Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak today on this matter of public importance. I am particularly unimpressed with the reason that we are speaking today. A press release was put out this morning by the Australian Electoral Commission in relation to the government’s school signs scandal. What the AEC very clearly articulated—and, quite frankly, I cannot remember this happening in some 16 years of my being in both this place and the other place—is where the government has actually breached the provisions of the Commonwealth Electoral Act.

The AEC said in relation to section 328 that the signs were in clear breach of the requirements of the act. The AEC actually went on further and said that, if those signs were there on a polling day, they would be in breach of section 340 of the Electoral Act.

We need to go back and have a look at the history of the Labor Party in relation to the Electoral Act in order to put this in some sort of context, to put this in the context of it being a deliberate act by the federal Labor government to breach the provisions of the Commonwealth Electoral Act. It beggars belief that, given the nature of this program, they would not have sought some advice in relation to it. But you have only got to go back to former senator Graham Richardson, who was the architect of the modern Electoral Act, and the comments he made in his autobiography, where he said that the current act—the one we are dealing with now—was put in place to maximise the political advantage that Labor could obtain. We have seen no clearer example of that than this signs-in-schools scandal. Some 4,000-plus schools have already got these signs up. By the time the program finishes, there will be over 8,000 political signs in schools throughout this country. Eight thousand political signs! Who could possibly use children and their parents as pawns in a political game?