Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

We were on the same side on that one. It was quite remarkable. That was before you got seduced, dare I say.

Dr Clarke said, in his evidence to us:

The point about data matching is that it is extraordinarily error-prone. It is based on, firstly, name; secondly, usually, elements of address and, thirdly, date of birth. Date of birth is commonly unreliable. People fib about their ages. Many people are not very pleased about having to disclose their ages, and that includes males as well as females. Address in this context cannot be used because the whole purpose of the study is to come up with different addresses and therefore you cannot match on it. So you have you got to reduce quality of data matching in this data-matching program compared to all the other data-matching programs that go on in government.

Name is enormously variable in its recording and is routinely 'scrubbed'—that is the term used—in order to try to muck around with the data, modify the data, in order to make it seem right. It is differently scrubbed by every different agency, so we have differential collection for different purposes in different ways with different data-quality measures with different data-scrubbing measures, and then we bundle all this together and match it. The false positives that arise from this are enormous, as indeed are the false negatives, because there are enormous numbers of occasions where matches could in principle be discovered which in fact are not discovered by the algorithms that are used. It is extraordinarily error prone. In circumstances like these you would think enormous care would be taken, enormous justification would have to be provided, proportionality would be taken account of and it would only be done when there are very serious benefits to be gained. Unfortunately that is far from the case.

In other words, Dr Clarke, who is skilled in the e-business industry, has pointed out to us the use of scrubbing, the way in which data is collected and modified to suit the purposes for which it is collected, and such data is now going to be bundled together and used by the Electoral Commissioner to change the electoral roll, the integrity of which is fundamental to running a proper democratic system.

I think we have to conclude, unfortunately, that the government and the Greens, who have been pushing this agenda for a considerable period of time because they feel it gives them an electoral advantage, are going to be able to force this legislation through the parliament. However, it will certainly be looked at should we be successful in being elected to government at the next election. At the last gasp, the failed Victorian and New South Wales governments tried this ploy to enhance their chances of re-election. I suspect the same outcome as befell them will befall the Gillard government and its aspirations to try and gain an electoral advantage from this. I would like to conclude by saying that I suspect the next piece of legislation in this train of manipulation of the electoral process will be to try to introduce the South Australian voting system whereby, if you do not complete your ballot paper, a bureaucrat will take it over for you if there has been a registered ticket. Watch this space. I fear that the evils that can be done to the electoral system are not yet finished.

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