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

I will respond to the contributions of senators, first of all to Senator Murray, who moved the amendment. When people are sentenced to a period of imprisonment their liberty is taken away from them, and every state has a different regime operating. You can quite properly assert that they do not stop being citizens whilst they are in prison. That is quite right. People that are not allowed to vote because of being under the age of 18 and those that are seen as having a mental illness or deficiency do not lose their right to be citizens either, but they do not have a right to vote. In the prison system your right to visit and talk to your family as much and as often as you want is taken away from you. In fairness, what do you think is more important: that you have proper family relationships or the right to vote?

Let us have a look at some of these issues. The number of telephone calls you are allowed to make as a prisoner—limited. The number of letters that you can write, the clothing that you wear, things that you would normally expect—all restricted. Do judges say, ‘In sentencing this person to imprisonment, I will allow them nevertheless to wear a red, garish tie like Senator George Campbell was wearing today,’ or something like that? These extra things that you and I would expect to be our normal right are taken away from us.

I fully agree with you that as a society we do need to be forgiving and also accepting of rehabilitation. That is why I would not go down the path of some states in the United States—to take Senator Ludwig’s suggestion—where, if you have served any period of imprisonment, you lose your right to vote forever. I do not subscribe to that view at all. But during the period in which you are in jail I think that society has a right to expect that your removal from society will also remove you from casting a vote.

I have been asked about article 25 of the UN convention. I do not have the exact wording in my mind, but it is basically that you cannot have an arbitrary or unreasonable abolition of the vote for certain people. If this parliament so determines then, with great respect to the United Nations, I would not consider that to be arbitrary or unreasonable if that is what the democratic parliament has determined through the democratic process. Tasmania used to have this provision—and I think that it just changed it very recently—but nobody ever asserted under the state Labor government that that was somehow a breach. We have state governments—I think, Western Australia and New South Wales—that say that if you serve a period of imprisonment of one year or more you lose the vote.

I think that Senator Murray’s stance is a principled one, but one that I disagree with. I am not sure where the Labor Party are coming from on this. If they are saying that disallowing somebody the right to vote whilst they are in jail is arbitrary, I would have thought that putting it at 12 months or three years is also an arbitrary situation. For the benefit of Senator Murray, who took delight in quoting Justice Action, I understand that that is an organisation that disagrees with the concept of imprisonment, full stop.