George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

One important issue that has often been overlooked in this debate is the removal of the requirement for media outlets to provide annual returns to the Electoral Commission. This makes it possible for companies that wish to make donations to the Liberal Party without having them made public to simply buy a series of advertisements or pay for air time or print space instead. Media companies will no longer have to inform the Electoral Commission of who paid for what. The Liberals have said that providing such returns is a burden on media companies. The media companies have not said that, but the coalition are saying that. That is their excuse for removing the requirement that media companies must report on who has paid for media during an election.

The coalition did not even bother to explain in the explanatory memorandum why they are removing the requirement for media companies to furnish the AEC with returns on electoral advertising. That is because there is no reason—other than that they are pulling the veil of secrecy tightly around themselves while trying as hard as possible to exclude the public. The reality is that most businesses do not donate money unless they think it is going to get them something in return. That is the hard reality of political life. The public needs to know, and should demand to know, who is paying to try and secure political power in this country. The greater the transparency of political donations, the more secure our democratic processes will be in the long term.

I will now turn to the early closure of the rolls. There is no doubt that this legislation is going to make it much more difficult for ordinary people to vote. The Liberal Party has expressed concerns about provisional votes being counted in the last election and those voters not qualifying for the electoral roll. According to Senator Abetz in a speech last year, this involved some 27,000 people. Compare that with the 423,000 people who changed their electoral details in the week preceding the closure of the rolls at the last election. Under this system, almost half a million people would have been disenfranchised—excluded from participating in the electoral process—and that could have significantly changed the outcome of the last election. Under this system, those 423,000 people, or roughly three per cent of the voting population, would have lost their voting rights.

Let us quickly look at what happens with roll closures in other countries. In New Zealand, the rolls close a day before polling. In the UK, the rolls close 11 days prior to an election. In Canada, voters can enrol on the day of voting. The reality is that closing the rolls early does not ensure electoral integrity. In fact, the opposite is true. It potentially disenfranchises a significant number of voters who should be able to cast a vote in an election if they meet all the other qualifying factors. It could leave hundreds of thousands of people incorrectly enrolled or not enrolled at all. The people who are most likely to be disenfranchised by these changes are young people, who often do not enrol until an election is called; people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, who may recently have become citizens or do not fully understand the system; and families who have moved house but have not yet updated all their details.