Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Cities and Urban Infrastructure) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Voter Integrity) Bill 2021. Labor is opposing this bill and the attack on our democratic rights and institutions that it represents. It is simply disgusting that the title of this bill includes the word 'integrity'. This bill has nothing to do with integrity and neither does this government. In fact, the very opposite is the case. This bill is by its very design a vehicle to diminish electoral integrity by restricting, without a shred of evidence, people's capacity to vote and by raising unwarranted questions about the operation of Australian elections. It is part of a wider attempt to undermine our democratic institutions.

On the eve of an election, this government, in its desperation, is seeking to move beyond rorting public money and treating it as a political slush fund to rorting the electoral process itself, seeking to rig it to its own advantage following the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Political Campaigners) Bill 2021, shamefully rammed through this chamber on Monday with 35 separate amendments introduced at the very last minute, giving members no opportunity to consider their effect. That was a bad bill designed to shut out the voices of those who might be critical of this government, including some of the most important voices and perspectives that need to be heard in this place in our politics, diminishing our democracy again in the absence of evidence—indeed, in defiance of the evidence.

On this point of evidence, I note that, just as we were participating in the last decision, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights issued some guidance on this bill—the bill that's before the House right now—raising its concerns about the restriction on the right to vote that is set out in this bill—this bill which is all about voter suppression. It is part of a disturbing pattern which we see emerging, representing the very opposite of boosting electoral integrity. The bill before the House is a revealing piece of legislation. It speaks to the character of this tired, dysfunctional and directionless government and that of the man who leads it. He's a bloke you can't trust and who, through this bill, says to Australians that he doesn't trust them. In essence, that is what this bill is all about. He has clocked that Australians are working him out and that he has no record to run on—no record of achievement, no vision for the future. While he didn't 'hold a hose', he's now, in his audacity, telling Australians that they must bring particular forms of identity with them in order to exercise the most fundamental of democratic rights—that of casting a ballot on election day. He's making it harder to vote and pretending that this is somehow needed when it is a solution in search of a problem, notwithstanding the real danger that suggesting there is a problem here represents to maintaining trust in politics, and pretending that this bill is concerned with lifting democratic standards when the evidence tells a very different and much more sinister story.

On Monday, Mr Morrison's government moved to shut out opposing alternative viewpoints from the political debate, punishing charities and not-for-profits who might want to tell the truth about Mr Morrison's many failures. Today, his government is trying to suppress the vote. Through the pandemic, we saw a welcome increase in Australians' trust in government and political institutions. This increase in trust, though, is being undermined by the Morrison-Joyce government, which is taking every opportunity to dog-whistle to those with extremist and dangerous views, as we saw in question time today. In the past week, we've seen gallows displayed on the steps of the Victorian parliament and violent threats made against elected officials across the country and their families too. Instead of standing unequivocally against these threats, the Prime Minister has taken the opportunity to emulate Donald Trump. Mr Morrison has chosen time and time again not to make clear that all this conduct is unacceptable in our democracy. Instead, not wanting to upset violent extremists, he took the opportunity to tell them that he understood them.

This is at the same time that he claims credit for high vaccination rates without taking responsibility for those measures necessary to get those rates up. Indeed, he's undermining those measures, calling for restrictions on the unvaccinated to be rolled back, putting at risk the workers and healthcare systems that have kept us safe for the past two years. On the one hand, he's claiming he wants the government out of people's lives, and, on the other, he's limiting political debate and suppressing voters with additional regulations. This is a joke at the expense of Australians.

