Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Enrolment and Prisoner Voting) Bill 2010. This bill seeks to make two changes to electoral law that the coalition finds objectionable. The bill also makes two uncontroversial amendments to which the coalition is not opposed. The opposition sees no problem with allowing prisoners to remain enrolled on the electoral roll even if they are not permitted to vote—which is the substance of the first non-controversial amendment. The coalition also has no objections to the second non-controversial amendment, which fixes an anomaly in the Electoral Act to ensure that all provisions of the act apply in the event of a half-Senate election. These two amend­ments are common-sense changes and the coalition does not seek to oppose them. However, the other two changes proposed in this bill are neither sensible nor common sense and the opposition cannot support their passage through this chamber.

The first undesirable change proposed in this bill relates to enrolment and the date of the closure of the electoral rolls before an election. The government alleges that this change is designed to make sure that people are not excluded from voting. The government claims that previous amend­ments to the Electoral Act made in 2006—which changed the time of the closure of the electoral law from seven days after the issue of the writs to 8 pm on the day the writs are issued—prevented many people from voting. This claim is pretty simplistic, to say the least. Certainly, the number of new enrolment or changes of address that the AEC dealt with dropped from 520,000 in 2004 to 263,000 in 2007 after the amendments to the Electoral Act were made in 2006.

However, the amendments were accom­panied by a strong advertising campaign funded by the then government to encourage people to enrol earlier. This is reflected in the fact that fewer people missed the enrolment deadline in 2007 than in 2004. In 2004 168,394 people missed the deadline of seven days after the writs were issued. Yet in 2007, when the deadline fell at 8 pm on the day the writs were issued, only 100,370 people missed the deadline. So we actually saw a drop in the number of people who were unsuccessful in their enrolment because of the deadline when it was moved forward under the 2006 laws.

Let us not forget, that it is indeed a criminal offence in this country to not be enrolled to vote once you are over the age of 18 years. What other laws are there that, when we break them, lobby groups like GetUp claim we are victims of some right-wing conspiracy of the Howard government? If we do not pay our taxes, no-one goes out on a limb to defend our rights to belatedly get the money to the tax office. If we forget to put on a seatbelt, no-one argues that they were not given enough time to do it up before driving off. In this country we are all bound by legal imperatives. Yet the legal imperative to be enrolled to vote and to have your enrolment record up to date is not sufficient for groups like GetUp. They feel that they need to sort of ride in on a white horse in case anyone has forgotten—