Sophie Mirabella (Indi, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Industry and Science) Share this | Hansard source

'Democracy!' my friend from Melbourne Ports calls out. As a proud custodian of the culture and philosophy that gave the world democracy, Member for Melbourne Ports, I am a very proud advocate of democracy, but don't we find it somewhat ironic that we have a government saying, 'We want democracy'? What is democracy? If we break it down, it is the will of the people. So we have Big Brother telling the people: 'This is your will. We will enrol you.' How utterly absurd. How counterintuitive. The Labor Party can talk about democracy all they like, whilst they disrespect the intelligence of the Australian people to enrol to vote. If there are issues, we have worked over decades on electoral education, on getting people onto the roll. But this attempt to introduce automatic enrolment and to have automatic changes to people's address details will only increase problems with the integrity of the roll because there are already embedded problems with the correctness of the information in the data with which this automatic enrolment and changes to the enrolment will be undertaken.

It is not actually that difficult and it is not actually that onerous to fill out an enrolment form. It is absolutely absurd to say, 'That is such a high bar.' If you take that to its logical conclusion, then, for so many things that we need to be proactive to fill in forms about, why don't we just dispense with that? Why don't we have Big Brother in every department just making decisions about what we should do? That is the logical conclusion of what the Labor Party are proposing. They expect us, on this very, very important issue of the integrity of the electoral roll, to just have blind faith that the 'reliable and current data source', which has no definition, which will be at the discretion of the commission, will be absolutely flawless. We cannot accept that because we have seen data that is flawed.

They hold up the automatic enrolment in New South Wales, and that has not been without its problems. Only 12 per cent of people who had their details automatically changed in New South Wales—at the state level—then enrolled themselves federally. As a result, electoral commissions at both federal and state level are having extraordinary difficulty in contacting people. This is just one example of the problems you get with automatic enrolment.

We do not believe that government knows best. We do not believe in the nanny state. We believe in upholding and respecting the rights and responsibilities of individual Australian citizens to change their enrolment forms and details. Beyond that, we think there is great scope to water down the integrity of the electoral roll. I do not have a view about the voting intentions of one group of people as opposed to another—we see a very fluid change in the Australian community. What I am concerned about is Big Brother making big mistakes and watering down this great democracy of ours.

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