Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Hansard source

The minister at the table earlier described the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address) Bill 2011 and the related bill that we are dealing with today as being all good, but I rise to beg to differ with him. I think there are serious concerns about the two bills that the Senate is currently debating. Notwithstanding the effusive support given by Senator Rhiannon for these bills, I think we ought to look long and hard at what we are doing by passing these bills. The intention of this legislation is that a net be thrown out to the broader population of people who are apparently not enrolled on the present Commonwealth electoral roll. Using certain assumptions, a proportion of these people would be enrolled automatically—without their consent and presumably often without their knowledge—on the Commonwealth electoral roll. It is thought that this will increase the number of people who are enrolled and who are eligible to cast their vote at federal elections. It is a method of improving participation in Commonwealth electoral processes, which the Greens and the Labor Party obviously think is important, but which I think represents a large amount of self-interest. Senator Rhiannon suggested that it is only the coalition that has self-interest in this legislation; I think the support of the two governing parties for this legislation reflects a large measure of their own self-interest.

An important point about this legislation is that it goes to the operation of our electoral system and to the operation of a body like the Senate. To pass the laws of the country with authority and with a sense of reflection of the wishes of the Australian people, we need to have underpinning the work of the parliament the strong foundation of an electoral system that is accurate and fair and that produces results that reliably reflects the views of the Australian people. Underpinning that is the integrity of the Australian Electoral Commission, which, in turn, relies on the integrity of the electoral rolls. If you do not have reliable rolls you have an immediate and fundamental problem with the effectiveness of the entire democratic structure upon which this country depends for good government.

Without any doubt at all, this legislation degrades the quality of the Australian electoral roll. Throwing out this net and enrolling people who have not offered to be enrolled or who may not be eligible to be enrolled because they are already enrolled in a different location or under a different name must necessarily increase the unreliability of the electoral roll. For Senator Rhiannon to rise in this place and say that this is about ensuring the integrity of the electoral roll is farcical; it demonstrably decreases the reliability of the electoral roll. The proponents of this legislation might argue that that is a fair enough trade-off. They might argue that, by getting onto the roll more people who might, through ignorance or perhaps reluctance to be on the roll, not be enrolled already, it is all right to degrade the quality of the roll overall. I beg to differ. I think that maintaining a roll that reflects the wish of Australian citizens to be on the roll—to want to vote and be part of the electoral system of this country—is very important. When we move to a system that does not have that foundation we are inherently working on weaker foundations. That is a great concern.

This bill relies on the Australian Electoral Commission's being able to use other sources of data—what is referred to in the bill as a 'reliable and current data source'—to add names to the electoral roll. The legislation does not tell us what these reliable and current data sources might be; it just says that the information should be garnered from such, unnamed sources. That in itself creates some concern, because essentially it is up to officers of the Electoral Commission to determine what information it is that they might rely upon. It is a phrase that is supremely open to interpretation. Why does the legislation not name the sources that the roll ought to rest upon? Why does it not say that we can rely on Medicare enrolments, Australian Taxation Office records, state electoral rolls or something else? It does not do that; it creates a wide discretion. That in itself is a concern, not because members of the Electoral Commission might deliberately misuse it but because the principles are open to variable application and because it may result in some officers using information which simply is not reliable, in the objective sense of that word.

It is important to make sure that we know why people are enrolled, if they have not made an express decision to enrol themselves on the Australian electoral roll. There are many reasons why a roll constructed in this form might not be an accurate reflection of what people intend doing or what their eligibility for enrolment is. In a 1999 inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration, which was a review of an earlier Australian National Audit Office report on the management of the tax file number system, it was found that there were 3.2 million more tax file numbers than there were people in Australia at the preceding census—the last census before 1999. But we are saying that names can be added to the Australian electoral roll, presumably, on the strength of a tax file number being attached to a name and address in the ATO's database—that is, 3.2 million presumably inaccurate or partially inaccurate tax file numbers potentially being the basis for enrolment on the electoral roll. The audit found that there were 185,000 potential duplicate tax records for individuals. An audit of deceased clients of the Australian Taxation Office found that 62 per cent of those deceased clients were in fact not recorded as deceased in a sample batch. So potentially very significant numbers of dead people would under this system be eligible for some kind of enrolment. Maybe there are measures that the government has planned to prevent that from occurring.