It is another opportunity of Mr Morrison, the Prime Minister, seeking to divide Australians, rather than unite them. He claims he believes in vaccines, claims credit for the vaccination rates, but at the same time he allows government members and senators to spread COVID and vaccine misinformation and disinformation, like Senator Rennick, who's been running scare campaigns about vaccine safety, including sharing posts from an antivaccination advocate who's called for the execution of Prime Minister Ardern for her country's vaccination program. And Senator Rennick has been rewarded for this conduct, as we learnt today. There's also Senator Antic, who has been feeding protests by claiming Australians are being coerced into getting vaccinated against their will, and of course there's the member for Dawson, who has promoted dangerous and banned COVID-19 treatments and compared vaccine mandates to apartheid, and he put in a disgraceful performance before question time today, a disgraceful performance matched by the failure of the Prime Minister to call it out, matched by the weakness of the Prime Minister who cannot even bring himself to say the name of the member for Dawson, which is George Christensen by the way. He deserves to be called out, instead of another nasty deflection and irrelevant attack on great Australian Sally McManus.

Australians deserve so much better. Australians deserves political leaders from right across the ideological spectrum who will stand up for integrity in politics, through our words, speaking honestly and telling the truth and matching those words with deeds. It's now well over 1,000 days since the Prime Minister promised a national integrity commission, but he won't establish one. If he did, he knows that it would be the members of his government who'd be the first to be hauled before it for this government's treatment of public funds, the Liberal Party's slush fund, and for the failure to disclose the source of secret donations hidden in something called a blind trust. Yesterday, Labor and the crossbench in the Senate sought to bring closer the national anticorruption commission that's so sorely needed in Australia, but the Liberals and the Nationals with their allies have again voted against this. They should be ashamed, and they should think about their obligations to our democratic and electoral system, instead of continuing to undermine these.

This bill is a cheap trick by the Morrison-Joyce government that it thinks will help it win the next election. This bill will require every Australian elector to prove their identity when they go to vote at the next election, and it has nothing to do with electoral or voting integrity and everything to do with this Prime Minister using any tactic available to him to stop people who might vote against him from having the opportunity to vote at all. This Prime Minister has only one motivation for everything he does. Nothing he brings before this House is ever genuine. Nothing is ever done in the public interest or the interest of Australians. Everything is done purely for this Prime Minister to somehow find a path to be re-elected, and this bill is part of that plan. It's a blatant voter suppression tool.

This government talks about how voter identification is required in other countries in all but 14 states of the US. The fact is, though, other countries don't have Australia's system of compulsory enrolment which makes the opportunity for voter fraud here almost nonexistent. Yes, voter ID is used extensively in the United States. It's straight out of Donald Trump's playbook. While we celebrated those famous and inspirational long waits in queues at ballot boxes—they were inspiring—let's remember that they were a triumph of resilience that should never have been required in the face of cynicism and often in the face of racism in that country, which we should not be seeking to emulate in this manner. There is simply no need for these laws. We know this because the Australian Electoral Commissioner has said the number of multiple votes cast in Australia is vanishingly small. It's something like 0.001 per cent. Of over 16 million people enrolled to vote at the last election, only 2,102 voters were found to have multiple marks next to their name. The commission wrote to every single one of them and found that many of the marks were simply administrative errors, where the polling official had mistakenly marked off the adjacent name. Others were mistakes by older people who voted again on polling day having already voted by post. On the few occasions where a person had more than two marks next to their name, some were found to have had issues in terms of their mental health. Out of 16 million voters, only 24 were referred for investigation. And how many were prosecuted?

Not a single one, as the member for Chifley reminds me. As well as investigating every single potential model to vote, the AEC also examines multiple marks by electorate to ensure there's never a situation where any instance of multiple voting is greater than the margin for the election. If this was to occur, the AEC would seek for the result to be overturned in the Court of Disputed Returns. The AEC has never had to do this.

