Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My question also relates to the Australian Electoral Commission. I note the comment you made, Minister Gray, that there are about 1.5 million Australians who are not enrolled to vote. With 150 members in the House of Representatives, we are talking about 10,000 people per electorate, on average, who are not eligible to vote. All of us would have experienced checking the enrolment of people who contact us. Often the people who contact us, particularly if they are transient or if they have to come into a job or who recently have not bothered to vote, are not registered.

My electorate is named after Harold Blair, who was an Aboriginal activist and tenor. He is a very famous person. He grew up in the Purga Mission south of Ipswich. There are a number of important Indigenous institutions in Ipswich. There is an Indigenous school called Hymba Yumba in Springfield. Just before the census, I urged the people there to make sure that their mums, dads and carers fill out census forms. The biggest high school in Ipswich, Bremer State High School, has about 1,500 students. About 30 per cent of those are Indigenous or Polynesian, with most of that 30 per cent being Indigenous. One of the busiest medical centres in Ipswich is Kambu Medical Centre. It has tens of thousands of patients. It is an Indigenous centre.

There are about 86,500 people on the electoral roll in Blair. We are celebrating this year 50 years since Indigenous people achieved the right to vote in federal elections. I understand that it was not compulsory to enrol but once you were enrolled it was compulsory to vote. In 1967, the Constitution was changed to give power to count Indigenous people in the census and for the Commonwealth to be given the power to make special laws for their benefit.

My question relates to the Electoral Commission. I have stood at polling booths in Ipswich for about 30 years handing out Labor Party pamphlets—the opposition side would call them propaganda but I would call them pamphlets—encouraging people to vote for the Australian Labor Party candidate. I recently stood all day at Raceview State School—the biggest state primary school in my electorate in Ipswich—and one of the things that struck me about this suburb, which is fairly typical of Ipswich, was how few Indigenous people came to the polling booth to cast a vote. What steps are the AEC taking to encourage Indigenous people to vote? What are the budgetary implications? Does the AEC require any additional funding to get all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to participate in the political process?

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