Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

When I left off on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2006 before question time, I was talking about democracy diminished, in that the so-called integrity measures are far from that. Earlier I dealt with the issue of gifts and party donations and the increase from $1,500 to $10,000. Before we broke for question time today, I also referred to how the Liberal Party can use anonymous sources under the $10,000 regime, if people donate $9,999 to the eight Liberal branches. If you were to use family relationships, you could also multiply that by two and get to some extraordinary numbers. What is important with these things is that there is transparency. It is good to see Senator Abetz here in the chamber because some of the matters he went to in respect of that, as a defence, do not stand up. I dealt with some of those before, but let me reiterate: there is no policy merit in this change.

The other area where there is no policy merit is the early closure of the rolls. Notwithstanding the spirited defence of it by the Australian Electoral Commission, the early closure of the rolls will cause a huge group of people to be disenfranchised from their votes, because it will effectively mean that the rolls will close from 8 pm on the day the writs are issued. There is no longer a period of grace where people are reminded they need to get on the rolls and sort out their enrolment. What Senator Abetz has argued in the past—if I verbal him, I am sure he will correct the record—is that people should take advantage of the issue and keep up to speed on their enrolment and deal with it as they go. That would be terrific in a perfect world, but we do not live in a perfect world. The grace period of seven days acts almost like a reminder, and it is a very focused reminder. When the writs are issued, people take note and turn their minds to an election that is going to occur and deal with it accordingly. This will result in people—people who would have otherwise been able to enrol and vote—not being able to change their particulars and they may be excluded from the roll. In a democracy, if we are talking about ensuring that all people who can vote are able to vote and not disenfranchising groups who we could otherwise deal with, it is wrong to have an early closure, as proposed in this bill.

The guiding principle in this area is that there should be the ability for people to express their will in an election. I am concerned about that ability being changed for new citizens and 17- to 18-year-olds, and not only, as might be argued, that the Liberal Party will seek to gain a benefit. I cannot clearly see how it will transpire, but I think you could make the reasonable guess that the early closure of the rolls will not disadvantage the Liberal Party. I think you could say it is more likely to advantage the Liberal Party and their constituency. The National Party probably have not turned their minds to how it will affect regional and rural Australians—whether their ability to use the seven days that currently exist to sort out their enrolment will be diminished. I suspect it will. I suspect they will also suffer under this integrity measure, so-called. It is surprising that the National Party have not really addressed it in any broad way, but that is a matter for them. It is, of course, still a great concern to the Labor Party.

I will turn to a couple of other issues. Senator Boswell provided some commentary on an old issue that I think has long been a thorn in the side of the Nationals—that is, Liberals for Forests, an issue which has focused them and which took up the majority of Senator Boswell’s speech. The minority report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters report says:

Several electorates on polling day 2004 saw the distribution of how-to-vote cards which were clearly designed to mislead voters into voting for a party they did not intend to vote for. This was particularly obvious when the manner in which these cards were distributed is taken into account. The Government members of the Committee devoted a great deal of time to expounding their view—

and Senator Boswell took the opportunity during the second reading debate to do that again—

that the Government candidate in the Division of Richmond was defeated …

It goes on to say that the government members tried to have it both ways on this question by condemning what they saw as the misleading distribution of the Liberals for Forests cards in Richmond, while condoning a clearly well-orchestrated campaign by the Liberal Party to deceive Australian Greens voters in the division of Melbourne Ports by the blatantly misleading distribution of green coloured how-to-vote cards. The minority report concluded:

We support the recommendation that the AEC conduct a review of the relevant sections of the Act, which are clearly inadequate for the purpose of preventing the misuse of how-to-vote cards to deceive voters. We believe that the practice of some state electoral authorities …

And it goes on. What we have there, of course, is an argument for another day. But I think the minority report does provide a better position than the one argued by the majority in this area. The majority report argued poorly, I think, to try to substantiate the reasons for the earlier closure of the rolls. I think it failed to address some of the more relevant issues. Of recommendation 4, the minority report said:

This is the most radical recommendation in the entire report. It will have the effect of disenfranchising anyone who has not enrolled by the time the writs for an election are issued, and potentially disenfranchising all voters who are not enrolled at their correct address by depriving them of an opportunity to correct their enrolment details.

That is the position that is likely to occur. The government have failed to take heed of what the minority pointed out. They have steamrolled over those issues and in doing so they have steamrolled over democracy. The pretext for this proposal is that the enrolment during the five working days increases electoral fraud because the AEC does not have time to verify the information given by the enrollees. That is the argument that seems to be put, but there was no evidence in support of that contention presented to the inquiry, nor has any been presented to previous inquiries.

If there is evidence out there, it should be tabled. It should be brought forward. The AEC has never said that it cannot handle the volume of applications received, so I think it is disingenuous to say that the AEC would be swamped during this period and not able to cope. If there is that view then it is a matter of ensuring that the AEC does have that flexibility, and the government have the ability to ensure that. The AEC continues to check into the integrity of the rolls in the period following their closure to ensure that people are eligible to vote, so I think that argument is broadly disingenuous. We also heard from an AEC employee, appearing in a private capacity, about the early closure of the rolls. The early closure of the rolls, in his words:

... would disenfranchise a lot of people. We would have had to go to a lot of expense and advertising to ensure that the rolls were as up-to-date as possible and do that on a continuing basis.

That evidence was presented to the committee on 12 August 2005. But the AEC said:

The AEC is firmly of the view that, in the absence of any evidence to suggest that the opportunity to enrol or correct enrolment details in the week prior to the close of the rolls is being significantly abused, the procedure introduced on the Committee’s recommendation after the 1983 election must be judged a success.

But we are still debating these issues in this chamber. The recommendation will also cause, as I have said, particular problems for electors in remote or regional Australia. The Liberals’ partners in the coalition, the National Party, have certainly not twigged to the fact that it is also part of the Liberal Party armoury to ensure that The Nationals are disadvantaged as a consequence. To not have adequate access to appropriate communication facilities would, as the Western Australian government at the time indicated in their submission, cause difficulties and might lead to disenfranchisement of electors.

We have also heard from Senator Mason. Curiously, Senator Mason was the only coalition senator—save, I suspect, Senator Abetz in his summing up—to even attempt a straight-faced justification of the changes. And perhaps Senator Abetz may not even do that. Senator Mason stated that these changes to enrolment awareness campaigns ‘will go a long way to countering any possible unintended consequences of an early closure of the roll’. It is not the unintended consequences that Labor is worried about but the many intended consequences of this bill. When you go to the two major issues that I have talked about today—the donations and the early closure of the rolls—this bill should not be proceeded with. The government know what they are doing. They are seeking to commit another rort. These are not integrity measures. They have again carted out the wheelbarrow of old wish lists that they always want to bring forward. When you look at the broader issue of whether democracy will be diminished as a consequence, it can be safely said that it will be by the passing of these integrity measures. I am going to run out of time now but I will have the opportunity in the committee stage to ask a range of questions about some of these matters and particularly the issues that surround the political financial disclosures under the proposed changes to the thresholds.