Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I want to speak briefly on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2006. I was not able to do so last Friday when it was before the Senate because I was chairing a Senate committee. I want to put a few things on the record. I will not cover all aspects of what the bill deals with, because other speakers have done that quite adequately, but I do want to touch on a few components of the legislation. In particular, I am very concerned about the likely impact it will have on the ability of Indigenous Australians to engage with the electoral process. If you look at the extra hurdles that are being put in place through this legislation, you will see that it is quite clear that one group in the community that will almost certainly be most significantly affected is Indigenous Australians. The requirement to produce a drivers licence is obviously going to be harder for younger Australians and for many people in remote areas. The requirement to produce an alternative prescribed document, to find a couple of people to sign declarations verifying your identity and to then get that into the relevant authorities is going to be a hurdle that is much more difficult for Indigenous people to overcome.

The first thing that I want to emphasise in saying that is that it is not that Indigenous people are any less capable than anybody else of following requirements but that people in remote communities are far less likely to be readily reminded and far less likely to be able to do these sorts of things easily. The key aim in the Electoral Act is to make it as convenient as possible for people to get on the electoral roll. You always have to balance that with ensuring that the integrity of the electoral roll is such that it does not unduly or improperly affect the outcome of elections. We have to face up to the simple reality that there are always going to be flaws in the electoral roll. The key test for the parliament, for the Electoral Commission and, indeed, for the public more broadly is to ensure that the accuracy of the electoral roll is close enough to 100 per cent so as not to impede the accuracy of an election result. You can never get 100 per cent. The government is not suggesting that you will get 100 per cent with these changes. We could always do more to make it closer to 100 per cent, but the test is whether or not such extra actions will make a discernible difference with regard to an electoral outcome and whether or not there are adequate protections in place to detect any fraud or deliberate dodgy behaviour that impacts on the result of an election.

I have been a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in the past. I was a participant in the committee back in the days when it was chaired by Mr Pyne, the member for Sturt, when there was an inquiry focusing on the revelations about dishonest behaviour with regard to electoral enrolments by some members of the Labor Party in Queensland. Of course, the Shepardson inquiry looked into that matter. There was no doubt that some dishonesty was uncovered. Some people had to pay quite a high price when that dishonesty was uncovered, but the simple fact is that at no stage was any evidence provided, let alone proven, that that dishonesty affected the result of an election. No evidence of any substantial nature at all was provided to that inquiry, to any of the others that I sat on or at any other time that I am aware of that suggests any form of calculated, organised, deliberate widespread fraud with regard to electoral outcomes.

It is quite clear that, if significant fraud was conducted at election time by people wrongly enrolled, voting when they were not entitled to, voting in the name of dead people or all those sorts of urban myths that float around the place, it would be detected. Any election that is sufficiently close that there is the prospect of that sort of behaviour influencing the outcome would clearly be pursued by the losing party and would clearly be able to be detected. You might not be able to detect people voting that way on the day but, if a whole bunch of people busted in to vote unlawfully as is sometimes alleged, it would be detected after the fact and, if it affected the result in a particular seat, that result would be able to be challenged and, I would suggest, almost certainly overturned. The simple fact is that that has not been detected on any wide scale, and I believe the protections in place are adequate to assess whether or not it has happened.

In addition, we could put in extra requirements that would compromise people’s protections under privacy laws to ensure that they are enrolled where they are supposed to be enrolled, to ensure that people are not incorrectly enrolled at the wrong address and to ensure that the people who are enrolled are the people they say they are, but it would cost an enormous amount of money. It would improve the accuracy of the electoral roll marginally, but it would not be to any discernible benefit.

You also have to look at the flip side. It is unreasonable to spend millions and millions of extra dollars to just slightly improve the accuracy of the electoral roll. On top of that, you have to look at what the impact will be. If you make it too difficult, too much of an imposition, too much of an inconvenience or too much of a hassle for people to get on the roll then many people will not do it. We would all like to think that everybody would be charging down to get their name on the electoral roll the moment they turn 18—or I think you can get your name on the roll provisionally at age 17. We would all like to think that everybody in the country follows politics as closely as we in this chamber do, but the fact is that people do not. The fact is that enrolling is something that people usually do some time or other when they get around to it. We all know, or at least we should know, the enormous percentage of young people—particularly those who are just 18—who are not on the roll.

