Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address) Bill 2011 and the cognate bill, the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill 2012. I am pleased to speak on these bills because I have always been very concerned about maintaining the integrity of the electoral roll. One of the great features of the Australian electoral system and our system generally is that we were able to maintain the integrity of our electoral roll to the best of our ability for many years without the technology that we have today, but we certainly knew where people lived, we knew who they were and we were able to track them when they moved.

The dissenting report by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters on the maintaining address bill said:

… this legislation has been designed by Labor and the Greens solely for their own electoral advantage.

It went on to say:

The Coalition believes that the Bill will lead to a weakening of the integrity of the Electoral Roll, a significant decrease in privacy for individual electors and will remove virtually all responsibility for individual electors to take care of their own enrolment.

That is really at the nub of the bills. It has gone from the individual looking after their own status on the electoral roll to allowing the Australian Electoral Commission to take over that responsibility. Everything else between that goes to the discussion that we are about to have. There have been a whole lot of reasons given as to why you would shift the onus from the individual to the Australian Electoral Commission, but, at the end of the day, what was the matter with the individual getting themselves on the roll, maintaining themselves on the roll, notifying when they shifted and notifying when they were not on the roll? It really takes away the individual's responsibility in this area, and I think that is a quite disappointing aspect of what is happening with these bills.

For many years there have been concerns about the agenda for watering down the integrity of the electoral roll. We also have integrity issues involving border protection—those who come here not through the proper channels but by boat. We think that maintaining the integrity of our borders is very important. The government changed those rules so that border protection has been watered down. With these bills, integrity is again being questioned.

As a person in a marginal seat, I have always been very interested in the integrity of the roll. One of the things that has happened since I came to this place in 1996, and came back again, is that I did my best to assist the AEC in maintaining the integrity of the roll in terms of those people going on and those coming off. That is one of the reasons I sign every letter to new electors personally. Not one has been electronically generated. When somebody is getting on the electoral roll I think it is quite rude for a member of parliament to send an electronic signature on a letter that says: 'Welcome to my electorate for the following reasons.' It is not only about that, but signing those letters allows me to find out a whole lot of interesting things: multiple people at addresses or an interesting drift towards new parts of my electorate, like Piara Waters. That is an interesting area, because people have to get themselves on the electoral roll.

Part of what the bills are saying is that the AEC will use a whole lot of government agencies to track people, such as the tax office or Centrelink. One of the ways to help them track who is new in an area is by the number of bins given out by the local government authority. I suppose that is one way of doing it, but it is not very scientific.

In terms of electoral integrity, we know that the Labor Party has form in this area. Dare I refer the House to the book The frauding of votes? by Dr Amy McGrath, which is introduced by Bob Bottom who, as we know, was a very good crime fighter. There have been a whole lot of books written, such as this, about fraudulent electoral practices.

You can look at some interesting anecdotes. The Labor Party have done it to themselves. Many years ago there was the great story about Paul Keating and Laurie Brereton heading off into the night with a box of electoral votes on the back of his motorbike to run them away so that they could not be counted, to skew their own electoral result. It is all in history. How the Labor Party like to manipulate their elections is folklore.

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