Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Communications and Broadband) Share this | Hansard source

There is nothing more important than maintaining the integrity of the electoral roll. All of us in this House are very aware of its importance and very aware that far too often people are excluded from voting when they should be able to vote and, regrettably, people vote when they are not entitled to vote.

I want to share with the House an experience I had when I was running for parliament in the 2004 election. I was standing in the shopping mall at Bondi Junction—interfering with people's commercial activities as we all do when we are running for parliament—and I met a young woman and urged her to vote for me. She said, 'I will be away on polling day.' I said, 'Well, madam, you could get a postal vote or you could vote pre-poll.' She said, 'Don't worry about that; I will get my girlfriend to vote for me.' I nearly fainted—I was absolutely appalled. I impressed on her the seriousness of the offence she and her girlfriend were contemplating committing and I said, 'You can't do that.' She said, 'Everybody does that.' I hope I persuaded her that everybody should not do that. I had a similar experience on three or four occasions over the course of that election campaign and it impressed on me that not everybody takes the integrity of the electoral roll as seriously as they should.

When I came to this place after the 2004 elections, I regret to say that I was unable to persuade the distinguished Prime Minister of the day, the Hon. John Howard, that one of the reforms we should make to the Electoral Act was to require people to produce proof of identity when they go to vote. This was regarded by others much wiser and more experienced than me—not least of whom the Prime Minister—as being a bridge too far. But I still hold to that view. I am open to being persuaded that I am wrong of course—I am open-minded about this.

The more rigour and integrity we can put into the electoral roll the better. It is a remarkable thing that in this country you need 100 points of ID to open a bank account—you need to produce ID to do practically anything nowadays and almost everybody has multiple sources of identification, even multiple sources of photo identification—but you can go and vote and change the government of the nation, indeed the destiny of the nation, without ever having to identify yourself.

The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address) Bill 2011 does not deal with the question of producing identification at the polling booth, but what it does do is allow the Electoral Commissioner to directly update an elector's enrolled address following the receipt of information about the address that elector is at—without any discussion with, consent from or engagement with the elector in person. We all say that we have compulsory voting in Australia. In fact, we do not have compulsory voting—

See this speech in context