Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure and honour to speak on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address Bill) 2011 and the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill 2012 and to respond to some of the points made by the members for Indi and Mackellar. I particularly want to commend the Special Minister of State for tackling this matter and taking up the decline of enrolment across Australia.

This legislation will mean that, when it comes to elections, more Australians will have a say in who represents them. I will provide some of the extraordinary facts—as opposed to the rhetoric from obscure professors cited by the member for Mackellar—outlined by the Electoral Commission in their report on these changes to the roll. In 2001, there were 0.9 million electors not on the roll; in 2004, there were 1.2 million electors not on the roll; in 2007, there were 1.1 million electors not on the roll; and, in 2010, there were 1.4 million electors not on the roll. At the parallel elections of 2001, there were 12.6 million Australians on the roll; in 2004, there were 13 million on the roll; in 2007, there were 13.6 million on the roll; and, in 2010, there were 14.1 million on the roll. The Australian Electoral Commission estimate that, at the end of 2011, the federal enrolment participation rate was 90.2 per cent. This means that around 1.5 million people who are eligible to vote are not enrolled and consequently cannot vote.

Indeed, at the 2010 federal election, 2½ million Australians did not effectively exercise their vote. Of these, 1.4 million were not enrolled, 729,000 were enrolled but did not show up, 400,000 cast informal ballots and 166,000 provisional voters thought they had cast a valid vote but in fact had their vote excluded. These issues were all handled by other aspects of the government's electoral legislation, but I want to go back to the Electoral Commission's cool, rational, dispassionate explanation of the decline in the percentage of people who are enrolled and of the massive increase in the absolute number of Australians who are not enrolled.

The estimated enrolment participation rate on 31 December 2011 was, as I said, 90.2 per cent of the eligible population. That sits near the bottom end, the Electoral Commission said, of any recently recorded measure of enrolment participation. The problem of non-enrolment extends beyond an asserted disengaged youth issue. Enrolment rates do not reach 90 per cent of voters until voters reach 40 years of age and the AEC's whole-of-population target of 95 per cent enrolment is not met until electors reach their mid-50s or late 50s. Worse than that is the fact that not only is the absolute number of Australians not enrolled increasing but the percentage of the population not enrolled is also increasing. So the Electoral Commission has a very substantial problem, a problem not addressed in the remarks of either the member for Indi or the member for Mackellar.

The member for Indi spoke of a class war and used the Liberals' favourite cliches—'the integrity of the electoral roll' and 'Big Brother'. The integrity of the electoral roll involves more than just cutting people off and making it harder for them to be enrolled; it involves seeing that the Australian electoral roll accurately represents the broad mass of citizens of Australia as best it can. Some of the remarks of the member for Indi would make former Prime Minister John Howard turn in his grave—if he were in it, which thankfully he is not at the moment. But the point is that continuous roll update was used by the previous Howard government to—

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