. We should not be surprised that we are seeing on display the coalition’s dumping of its small ‘l’ liberal values in its argument against the restoration of democratic rights that it wrested from tens of thousands of mostly young Australians in the first place.

We have heard a lot recently about the morphing of the coalition into the dangerous doppelganger of the ultraconservative Tea Party movement in the United States and how racism is eating away the coalition’s small ‘l’ liberal values. It is a reflection of how far the coalition has lurched to the right that the High Court, not itself a radical institution, has had to act to overturn these undemocratic laws.

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