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

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I have not at this stage seen this response. It may well be in the Table Office by now, but, again, the normal courtesies were not extended in relation to this matter. Anyway, that is a matter for the minister. In relation to this matter and the final report the coalition actually agreed more often with the government than we disagreed. This committee has worked on that basis for some time. There was a very substantial and compelling dissenting report and my colleague Senator Birmingham, who I was not aware was sitting behind me, is going to address that in greater measure. Given that he is here, I will confine my remarks to a couple of matters.

As a matter of principle probably the most important piece of legislation that governs the lives of Australian citizens is the Commonwealth Electoral Act. It is hard to think of an act of this parliament that is more important than the electoral act. It is hard to imagine an act of parliament that must be treated with the same amount of caution than the Australian electoral act. That fundamental right that each and everyone of us has to vote—the single most important thing we do in our lifetime, in my view—is that right to maintain our democracy of which we should be incredibly proud, and voting is an absolutely pivotal part of that. What you have got to establish and what you have got to be able to say to the Australian people is that, when you vote, the integrity of your own vote is guaranteed and equally important and the integrity of the vote of every other person who votes is guaranteed. We have quite clearly said over many, many years that we will do whatever is required in relation to the electoral act to ensure that it is not abused and that fraudulent activities are not allowed.

That, of course, is not a matter that has always been shared by the Australian Labor Party. I can go through the list, which is as long as your arm, but I will just give you a couple of examples. We have: Andrew Kehoe, Labor Party worker convicted and fined; Karen Ehrmann, Labor Party worker sent to jail; Mark Kaiser, former Labor Party MP; Christian Zahra, former Labor Party MP; Gino Nandarino, New South Wales Young Labor convicted and fined; and so on. If you really want to spend a bit of time looking at the level of fraud perpetrated by the Australian Labor Party, just go and pick up the Shepherdson inquiry report and you will need nothing else to establish the bona fides of the Labor Party.

I know that my colleague will be talking about participation, closure of the rolls, proof of identity and mobile polling. On that basis I will speak very briefly about participation, because I was not getting the rapid head-nodding that I was getting in relation to the other matters. The minister and I will be speaking at the 25-year celebration of the AEC in Canberra next week, and I will be making some comments about the participation question on that occasion. The simple fact is that non-institutional barriers are the chief problem with participation rates.

There are certain elements of the government’s response that cannot be supported by the opposition. The Commonwealth Electoral Act mandates that Australians have some basic rights and responsibilities—upon reaching enrolment age to enrol to vote; to actually maintain their enrolment to vote in election; and to fully extend their preferences to all candidates in their electorate who are contesting elections. These are the basic building blocks of our system of compulsory preferential voting. Yet the government’s response concludes that these requirements impose an unwarranted inconvenience on citizens. The Labor Party wants to shift to the lowest common denominator approach. That was wrong in our view and we oppose it.

The greatest right we have is to vote. Our very strong view is that participation is the key to this. With the rights come responsibilities and the responsibilities are clear that Australian citizens are required to participate in this process by enrolling. I will now hand back to my colleague, Senator Birmingham, who was a very active and important member of this committee as he is in relation to everything else he does, and he will continue with his remarks.