Despite all this evidence to the contrary, this government is desperately pushing this legislation through in the final sitting fortnights of the year, potentially the final sitting fortnights before an election and the very end of this parliament. So you have to ask: why is this government prioritising this voter suppression bill and the other measures designed to diminish electoral integrity over its national integrity commission? Well, the government knows, for example, that people in remote Indigenous communities are less likely to have or to carry identification with them. Enrolment and turnout are already much lower amongst Indigenous Australians than non-Indigenous Australians, with just 79.3 per cent of Indigenous people enrolled to vote nationally, compared to an overall enrolment rate of 96.1 per cent. And this is even worse in the Northern Territory, with an Indigenous enrolment rate of 69.6 per cent. More needs to be done to address this, including investigating how people living in remote communities can be added to the roll through federal direct enrolment and an update program. Requiring voters to provide identification will be yet another barrier to prevent First Nations people from voting and from their voices being heard in this place. The National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation has previously submitted to a government review that:

Many of our Aboriginal patients use their Medicare card as their only form of identification—many do not have a Drivers' License or a Proof of Identity card.

With many relying on a Medicare card as their only proof of identity, if someone replaces an expired or lost card when an election is called, they may very well not receive their card in time to vote, especially if that card has to be delivered to a regional or remote area. These are issues that you would be very familiar with, Deputy Speaker. This is a particular issue for those trying to attest someone else's identity. While there is a wider range of identity documents available to show when identifying themselves, when attesting to vote you can only use a Commonwealth or state issued identity document and not things like bank statements, rates notices or credit cards, which the government has promoted as making the vote process under the bill accessible. In combination with the polling officer's discretion and the possibility of names not matching on documents, introducing these changes this close to an election is a recipe for a disaster on polling day.

When the Northern Territory was about to be reduced to just one seat in the House of Representatives, we had to fight tooth and nail to save the seat of Lingiari and ensure Territorians had the representation they deserve. I want to acknowledge the tireless efforts of the member for Lingiari in that respect. In lieu of reducing the Territory to just one seat, this government is now using the bill to help it win Lingiari by suppressing the votes of First Nations people in the Territory. And, as the member for Kennedy has rightly pointed out, these laws are blatantly racist and will prevent First Australians living in community areas from voting, and I quote him, 'How hypocritical is it of this government to pretend to support a voice to parliament while taking steps to actively prevent First Nations people from participating in our democratic process.' Of course, it doesn't end here. People who are experiencing homelessness, women subject to family violence who have had to leave their home and many young people do not have easy access to identification that many of us take for granted.

In my role as the shadow minister for multicultural affairs, I've also heard from multicultural communities about the effect that this proposal will have on them. FECCA says that the government's proposed changes would disenfranchise voters from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds who often face substantial hurdles in proving their identity. Identity documents can become mismatched for many reasons, including the anglicisation of personal names, difficulties in adapting cultural naming customs to standardised forms and government data entry or transliteration errors.

In this bill, if a polling official is not satisfied with someone's proof of identity, they can reject someone's claim to vote, allowing a declaration vote should certain circumstances be met. It's unclear the extent to which the name on somebody's identity will have to match their name on the roll. When confronted with someone with identity documents with a variation of their name due to registration differences, how much discretion will be left to the polling officer to allow or to deny someone their vote? Will they be directed to reject someone whose name isn't an exact match? How many forms of identity will someone be allowed to produce to try and prove their identity before they may be considered a fraud? If someone's identity is rejected, how many people will go home and find a document up to the polling staff's standard, and how many people would simply risk the fine rather than go back to the booth, and, particularly in a summer election in parts of the country that are a bit warmer than the northern suburbs of Melbourne, this may be a challenge.

Filling out a declaration envelope is not the easy solution the government makes it out to be, either. Currently, to complete a declaration envelope, you're required to provide your full name, address, phone number, date of birth, town and country of birth, and either your drivers licence or passport number, or have the envelope filled out by somebody who can attest to your identity. If you have to fill out a declaration vote because you don't have identification or someone to attest to your identity, how can you provide a driver's licence or passport number or have someone to attest to your identity to receive a declaration vote? It is absurd.

