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

I mentioned the matter of the closure of the rolls during the second reading debate and I want to come back to it because between the time that I spoke and now I have been able to check with the Parliamentary Library and obtain some relevant information that would be helpful for the debate. When you look at the issue of the early closure of the rolls, there is considerable disenfranchisement of voters. This is an extraordinary position for this government to adopt. If you look at any time since the 1993 election, on the figures supplied to me by the Parliamentary Library and the AEC there have been 1,907,587 Australians who would have enrolled during the seven-day grace period. That is the order of numbers that you are seeking to strike off the roll, to not give an opportunity to vote in an election—it is an extraordinary number—and what you are going to do into the future is exactly that.

The government may be interested in the number of people in government-held marginal seats in the last federal election in 2004 who enrolled between the calling of the election and the close of rolls. Save for a couple of exceptions, these figures would be approximate and of course they relate to 2004 so you could look at them in that light. But they show that 2,454 local residents of the Prime Minister’s seat of Bennelong would have missed out on a vote. About 2,647 residents of Eden-Monaro would have had their rights stripped in the Special Minister of State’s own electorate if an election were held tomorrow. The member for Greenway seems happy to discard 2,471 local residents from her electorate, treating their right to vote like an orange peel—just discarding it. The member for Page has ripped away voting rights of at least 2,798 people who enrolled during the grace period last time. In McMillan the sitting member has turned his back on 2,184 local residents from places like Baw Baw to Tidal River, from Pakenham to Moe. The Western Australian seats of Hasluck and Stirling have particularly large numbers of locals who enrolled during the campaign: 3,681 and 4,588 respectively. In Bonner the local member has effectively voted to kick 2,045 bayside residents off the roll, something that would not have happened under the strong local representation of Con Sciacca.