I recall that it was suggested during estimates a year or two ago that perhaps as many as 50 per cent of 18-year-olds are not on the electoral roll. The time when they do get on the roll is when an election is called or when an election is imminent. That is why the deliberate closing of the electoral roll on the day that writs are issued is a flagrant rort, and it will unquestionably lead to the disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of Australians. For those who want the history and the background of that, Senator Ray’s and Senator Faulkner’s speeches on Friday in this chamber give that detail quite accurately. We know what impact it will have because we have seen it. It has been done before. It was done in 1983 and we know what happened. Tens of thousands of people, mainly young people, will be disenfranchised, and many more will be forced to vote in an electorate in which they are no longer eligible.

I believe that this legislation is a perfect example of why it is tremendously dangerous to give any one political party control of both houses of parliament. We have seen that, at the first available opportunity, this government has introduced changes to the Electoral Act to try to rort the act in their favour. That is not only unconscionable; it also brings democracy into disrepute. Many people have criticised the way this government has followed the US in areas such as foreign policy. I am particularly disappointed to see them following the USA with regard to the partisan use of electoral laws. That is what this legislation is: it is blatantly party political and deliberately tilted to meet the interests of the governing party.

People have already noted that under this legislation it will be possible, in effect, to make anonymous donations of up to $90,000 to a particular political party. That can be done if you donate $10,000 to each division of a party in each state and territory, plus nationally. That is a disgrace. We have seen, of course, a significant jump in the level of tax deductibility for political donations. I remember when the Electoral Act was amended to allow donations up to $100 to be tax deductible. The Democrats supported that at the time because it was actually a clause specifically out of our party’s policy. That was back in the time of the former Labor government, more than 10 years ago.

My personal view is that it was probably an unwise thing to have in policy. We have public funding, and to have a second bite at the cherry through the tax deductibility of personal donations to political parties is, I think doubling up, and it is a less efficient method. If you are going to have public funding, where political parties are funded through election campaigns, I think that is a sufficient draw on the public purse. To have a second draw on the public purse through tax deductibility is, I think, unwise. I think we should reverse that policy and remove tax deductibility from the act altogether. We certainly should not be having that massive increase of up to $1,500.

The other aspect that I want to return to is the fact that the impact is likely to be greater on Indigenous Australians than on anyone else in the community. In the last few weeks we have been talking about the range of problems Indigenous Australians face in many areas, particularly in remote communities. It is particularly ironic and inappropriate to be changing the Electoral Act in a way that it will make it less likely that Indigenous people will be on the electoral roll. How much extra incentive will political parties have to ignore the needs of Aboriginal Australians if they know that more and more of them are not on the electoral roll? There would be even less motivation to address the views and needs of Indigenous Australians with fewer and fewer on the electoral roll—and there is already a higher than average proportion of Indigenous people who are not on the electoral roll.

Again reflecting back on the time when I was a member of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, after the 1998 election—I think it was, but I might be mistaken—I spent three days at public hearings in the Northern Territory. At that time, the Northern Territory had just one House of Representatives seat. The Country Liberal Party was so obsessed with the fact that the Aboriginal population in the Territory were voting so much for the Labor Party that they figured there had to be a rort going on. We had hearings in Darwin, in Alice Springs and in Maningrida in Arnhem Land. All the hearings focused, in theory, on how the system could work better for people in remote communities and for Indigenous Australians. But I know, from things many people said on and off the record, that there was great frustration about the large percentage of Aboriginal people who did not vote for the Country Liberal Party.

It is no secret that a large proportion of Indigenous people in many areas vote disproportionately towards the Labor Party. That is not something I am pleased about. I do not know why they vote for the Labor Party, and I will not use this opportunity to go on at great length about the Labor Party’s failures on Indigenous affairs—in many respects I see them as not much better, and occasionally worse, than the coalition’s failures.

It is nonetheless a simple psephological fact that, broadly speaking, a large percentage of Indigenous people do vote for the Labor Party. I have on occasion heard coalition people basically accepting that that vote will go significantly in that direction and that there is not much they can do about it. However, it appears there is something they can do about it. They can change the Electoral Act to make it harder for Indigenous people to get on the roll and easier for them to get kicked off the roll—particularly when you add in the provision in this act which makes any person who is subject to a term of imprisonment of any length of time—not just a term of at least three years, as is currently the case—not eligible to vote. This is once again going down the US path, and that is a very dangerous path to go down. We all know, and this is another area that we should all be working on in a policy sense, that Indigenous people are disproportionately represented in this country’s jails. This will be another mechanism for significantly disenfranchising a greater number of Indigenous people.