The AEC Commissioner has stated that the vast majority of multiple votes are cast by people over the age of 80 who have English as an additional language or are confused about the act of voting. At the last election, only 64 per cent of provisional votes were counted, with more than 56,000 votes excluded from the count—56,000! An AEC analysis indicates that provisional votes are roughly 50 per cent more likely to be informal. These are serious considerations that raise serious questions for anyone who is concerned about the strength of our democracy.

Given the complexity of completing a declaration vote, especially if you speak English as an additional language or have low literacy skills, many votes submitted by eligible voters may be excluded due to informality—votes excluded as a result of this proposal; votes that would have been counted if these electors had been allowed to vote in the same manner as every other election they have participated in. Indeed, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights noted in their scrutiny report that it was unclear if declaration voting was an accessible alternative for voters. This is a very, very serious concern that goes to the heart of this bill and demonstrates the cynicism that animates it.

These changes are being rushed through without consultation or regard for the particular impacts on multicultural communities—a major failure of process, compounding the substantive problem that underpins the bill. Instead of listening to our independent Electoral Commission, who have made clear that voter impersonation is not a problem in Australia, the Morrison-Joyce government is acting on suggestions from the Institute of Public Affairs. As the member for Moreton would be well aware, that is the same right-wing group that has long campaigned for repealing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to allow for hate speech. The government are listening to the IPA and not considering the facts before us, which is that these laws in the bill before us are unnecessary, burdensome and a deliberate, shameful and dangerous attempt by the Prime Minister to undermine public confidence in our electoral system.

I draw the attention of members to the evidence of Professor Graham Orr, from the University of Queensland, one of Australia's leading experts in electoral law. He said:

The "evidence" to support voter ID is the intuition that voters should produce ID. The benefit of voter ID is said to be enhancing perceptions of integrity.

…   …   …

Perceptions of risk can also be circular, if not manipulated. By playing up integrity risks, regardless of the actual evidence, you can generate concerns that you then use to justify new rules.

These are the exact tools that the US Republicans and Donald Trump used—and there are still people in the United States who believe, shockingly, that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. There are real dangers to our democracy here and they need to be called out by all of us engaged in democratic politics.

While requiring identification will affect the most marginalised in our communities, make no mistake: this change, which has not been required in 120 years of federal elections, will make voting take longer all of us. There will be queues around the block on election day, with over 16 million identities being checked, with AEC officials needing to verify the authenticity of documents, making sure the name and address match that on the roll, then issuing and explaining declaration votes for people who've failed this unnecessary test—often an unfair test.

The member for Moreton reminds me—and during a pandemic. That's something that I'm glad he raised, because there is an important electoral bill that needs to be debated to put in place provisions that will enable the conduct of an election should pandemic circumstances render challenges on election day or during the course of the election period. But we're not debating this, are we? It is still sitting on the Notice Paper, where these bills, fulfilling an ideological agenda on the one hand and a desperate and cynical power grab on the other, are being pushed through this House, and, I'm sure government members hope, being pushed through the other place as well.

Let us think about the people who can't wait around on election day or at prepoll—shift workers, parents with young kids and older people who can't stand in queues for hours who might just give up and go home without voting. This law will potentially disenfranchise thousands of Australians. When voter ID was introduced at the 2015 Queensland state election, voter turnout was the lowest it had been since 1980—the lowest for 12 consecutive elections. Polling officials turned people without ID away because they were confused about the rules and didn't offer them declaration votes. Voters were also confused, so they didn't turn out if they didn't have ID or didn't vote at all if they had forgotten their ID.

With this government rushing this legislation through, this experience could well be replicated at the next election, with very, very serious consequences for our democracy. Even the government-controlled Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights said that these laws could reduce public confidence in the electoral system, that these laws could discourage some voters from voting and that these laws may be discriminatory. It is my hope that the members of the government who recognised these things in the committee will make that recognition clear on the floor of this place and of the other place, and join us in voting down these unnecessary, discriminatory and dangerous proposed changes.

