Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Can I firstly thank the member for Jagajaga for her very erudite presentation of the arguments as to why we should be making these changes to lower the donation disclosure threshold. This has been an issue for the labour movement in particular for some years. It is important that everyone in this country understands who is providing the resources behind political parties. It needs transparency. It is part of what we need to open up our democracy, just like it's important to open up our democracy by making sure that everyone who's got the right to vote does vote. Sadly, that's not the case when it comes to people who live in remote communities, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as my friend the member for Leichhardt could attest. Over the last week or so we've seen massive demonstrations across the world and here in Australia around Black Lives Matter and all the attendant issues that go around addressing disadvantage and making sure that people are open to participating in our country and having issues dealt with that they need to have dealt with. The problem with that, of course, is that if you're an Aboriginal person living in a remote part of this country, you're very unlikely—in the Electoral Commission's own figures, at June 2019 only 68 per cent of the Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory who were eligible to vote were enrolled to vote. In Western Australia the figure was 65 per cent. The turnout was around 70 per cent. The formal vote is around the same. So you're getting roughly around half the Aboriginal population actually exercising a formal vote.

That raises very significant issues for us in this country. If we're saying we want to hear the voices of Aboriginal people—even though this government denies them that opportunity in terms of a voice to parliament—if we want to hear the voices of Aboriginal people at the ballot box, which is where we want them to exercise their voice, then we'd be making sure they were enrolled to vote. Yet this is not the case. Despite the figure I used from the Australian Electoral Commission, the Australian National Audit Office had a figure suggesting that 42 per cent of all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are not enrolled to vote. Think about it: only 58 per cent are enrolled to vote. How are they exercising their voice in this democracy of ours if they can't vote?

Part of the issue here goes to the way in which this government has run down the resources of the Australian Electoral Commission. In 2013-2014 there were 179 visits by remote teams to Aboriginal communities across Australia. They had $3 million devoted for that purpose. In 2018-19 that figure had dropped to 91. In the case of the Northern Territory, the Australian Electoral Commission dropped its staffing from 15 people to 3. There are 280-odd polling places in my electorate of Lingiari, 280 remote polling places, which require polling teams to be moving out a fortnight before the final date of the election, on the Monday of the penultimate week, involved in mobile polling. It's very important that people are involved in that polling process. But if there is significant underenrolment, as we know now there is, what action is the Commonwealth taking to address that underenrolment issue?

One of the issues we have here is that direct automatic enrolment is not available to remote communities. That's a significant issue. Direct enrolment is not used in remote communities—God knows for what reason. But there are obvious ways in which you can inform people that they are on the roll apart from using the postal service. There are electronic media which we all use very effectively and which are used effectively by people who live in remote places.

But the fundamental issue here is really, really very important. I think there is an argument to say that the lack of engagement by the Commonwealth Electoral Commission and, indeed, this government, by not ensuring people are properly enrolled to vote and informed on how to vote and exercise their vote at election time, is an act of discrimination. I think there is an argument that it could be contrary to the Racial Discrimination Act in this country, and that's something which this government should take seriously. We have obligations under international law. We're party to agreements in the United Nations which talk about the rights of people to exercise their rights in the democracy, yet we're clearly making it extremely difficult for Aboriginal people who live in remote places to be enrolled and to have a vote.

I've been involved in I forget how many elections—12, and some before that; 12 of my own, that is. They've all involved remote community polling. Very little has changed in the way in which we enrol people. Very little has changed. If you don't have face-to-face interaction, it is extremely difficult unless you're doing automatic direct enrolment. Unless you have face-to-face interaction and take people through the process of filling out an enrolment form, then people don't get enrolled. There are language issues, obviously, for people who live in remote places, where English is the second or third or fourth language. You need to make sure that they've got access to interpreter services so that they understand what you're talking about.

Up until 1996, the Electoral Commission had mobile voting enrolment and education teams operating across remote Australia. One of the first actions of the Howard government was to get rid of them. They haven't been put back since, although there was an increase in the expenditure under Labor. That makes it really, really difficult to understand how this government can be committed to addressing rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in this country if they don't give them the fundamental right to exercise a vote on polling day. It seems to me that it's in the hands of the government to make changes here, and it requires them to fund the Commonwealth Electoral Commission appropriately so that they can put in place these electoral teams with the proper personnel to be operating on a full-time basis across remote Australia, talking to people about the importance of voting, making sure they're enrolled to vote and turning up on voting day to exercise their right to vote and actually vote formally.

As I'm sure the member for Leichhardt will know from his experience in remote places, sometimes these things are very difficult. The resourcing of remote mobile polling teams is difficult. The ability of the Commonwealth Electoral Commission to do its work in remote places is difficult. We accept that. That's not to say it can't be done or shouldn't be done; it should be done, and every effort should be made to make sure that it is done. This government has chosen the opposite path, undermining the rights of First Nations people in this country to exercise their proper rights as citizens by making sure they're enrolled to vote and exercise a formal vote on polling day.

We talk about a lot in this place. We talk fulsomely about the importance of public policy. We talk fulsomely about the importance of engaging with people across the electorate, across the community. We talk fulsomely about getting people engaged and making them informed, providing them with opportunity. Well, the most fundamental opportunity in this country as a citizen is the right to vote. Yet here we've got what is arguably discriminatory action by this government, ensuring that Aboriginal people in remote communities do not have that right to vote because they've failed to ensure that they're enrolled to vote in an appropriate manner.

Debate adjourned.

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