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

Yes, I think I know how they might vote as well. Hence my comment before, Senator Fifield, about the self-interest of the Labor Party and the Greens alliance government. We know that a system that provides for such things to occur is inherently dangerous. Will there be checks undertaken to make sure that a person who is deceased but who still has a tax file number attached to a name and an address does not get onto the electoral roll? We don't know, because it is not spelt out in the legislation. It is not described anywhere. I would invite the minister in closing this debate to tell us how we make sure that those sorts of things do not happen. I suspect that she will not be able to.

The same audit report from 1998-99 by the Australian National Audit Office found that up to half a million active Medicare enrolment records were probably for people who were deceased. So the problem of out-of-date records in the tax office is replicated with out-of-date records in the Medicare office. Presumably, if a name is identified on the tax office database as belonging to a certain person and they say, 'We'd better check this. We'll look at the Medicare records and see if that name is confirmed there. Yes, it is, at the same address. That must be a real person,' then suddenly we have a confirmed enrolment. It has been checked and confirmed but in fact it is not an enrolment of a living person at all. That is the foundation on which this government wants to build this brave new world. I have to say I think that is extremely concerning.

There is really only one reliable way of ensuring that eligible people appear on the Australian electoral roll, and that is for them to exercise the initiative of saying, 'I choose to exercise my democratic right to be enrolled—indeed my democratic obligation to be enrolled—and I come forward to put that information into the public arena for the purposes of enrolment.' That is a reasonable system. That is a fair system, but that is not the system to which the government is presently proceeding.

There are a number of aspects of this which I think generate real concern. One is that it actually removes the sense of individual responsibility as the basis on which people engage with the electoral system. At the moment I am sure all of us in this place with children tell them, when they reach the age of 18, 'Make sure you're enrolled on the electoral roll.' You pursue that as a matter of responsibility, and it is good for your children to take that active step, maybe pushed a little by their parents, to go and put their name on the electoral roll. It reminds them of their responsibility as citizens in a democratic nation—one of the world's oldest democratic nations, indeed—to take part in the electoral system.

But what this government's legislation is moving towards is a system where that responsibility is removed or at least downplayed. What is to stop people from making an assumption, based on legislation like this, that enrolment is taken care of for you by the government? 'Don't worry about it—a computer somewhere will enrol you. You don't have to worry about that.' It may have the perverse effect of making some people think they do not need to take the step of enrolling, and that would be most unfortunate.

This is obviously an invitation to fraud. We will have an electoral roll which will be clearly less accurate than has been the case in the past, but of course it will remain a public document. Say we have a tight federal election in the offing one day. I don't particularly think the next one is going to be very tight, but let's assume there is a tight federal election coming up and there are a few key marginal seats that are likely to decide the outcome. Some people decide that it is very important that their party win those tight seats to make sure that they win the election. They go to the electoral roll and they discover with a bit of research that there are a number of names on that roll of people who are deceased. The temptation is there to cast votes in the names of those deceased people.

This is not a scare tactic; it is true. We know from audits of the electoral roll in the past that it is true there is some measure of deliberate fraudulent voting and some measure of fraudulent enrolment. When we have very tight election outcomes, the thought that results might be corrupted because of such behaviour is anathema to the effectiveness and reliability of our system. To think that we are passing legislation today to make that more likely is a matter of real concern.

Senator Rhiannon in her remarks raised concerns about privacy. Indeed, where people's names are being plucked from other data sources and placed on the electoral roll, there are real concerns about privacy. She addressed those by saying that records can be corrected. Perhaps they can, but that does not alter the fact that the problem with privacy is there at the beginning. Unless a person happens to know that some details are being used in an inappropriate way—and of course people are not asked to enrol under this new system; they are simply enrolled—the likelihood of that kind of abuse of privacy increases. It goes without saying that many people who are eligible for enrolment have reasons not to be on a publicly available, published version of the electoral roll—and I imagine there are a few such people in this very chamber, for example. They may lose that control because their names might be added to the electoral roll without them being aware of it.

Reference was made by Senator Rhiannon to the experience in New South Wales and Victoria, where once again Labor governments have introduced automatic enrolment provisions. Antony Green, the distinguished psephologist, noted in his blog on 16 July last year that of the 70,000 people automatically enrolled in New South Wales for its most recent election, two-thirds were so-called updated address details. That is the automatic system we are now looking at here. Only 12 per cent had filled out the AEC's form to enrol federally. Further, of the 20,000 people whose address details were changed automatically in New South Wales, only 87.5 per cent turned out to vote, below the overall attendance of 92.3 per cent. For those automatically enrolled for the first time, the turnout was only 64.3 per cent. So clearly the systems in New South Wales and Victoria are not completely effective at accurately reflecting what people want to do and what their intentions are. Taking from them the responsibility of making those decisions to enrol clearly presents a problem.

Acknowledging that there are, for example, problems with people enrolling to vote at the state level but not enrolling at the federal level, there are other ways of fixing those issues. If people demonstrate a desire to be enrolled and they put their name down on an electoral roll at the state level and think that they might therefore be enrolled at the federal level it is perfectly possible for the Australian Electoral Commission to write to these people and ask, 'Are you aware that you are enrolled on the state roll but not on the federal roll?' and deal with the issue in that way and leave the initiative to individual potential electors. But that is not the approach taken in this legislation, and that is very concerning.

I mentioned self-interest before. I cannot help but wonder whether a party or parties facing an adverse outcome at the next election might think it is a good idea to try to rake as many other people as they possibly can onto the roll so that it might perhaps tip the balance in their favour in some seats they are at risk of losing. It is very hard to know what their intentions are in that respect.

To sum up, these bills are a concern because they reduce the integrity of the Australian electoral roll, with electors having their details updated without their knowledge, leading to a higher number of potential irregularities. The bills give the Electoral Commission the discretion to determine what are reliable and current data sources without specifying to the rest of the community what those actually are. I think that places far too great an onus on individual officers within the Electoral Commission.

The coalition believes that the personal responsibility which is part of our electoral system, the initiative to be an active and informed participant in our electoral system, is eroded by a system which puts people on the electoral roll without them knowing or consenting to that happening. It is likely that this is a step towards across-the-board automatic enrolment with all the problems that obviously go with such a concept. I have already indicated to the Senate the various problems with other data sources. There is no highly accurate other data source from which such information can be derived to place a person's name on the electoral roll.

At a time when trust in the political process and in politicians is at a fairly low level relative to other points in our history, as demonstrated by some recent opinion polls, why would we in the Senate want to add to that problem by increasing the unreliability of electoral tools which attempt to reflect the wishes of the Australian people for the make-up of their government? Why would we want to degrade that most important tool—the Australian electoral roll—by degrading the quality of the information on it, as this legislation inevitably will do? That is the question the Senate faces this afternoon. Why we would want to make our system less reliable and to attack the reputation of our system as having fair and accurate outcomes in federal elections is a mystery to me. I think members of this place should reconsider their support for this flawed legislation.