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

I am pleased to be able to contribute to the debate on the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Voter Integrity) Bill 2021, but I am sad that it's happening. Despite what the member for Sturt has convinced himself of, there is no need for this legislation, and that is abundantly clear. I have experienced, as a candidate, 12 elections, and I've thought all along that our system of voting is fair and good. It's the best in the world, but it can be improved. But it will not be improved by discouraging people from voting, and that's precisely what this legislation will do. It will impact upon the most marginalised people in the country: people who have difficulty with language and people who may have an issue with their health. Most particularly, it will have a dramatic and negative impact on Aboriginal people who live in remote communities.

Forty-two per cent or thereabouts of my electors in Lingiari are Aboriginal people. What will happen with this legislation is that an already very poor turnout of Aboriginal people will be further lowered. In June 2020, the proportion of eligible Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory on the roll was 68.7 per cent, so 31.3 per cent of Aboriginal people who were eligible to be on the roll were not. In the case of Western Australia, the figure was 67.6 per cent. At the last election, there were 42 remote polling teams covering 387 communities. There were 23,503 ordinary votes cast and 5,262 declaration votes cast. In the Northern Territory alone, for Lingiari there were 20 remote polling teams covering around 200 communities and outstations. With the combination of low voter enrolment and low turnout, it seems likely that only around 45 per cent of eligible Aboriginal people voted.

These facts are very simple. What will happen as a result if this legislation were to be passed and enacted? We'd see fewer people voting. This is not just a recent phenomenon, but it goes to the whole question of what the government believes should happen in relation to Aboriginal people and the electoral process in remote communities. As the Leader of the Opposition said, this legislation will impact upon a range of people outside of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but it will have a significant impact upon Aboriginal people. It builds upon decisions previously taken by this government that have meant that the opportunity to vote or be enrolled to vote has been made extremely difficult by successive conservative governments in this country. The 2017 budget included a measure to restructure by downsizing and relocating functions from the Australian Electoral Commission's Darwin office to Queensland. They went from 15 staff to three. The decision to restructure was done without any public consultation or discussion or reference to the interests of AEC staff who were being told they were being made redundant. The only reason given in the budget papers in 2017 for the downsizing of this office was to provide savings of $8.3 million to offset expenditure provided to enhance laws around the authorisation of public political communications.

We need to understand this is part of a piece. When the Howard government came to power in 1996, one of the first things it did was remove 25 education officers from the AEC, mostly in northern Australia. Sixteen of these officers operated in the north, and their function was to promote voter education and enrolment. We had this happen in 1996 and then we had it happen again in 2007, when the Australian Electoral Commission, because of budget cuts, took away staff who would otherwise be out in the field promoting Aboriginal enrolment and educating people on the voting system and their rights and obligations as Australian citizens. And we wonder why enrolment levels are low.

We need to contemplate the population we're talking about here. It's a young population. Using 2016 census figures, as a proportion of the Northern Territory population Aboriginal people made up 30 per cent but comprised 46 per cent of 16- to 19-year-olds—a huge growth of young people moving into voting age and far higher than the rest of the population, given the proportion of the population that Aboriginal people comprise. Instead of trying to enhance the opportunity for these Aboriginal people to be enrolled to vote, we have seen the government pull the rug out from underneath any programs and policies that would have provided them the opportunity to do exactly that. This is just another example. Clearly, the member for Sturt has absolutely no idea—and I suspect many of his colleagues are in the same boat—about the population who are going to be impacted most by this stupid decision.

We went and talked to communities where Aboriginal people make up the majority—they live in dispersed populations across, in the case of the Northern Territory, 200 polling places—over a fortnight. We went to 200 polling places over a fortnight. I know this, because I go to them. I know what happens at those polling places. We've got a lot of Aboriginal people who have very little English literacy and speak English as a second, third or fourth language. And they don't have identification. Many don't have a drivers licence or the opportunity to get one. They certainly don't have an Australian passport or a proof-of-age ID card. Many won't have a birth certificate, and, if they did, they wouldn't where to find it or how to get one. Most of them don't have a Commonwealth or state ID card, particularly these young people I'm referring to. They don't have a council rates notice because they don't pay rates. They don't have a telephone bill, and they won't have a utilities bill. They'll live in a house where there might be 20 or 25 people, and they're expected to have identification papers to turn up at a polling booth.

What will happen, sadly, is that the impact of this will be that, even if we're able to get significantly higher turnout, we will get people turning up at the polling place, going up to vote and being asked their name and asked for their identification, which they won't be able to provide. Then they'll be told they need to fill out a form to apply for a declaration vote. They'll find that difficult if not impossible in some cases, and they won't be able to fill out the form. They may or may not have people who will identify them as local people who have got identification. But what we know is that this will be a huge deterrent to them turning up to vote—a huge deterrent. So the poor turnouts at the last couple of elections will be exacerbated as a direct result of these measures if they are passed. That's not what we want.

What we should be doing is the reverse. We should be saying to people, 'We want to make sure you are educated and understand the voting system, that you are properly enrolled to vote and that, when you turn up to the polling place on voting day, you will get a vote by standing up and saying your name, as it is on the roll, and answering the question, "Have you voted anywhere else but here today?"' That's it, pure and simple.

We know what may happen in some cases, because I know what happens at these polling places. There'll be a thuggish scrutineer who will make it extremely difficult for people to be able to exercise their rights. I've observed this over many, many years. What do you do? You upset people. I notice my friend the member for Newcastle is here. She will recall, or at least know of, the Court of Disputed Returns case taken by Ernie Bridge against Alan Ridge in Western Australia. What the Liberals did in Western Australia was to try and deny people a right to vote—Aboriginal people in remote communities in this case. They deliberately tried to deny people the right to vote. They used alcohol as a mechanism, a shameful practice. Whilst this is not that, what it is going to do will have a similar impact. It will mean that people who would otherwise have the right to vote as Australian citizens will not exercise that right, and that, to me, is what this is about.

The previous speaker said, 'Well, you know, this is not about winning elections.' Pigs! You've been waiting for 12 elections to see me depart this place, and now you think it's your best chance to win the seat. You think: 'We'll have the best chance of winning the seat if we can minimise the opportunity for Aboriginal people to vote, because we know that when they voted for Snowdon at the last few elections he was getting 70, 80 or even 90 per cent of the vote in some booths. So how do we minimise that opportunity? Well, let's try and get fewer people to vote.' It is a very deliberate strategy. Of course the Prime Minister will stand up here piously saying, 'Of course that's not the case.' Well, we know about him. The Australian population are awake to him. We need to make sure that this legislation does not pass this parliament. This piece of legislation is discriminatory. In my view, the way it impacts on Aboriginal people in my community is racist. It would do entirely the opposite to what the member for Sturt claimed it would do. We as members of parliament have an obligation here to try and encourage people to participate in our democratic processes. If we are going to introduce this piece of legislation and pass it, what we are doing is discouraging them and taking away the opportunity to vote for many people who would otherwise have the right to vote. That can't be good. It's a dreadful thing to do to the Australian community. I hope that members of this parliament, even those on the government benches, see the merits of the argument about opposing this piece of legislation and do not support it. (Time expired)

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