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

As the honourable member for Melbourne Ports interjects, it is attendance which is compulsory. But the idea that somebody can be enrolled at a particular address simply because the Electoral Commissioner has found their name, with that address, on some other database or some other accounting system is profoundly wrong. Electors should be enrolled at the address they provide. If it turns out that they are no longer at that address, the Electoral Commissioner should do his or her duty and chase them up. Then it is up to the elector to put themselves back on the roll. But the idea of people being automatically enrolled is only calculated to make the electoral roll even less reliable than it is today.

I am not going to speak for very long on this because my colleagues have spoken so well and comprehensively on it. But I will just make this one point in closing, because it is a point I did not hear made by my colleagues earlier in this debate: the most insidious thing this amendment does is undermine the sense of personal responsibility. I gave the example of the woman I met who said she was going to get a girlfriend to vote for her. She had, in my view—and I hope I persuaded her that she was mistaken—a quite inadequate, improper and indeed unlawful view of her responsibility as an elector. She thought she could delegate that to somebody else who could walk in there and impersonate her. Since ID is not called for, in all probability that sort of impersonation would generally be successful.

There is nothing more important that we all do as citizens than vote. All of us have the very important civic obligation of attending a polling place and, if we choose to—and of course almost everyone does—voting. Our engagement with the electoral office is a personal obligation; our engagement with our democracy is a personal obligation. The idea that you can be put on the roll at an address without any action by yourself undermines that sense of personal responsibility. It debases the electoral roll and it will make the electoral roll, which is, as of today, insufficiently reliable, potentially much less reliable in the future. The member for Tangney and other speakers on our side, as well as my colleagues in the dissenting report of the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters, have described all the defects of the various databases that can be accessed. There is no substitute for an elector taking his or her own responsibility for saying, 'This is where I live, and I know that if I make an untrue statement I am committing an offence.' The responsibility should be on the electors, on citizens—after all, this parliament, this democracy, belongs to them. Their engagement with the electoral process should involve a decision by them to put themselves on the roll or to correct and change their address when they move house. It should not be imposed on them by some computerised exercise of pulling their name and address out of a third-party database. For that reason we are opposing this legislation.

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