Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, I present the committee's report entitled Advisory report on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill 2012, incorporating a dissenting report, together with the minutes of proceedings.

In accordance with standing order 39(f) the report was made a parliamentary paper.

by leave—Australian Electoral Commission figures indicate that there are 1.5 million eligible Australians not on the Commonwealth electoral roll. These are people who have failed to enrol or did not update their address details and have consequently been removed from the roll. Under the current arrangements, if they do not submit a form to the AEC, they will not be able to vote at the next federal election.

The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill 2012 will provide the AEC with additional tools to improve roll completeness. The AEC will be able to directly enrol eligible people who are not currently enrolled based on data received from trusted third party sources.

Direct enrolment will provide a service to eligible electors and allow the AEC greater flexibility in its administration of the roll. Direct enrolment is not a panacea to declining enrolment rates, but together with other AEC activities for roll stimulation—such as targeted mail-outs, fieldwork and education programs—it will help enhance roll completeness and accuracy.

Increasing the number of eligible Australians on the roll will not compromise roll integrity.

The AEC recognises that not all data sources are suitable for direct enrolment. The third party sources that the AEC will use have been tried and tested in the existing CRU and objection processes. If we trust this data to disenfranchise Australians by removing them from the roll, then surely the AEC should also have the flexibility to use this data to enfranchise eligible electors.

The AEC will also perform further checks on the data to verify the identity, eligibility and address details before any action is taken to directly enrol someone.

In 2009-10, nearly 350,000 eligible electors were objected from the roll. Many thousands of people attended polling places at the last two federal elections and had to cast provisional rather than ordinary votes when their names could not be found on the roll. Prior to the 2007 federal election, the AEC had the discretion to reinstate around 50 per cent of these people to the roll and admit their votes to further scrutiny. However, the removal of this discretion combined with the evidence of identity requirements, also in effect at these elections, meant that fewer than 20 per cent of those provisional votes could be saved.

At the 2010 federal election, around 280,000 votes were rejected because these electors were incorrectly enrolled or not enrolled. Allowing the AEC the flexibility to reinstate these electors and to admit their provisional votes to scrutiny could have saved many of these wasted votes.

The proof of identity requirements were removed by the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Provisional Voting) Act 2011. Now, this bill seeks to remove the other unnecessary restriction that has led to the significant increase in rejected votes.

Schedule 2 of the bill provides for the reinstatement of some electors who were objected off the roll and for their provisional votes to be fully or partially admitted to the count. The bill seeks to reinstate the safety net, which was in place prior to the 2007 federal election, for those electors who have clearly demonstrated their intention to vote by attending a polling place and casting a provisional vote.

The bill, in combination with the maintaining address bill, aims to balance the effects of the objection process on the roll and enable the data collection systems, which are deemed strong enough to object an elector to be used to assist eligible electors to meet their electoral obligations.

On behalf of the committee, I thank the organisations and individuals who assisted the committee during the inquiry through submissions or participating at the roundtable discussion in Canberra. I also thank my colleagues on the committee for their work and contribution to this report, and the secretariat for their work on this inquiry.

I commend the report to the House.

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

by leave—In rising to speak to the report of the Joint Standing on Electoral Matters into its consideration of the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill 2012, once again, I note that this is a highly partisan report. The committee was split with the Labor Party and the Greens on the one hand and the members of the coalition on the other. As the government had the majority on the committee, that means the report becomes the majority report. But there was no agreement between the government and the opposition as to the need for this bill. In fact, the philosophical dispute is very strong.

The coalition believe firmly, as the Electoral Act sets out, that it is the responsibility of the Electoral Commission to maintain the integrity of the roll. That is its first, second, third or fourth, or whatever, obligation to do. There is plenty of case law which has been around to back up that contention. In 1993, Acting Chief Justice Brennan in the case of Muldowney and the Australian Electoral Commission said, 'The electoral roll is pivotal to the electoral system.' He held that the qualifications to vote include enrolment, noting that the term 'elector' is defined to mean someone on the roll and the mandating of an administrative hurdle like enrolment created is no undue hardship.

The legislation provides that it is the responsibility of an individual who is eligible to be on the roll to, firstly, enrol—and that means filling out a form with a signature—and, secondly, ensure that should you change your address that you will notify the Electoral Commission of that within 21 days—hardly onerous responsibilities. Yet the universal franchise that we have in this country and our compulsory voting system ensure that we have a very high participation rate in the voting system.

As in the Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four where you simply say things that are the direct opposite of what is really meant is very much involved in this process brought in by the government. The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Protecting Elector Participation) Bill is really the 'automatic enrolment' bill, just as the other bill which we will be debating later this week, the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address) Bill, is really about changing addresses without an elector's knowledge or consent.

The important thing to note here is that the government is proposing to allow the Australian Electoral Commission to have absolute discretion in whichever role it chooses, which the chairman of the committee referred to as 'trusted sources'. No evidence has been given by the Electoral Commissioner as to why he would be making one decision as distinct from another or what examination there would be of this system, which was brought in in New South Wales and Victoria in the dying days of those governments to try to enhance their voting ability. The bottom line is that this legislation is being brought in to give a political and electoral advantage to the government of the day.

This is a very serious matter. If you have a cursory look at what has transpired in New South Wales you will see that only 64 per cent of the so-called automatic enrollees turned out to vote and, when the Australian Electoral Commission contacted those people who were transferred, only 20 per cent of them had bothered to enrol on the federal roll. That is an 80 per cent failure rate and a nearly 40 per cent failure rate evidenced in New South Wales.

No evidence put forward by the Electoral Commission shows any attempt to properly examine those numbers in order to put out a warning signal that this is bad legislation and bad for the electoral roll. We will have the opportunity later this week to debate these two bills—it will be a cognate debate—but I think it is very important to say that the coalition believes that referring these bills to JSCEM for its consideration is an important part of our scrutiny process. The bottom line is that the evidence, or lack of it, from the Electoral Commission to substantiate their agreement with Labor and the Greens in bringing about a change—which Labor and the Greens believe will be to their advantage—is no reason to put at risk the integrity of the roll. I am perpetually disappointed that the Australian Electoral Commission seems to be in lockstep with Labor and the Greens.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In accordance with standing order 39(d), the debate is adjourned. The resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.