The substantive impact of this is also impacted by the failure of the government to support the independent umpire in the Australian Electoral Commission. I note the government has provided just $5.6 million this financial year for the AEC to implement this change. This won't even touch the sides of what's required. You don't need to be a mathematician to work out that that won't be enough for the AEC to write to every single voter to provide them with a letter of enrolment that they can take along as proof of their identity. Yet, somehow, that $5.6 million has to cover: a public education campaign; training on the new rules for over 100,000 polling day staff; and additional staff that will be required at every polling place to manage the increase in the number of declaration votes. That's before we get to some of the challenges that the global pandemic may impose on the conduct of the election. I really feel for the AEC, who do such important work for all of us and for our country, having this change dumped on them months out from conducting the biggest peacetime logistical exercise in Australia's history under the cloud of COVID—a change which they have said is entirely unnecessary. And they would know; they are our election experts.

In addition to checking every single multiple vote, the AEC has other systems in place to protect the integrity of our elections. The AEC is increasingly rolling out electronic certified lists, an improvement on the paper rolls, lessening the chance of administrative errors and providing real-time updates on whether an elector has already voted. In addition, earlier this year this parliament passed legislation to establish a designated electoral register. If someone has been identified as a multiple voter they will be placed on this register and will only be able to vote by declaration vote, ensuring only one vote is counted. The Electoral Commissioner has said both of these initiatives will greatly assist in dealing with a very small number of multiple voters—a real solution, instead of this cynical exercise in power grabbing.

That brings us to the real question before the House: why is the government doing this? There is simply no warrant for changing the voting rules at what may well be the eleventh hour. This has nothing to do with electoral integrity or voting integrity but everything to do with this Prime Minister's character. Instead of this change here, there is much so more we could be doing to improve electoral integrity. To that end, I move the following as a second reading amendment:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the House declines to give the bill a second reading and:

(1) notes that the bill's stated intention is to improve public confidence about the integrity of ballot-issuing practices;

(2) notes further that the independent Australian Electoral Commissioner has said that the issue of multiple voting is 'vanishingly small'; and

(3) calls on the Government to implement electoral integrity measures that would make a real difference including:

  (a) lowering the disclosure threshold from the current $14,500 to a fixed $1,000 so political donations are transparent for all to see;

  (b) requiring real time disclosure of political donations; and

  (c) reforming electoral expenditure laws;

  (d) providing more resources to the AEC to increase enrolment and turnout;

  (e) addressing the spread of dangerous misinformation and disinformation;

  (f) legislating for a powerful and independent anti-corruption commission;

  (g) making laws to prevent governments from pork-barrelling in marginal held seats; and

  (h) requiring parliamentarians to disclose secret donations".

We have an electoral system in Australia to be proud of, which gives everyone their say, and we on this side of the House will defend it and seek to strengthen it, not undermine it for cheap electoral politics. But this is a government that has long since given up on governing. Its threadbare legislative agenda this fortnight shows that they aren't even trying to advance our national interest. Instead, we see this: a desperate attempt to cling to power, whatever the cost.

This bill is an attack on our democracy—another one. It's an attempt to import the very worst of United States politics to mandate voter suppression, to frustrate millions and to exclude many thousands from casting their ballots, knowing the disproportionate impact on First Nations people and on Australians from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, not just to seek to buy votes by treating public money as their slush fund but to go further and to seek to effectively restrict the franchise of those who they feel might not support them. They should be ashamed, but they are shameless. Australians deserve better. They deserve respect for them and for the democratic institutions that Australians have built up.

Labor knows this and we are resolutely committed to standing up for electoral integrity, starting with voting against this rotten and dishonest bill, which we will fight all the way. For us, Australian democracy is not for sale, and defending it—indeed, extending it—is nonnegotiable. I'm proud of us and I'm proud that my friend Senator Farrell has committed an Albanese Labor government to repealing this law as its first act should it be enacted. But it shouldn't come to this, and it needn't come to this. This bill can be withdrawn today—or this House should reject it.

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