Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

When it comes to developing sophisticated electoral systems, Australia has always been regarded as a world leader. Indeed, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries we were well in advance of the rest of the world, partly because we were a New World country and partly because we were determined to throw off the hierarchical nature of the mother country and actually pioneer a real democracy in this country. For instance, we were one of the first ever to introduce universal suffrage. With the exception of the legislative councils in South Australia and Victoria, which kept property qualifications up until around 1960, the rest of our democracy was universal franchise—along with New Zealand, which was the first to give women the vote. The last state in Australia to finally succumb was Victoria in 1906.

We pioneered the secret ballot. We pioneered the concept of compulsory enrolment. We were one of the first countries to pay members of parliament and we introduced sophisticated postal and absentee voting systems—all before 1913. These were all in place in our country. Even late into the 20th century, various states of the United States referred to the secret ballot system as the ‘Australian ballot’. What better compliment could this country get than to have our secret ballot system referred to as the Australian ballot in one of the great democracies of the world, the United States.

There were other changes that came in. Compulsory attendance at the polling booths came in the 1920s. That was erroneously referred to by Senator Evans as compulsory voting. We have never had compulsory voting, but we have had compulsory attendance at the polling booth. None of us knows what people do when they pull the curtain behind them. Also, in 1949, we introduced proportional representation to this Senate. That is still not necessarily universally applauded, but it changed the nature of this Senate, which, on some previous occasions, had 35 members from one political party and one from another. It is now one of the finest parliamentary institutions in the world, even with the excesses and restrictions placed on it by a majority Liberal-National coalition over the last year.

But, once the Menzies government was entrenched, we had the dark ages of electoral matters in Australia. There was no attention given to it and no concern whatsoever. The worst aspect, of course, was the 1962 redistribution, which would have rebalanced electoral boundaries, given the massive urban growth that was occurring in major metropolitan cities. When the then Country Party objected to that redistribution, Menzies threw it in the bin because, remember, at that point in time you could reject redistributions in the parliament. And what did that lead to? It led to the worst malapportionment in the federal parliament’s history.

Take my state of Victoria. At the 1966 election, both the electorate of Bruce and the electorate of Lalor had over 140,000 electors in them; the electorate of Isaacs, around about the Faulkner area, and the electorate of Scullin had fewer than 30,000 members. A massive malapportionment was allowed to occur under the Menzies government, and its successors could not have cared less. That somewhat changed with the election of the Whitlam government, when the concept of one vote, one value was entrenched. But many of the other electoral reforms were knocked off by a recalcitrant Senate.

And now I come to the Fraser era. Most of you would not recognise that name—it is now ‘Saint Malcolm of High Principle’. What was one of the first acts of Malcolm Fraser? It was to introduce the 5,000 square kilometre rort, which re-entrenched malapportionment in the electoral system. That couldn’t be the same person as the one that goes around today as the successor to Mother Teresa, could it?