Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

My questions are to the Special Minister of State. I want to ask a few questions concerning the appropriations for the Australian Electoral Commission. I note that the additional sum of $58 million over four years has the stated purpose of maintaining operating capacity and supporting electoral participation. The first question I ask is: would you confirm that the words 'supporting electoral participation' mean that the extra funding is to support the Labor-Greens policy of automatic enrolment? I say it is their policy because we have opposed it very strenuously as corrupting the integrity of the roll. Could you also tell me how many electors the AEC expect to enrol under this program of automatic enrolment and how long the process is likely to take? Is it true that the AEC has begun in the marginal seat of Petrie, currently held by the Labor Party? What is the estimated total cost of enrolling people from these extraneous rolls?

Does the AEC have a preference for which data sources it uses outside the ones that have been stated already, those mainly being the equivalent of the RTA, school leaver rolls and one other? It is a completely unfettered power that the AEC has—it can choose anything it likes? What safeguards—this is very important—if any, has the government put in place, or the AEC put in place for that matter, to ensure that people are not added to the roll who are not entitled to be there? The reason I ask that question so specifically is that in New South Wales the result of automatic enrolment was that, whereas the normal turnout rate for properly enrolled electors is 92 per cent, from the people added from the automatic enrolment it was only 64 per cent. Also, we had advice in evidence at JSCEM that, of those who were added to the New South Wales roll, the AEC's success rate in getting them to transfer to the federal roll under the old law—not automatic enrolment—was only 20 per cent. That tends to make me think that there were people there who ought not to be there.

Also, having made those comments, I also ask whether or not the AEC has estimated what the error rate will be, what mechanism they have used to measure what they think that error rate will be and whether or not they can at any time hope that they could give a guarantee that 100 per cent of people added to the roll are actually entitled to be there—that the system they put in place would guarantee 100 per cent?

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