We need to look at how this is used in other parts of the world. I will use the example of the United States of America. People have written a lot about the presidential election of 2000, in particular in the state of Florida. People talked about a range of things, such as hanging chads and whether or not certain things were counted or not counted, but to me the biggest thing that stood out in that state, and in different counties within that state, was the fact that one mechanism that was used by the Republicans—and they are not alone in using electoral law to this end—to disenfranchise a group in the community was to make not just felons but also former felons ineligible to be on the roll. Such people are disproportionately more represented in the black community in America and they are disproportionately more likely to vote Democrat in the US. It was a deliberate tactic to try and purge potential Democrat voters from the electoral roll in the United States, in a way that would potentially affect the outcome of a presidential election—and of course we all know some of the things that have happened since then—and potentially have an enormous impact on the direction of human history.

I am not suggesting that this bill goes that far. However simple the measure, if it is saying that it is appropriate to disenfranchise people because they are in jail, what is to say that the next step will not be to disenfranchise people because they were once in jail and so they are not of proper character and should lose their right to vote? Where does it stop once we accept that some people, who are citizens, should nonetheless have their right to vote removed from them? It is a very dangerous precedent that is being extended substantially in this legislation and it is, once again, by no coincidence whatsoever, occurring in a way that almost certainly will advantage the party that is currently in government.

As a number of speakers have noted in this debate, we also need to look at the form of this government. One of the first things they did when they got into power in 1996, under the guise of budget cutting that was necessary because of the budgetary situation at the time, was to cancel the Aboriginal Electoral Education Program, a program that was widely acknowledged, including by the Electoral Commission, as being enormously effective in improving the ability of Aboriginal people to engage in the electoral system, to understand how it worked and to participate more fully.

Many of us repeatedly bemoan the lack of Aboriginal participation and presence in the federal parliament. Only two people in this parliament in over 100 years have come from an Aboriginal background—they were in this Senate—and of course there are none at the moment. When we are deliberately cutting programs that allow Aboriginal people to be able to more effectively engage just with the voting process, it is no surprise that so few of them have made their way through the political processes and into the parliaments of this country.

While this government restored many of the programs they cut for budgetary reasons in 1996, they have never restored the AEEP. The clear intent of that was to not make it any easier for Indigenous people to vote or to understand the electoral process because they do not vote for this government. This government do not want to help them get on the roll or be able to vote; they want to make it easier to get them off the roll. That is a shameful thing at any time, but at a time when we have a public debate that is openly acknowledging that we need to do better as a political process and as a parliamentary system in assisting Indigenous Australians, it is particularly shameful.

I want to briefly correct one thing in Senator Ray’s otherwise very good speech. In speaking about the Democrats’ role in a previous amendment to the Electoral Act, he said that we supported what Labor called the ‘dash for cash’ legislation. That legislation did not cost the taxpayer one cent. It simply ensured that the Electoral Act clarified the way the administrative structure of the Liberal Party interacted with the public-funding requirements. It may or may not have been responsible for most state Liberal Party branches now being broke, as Senator Ray alleged—I do not know whether or not they are broke, and I do not know whether or not it is a consequence of that legislation—but that is not my business; how they organise their funds is a matter for the Liberal Party.

It was also incorrect to say, as Senator Ray did, that the Democrats were internally divided at the time and that most of the Democrat senators actually opposed it but went along with it because they did not want to rock the boat. That is simply wrong. I can categorically say that, as leader of the party at the time, I did not hear a single Democrat senator express any opposition to that change. It was a logical change. It did not cost the taxpayer one cent. There was no reason not to amend the Electoral Act in a way that enabled the public funding to go in the direction that the administrative arm of that party wanted it to go. I would make the same amendments for any other political party if it did not cost the taxpayer anything. I think that was a misrepresentation by Senator Ray of both the Democrats’ position at that time and the import of that bill.

Having said that, getting back to this legislation, this is a sign of what happens when a government has control of the Senate. There is the risk that they can rort the very act that gets people elected here and tilt it more in their favour. That is shameful and should be opposed, and I hope that at least one member of the coalition in the Senate has the courage to do so. (Time expired)