Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition (Social and Community Affairs)) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to make a brief contribution to this debate on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Democratic Plebiscites) Bill 2007. Listening to the debate today, I am not surprised one bit that we so often hear people talking about Australians being cynical and switched off from politics. You do not have to think too long before you realise that what has been discussed in the chamber today, under the guise of debate on this bill, has been extraordinary nonsense. More importantly, under this government we have seen every attempt to keep the public out of politics and to stop them from even wanting to be involved.

This bill is one step in the right direction. We support any means to improve the quality of our democracy. That means making it easier for people to find out what is happening in politics so that they can make informed decisions and communicate with their elected representatives. People should have a say in decisions that involve them, their local communities or the broader Australian community.

I will get back to what this bill is all about. The bill amends the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to authorise the AEC’s use and disclosure of any information held by the AEC, including information contained in an electoral roll, for the purpose of conducting an activity such as a plebiscite. I should note, as several other senators have noted today, that this is a very short piece of legislation which contains no detail about what form such a plebiscite might take, so we need to be careful about not overstating the impact that it might have.

The bill has been introduced in the context of the proposed forced council amalgamations in Queensland. Labor believes that these communities should have the ability to express their views on these proposals and that they should not be fined or sacked for doing so. For this reason we support this bill. We have been suggesting the use of plebiscites for some months now. They are just one example of measures that can be taken to get people involved in democratic processes. They are measures which can support politicians’ decision making.

The bill is about more than just Queensland councils. This legislation could pave the way for citizen initiated plebiscites on other issues, which we welcome in principle. When matters are deeply controversial in a local community, people should be able to have a mechanism to make their views on the matter heard. This is not to replace our system of representative democracy but rather is an important complement to it. Just last week, the Prime Minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, announced that he would be instituting citizens’ juries in the UK. We should be thinking about innovative ways to inform people and involve them in decision making, not engaging in the smoke-and-mirror obfuscation that characterises the way this government treats its citizens and electors.

It has become commonplace to say that Australians are cynical about politics and politicians. In the annual Roy Morgan poll, politics usually comes pretty low down on the list of trustworthy occupations—usually just above journalists and the car salesmen. People want politicians to represent their interests honestly, and they want to know what is going on. And these have not been features of the Howard government.

It would be wonderful if this legislation were an indication of some commitment on the part of the government towards improving democratic process in this country. I doubt that it is—not least because the government does not have much of a track record in this respect. Under the Howard government, the quality of our democracy has been significantly downgraded. The coalition have used their control of the Senate to diminish the role of the Senate committees—one of the most constructive, bilateral processes of our parliament, which is admired worldwide. The committee system allows ordinary people the right to have their say on issues that affect them.

The reality of our parliamentary system as it is working at the moment has been commented on by the Clerk of the Senate at a recent forum. He said:

Legislation framed by the executive alone is rammed through lower houses with the least possible delay and examination, scrutiny of government is severely limited lest it disclose matters embarrassing to government, and inquiries are limited to matters which cannot cause the executive any difficulty or embarrassment.

The role of the Senate in scrutinising legislation and allowing Australians to have some input into the process is important but the government has used its control of the Senate to hamstring the capacity of the Senate to provide scrutiny and transparency wherever possible.

This is a government that has shown little respect for the committee process and the effort that thousands of Australians put into making submissions and appearing before committee inquiries. The Democratic Audit of Australia pointed out that the latest six-monthly report on government responses to committee reports, presented to parliament in June this year, showed:

... the government had failed to respond to a single report within the required three-month period. Indeed, some are still waiting for a response after several years. Whilst in a few cases the government claims a response is pending, subject to developments, in the case of the report on A Certain Maritime Incident (tabled in 2002), the government is still deciding whether it is going to respond at all.

This shows a manifest lack of respect for the democratic processes of our parliament and for the ordinary Australians who put their neck out to be involved in it. The Howard government’s control of the Senate also enabled the government to put in place some radical, disturbing and worrying changes to the Commonwealth Electoral Act last year. That has to be the most brazen example of this government’s lack of commitment to improving Australia’s democratic processes. Under these laws, first time voters or those who are re-enrolling or updating enrolment details are required to comply with new proof of identity requirements. Voters will have to either provide drivers licence details, having prescribed documents witnessed by authorised persons according to the act, or have two enrolled people, whom they have known for at least a month, confirm their identity. With data showing that between 10 and 20 per cent of adults do not have a drivers licence, that will be a real problem for some Australians. We should be encouraging people to enrol to vote, not making it increasingly difficult for them to do so.

But more worrying than this, at this point in the electoral cycle, is the early closure of the electoral rolls instituted by the Howard government in that same piece of legislation. These changes close the rolls for new voters on the day the writs are issued or a minimum of 33 days before polling day. So existing enrollees are only given three days to correct their details. The rationale for this was to prevent electoral fraud, but the ANAO found no evidence that fraud was even taking place.

Australia has long been at the vanguard of democratic process and reform. But these changes actually put it behind developments in countries such as Canada and New Zealand, which have changed their legislation in the opposite way to make it easier to enrol and vote. Of course the early closing of the electoral rolls most seriously affects young people who are not yet on the roll. The Special Minister of State, Mr Nairn, admitted in July that, as of March, more than 400,000 eligible people were not enrolled to vote. These are the real people being defrauded by these measures. I should not need to point out that young people are so important to our country’s future. They should be given every opportunity to have their say and we should be encouraging them, rather than discouraging them, to be involved. But it is no great surprise that the coalition do not want more young people on the rolls. Young people who do not have mortgages are not key targets for the government’s endless and deeply monotonous scare campaigns on interest rates. Young people are those most vulnerable to losing conditions under Work Choices. Young people see the overcrowded lecture theatres in their universities and carry debts from their university days through to their working lives. Of course the coalition wants to prevent as many of these people as possible from getting on the electoral roll.

Last month the High Court struck down the amendment in the Commonwealth Electoral Act preventing prisoners who are serving a sentence of less than three years from voting in elections. That is important because, effectively, it led to the potential disenfranchisement of a great swathe of, in particular, Indigenous Australians. In addition, just to make this antidemocratic cocktail all the more potent, the 2006 legislation made it easier for corporations to make secret donations to political parties. Professor Marian Sawer pointed out:

Australia seems unique in legislating to make it easier for private money to influence the policies of elected governments, by removing many corporate donations from public scrutiny.

That is outrageous, but of course we should not be surprised. This piece of legislation which we are debating today is a welcome but entirely uncharacteristic development on the part of this government. I now leave it to my colleague Senator McLucas to reflect on Labor’s final position on the bill.