Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

Would you mind, Senator Carr? We actually listened to you guys and your very pathetic contributions for a while. Let me turn to prisoner voting. There are those who are now suggesting that everybody should be entitled to vote, including prisoners, and that this is somehow a fundamental right. It has long been the case in Australia, especially in state jurisdictions, that, if you are serving a period of imprisonment, you do not get the vote. We as a government happen to believe that if through the judicial system you have been sentenced to a period of incarceration—in other words, you have been removed from society by society through the judicial system—then, during that period of your removal from society, you forfeit the right to vote.

Senator Nettle and others are trying to justify the right to vote for these people. She says it is an important part of their rehabilitation. Can I say that I acted in the criminal law jurisdiction for quite some time. Not once did a person likely to go to jail say to me: ‘Eric, whatever you do, just give me the right to vote. Send me to jail by all means, just as long as I keep the right to vote.’ Not once was that said.

Let us get a grip on reality with this. The concern of citizens is their removal from society by the judicial system because they have so offended against the rules and laws of our society that they are deemed to be unworthy to walk the streets. I know some academic said that I put it deliciously simply by saying that chances are that, if you are unfit to walk the streets, you are unfit to vote. I suppose the reason they say that it is deliciously simple is because there is no argument in principle against that proposition. If you are removed from society then chances are that you should not be entitled to vote.

Allow me to go through some of the contributions of honourable senators in relation to the threshold in particular. What I seek to do is put on the record and repeat into the Hansard that which was said nearly a quarter of a century ago. Who said this, Senator Marshall? This person said:

People should be protected, if they want to be protected, by not having their names associated with a particular political party. What we are saying is that people who make these donations to political parties should be allowed to remain anonymous. We say that any donation—

and this will give you the hint, especially Senator Murray, I trust—

over $2,000, which we would regard as significant, should be capable of public disclosure.

That, of course, was the former leader of the Australian Democrats, speaking in this place some 24 years ago, saying that $2,000 was the appropriate threshold. If you then go to the Parliamentary Library and ask them to apply the inflation factor to that, you now have a figure well in excess of $5,000. So if the principle of Senator Don Chipp at the time remained and if you were to forward it to 2006, a quarter of a century later, you would have a figure in excess of $5,000. But he does make this point:

I would be sympathetic to the view that if persons because of altruism want to give a certain amount of money they should be protected if they want to be protected.