Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move opposition amendments (14) and (16) on sheet 7360 together:

(14) Schedule 1, page 15 (line 11), omit the heading.

(16) Schedule 1, item 54, page 16 (line 3), omit "and 53".

We also oppose schedule 1 in the following terms:

(15) Schedule 1, item 53, page 15 (lines 12 to 14), TO BE OPPOSED.

At the outset I note that the amendments now being moved by the opposition with respect to the extension of the automatic enrolment provisions to the use of ATO data incorporate amendments that have also been moved and are listed by Senator Xenophon.

I would like to address a couple of the points raised earlier in the debate following my contribution about the opposition's position on automatic enrolment. With respect, Senator Rhiannon and Senator Polley stated and/or implied that the opposition sought to keep people off the electoral roll. I am sick to death of coming into this place and finding out that the people on the other side have a window into my soul and determine my motivations. On this particular issue, I have been consistent, as have my arguments and all the criticisms I have offered of automatic enrolment. These ad hominem attacks that the Labor Party and the Greens throw up serve no purpose if we want to look at what is actually happening with our electoral roll. With respect, I do not think Senator Rhiannon should be going down the path of trying to interpret people's motives for what they say and do.

I go back to the key point. I challenge anyone to find an easier form produced by the Commonwealth parliament than the electoral enrolment form. I challenge anyone to walk into a Medicare office, a Centrelink office or an office seeking some sort of licence to undertake business activity and find an easier form than an electoral enrolment form, which is an A4 page. The form to register a newborn with Medicare has 80 questions. So let us not pretend that there is in any way a burden or disincentive for people enrolling to vote. These arguments need to be recounted because of the slurs put upon the coalition's consistent position time and time again by contributions like those from Senator Rhiannon and Senator Polley.

We have said that you have a legal obligation to enrol to vote and then you have a legal obligation to effectively vote. There are some people missing from the electoral roll. There is some debate about the numbers, but let us not confuse people choosing not to exercise their right to vote with disenfranchisement, which is the conflation the Labor Party and the Greens try to come up with: that in Australia we have a system, prior to automatic enrolment or in those states where it does not exist, that somehow prevents people from exercising their franchise.

This is patently and demonstrably untrue. It is an insult to every other voter. It is an insult to the Australian Electoral Commission. Let us be honest about what people are on about here, which is seeking to circumvent the government's responsibility to pursue those who do not enrol to vote because it is just easier to start using technology and add people. Senator Rhiannon and Senator Polley attacked the coalition and said certain things about people whom we allegedly would not like to have the vote, despite there being no evidence supporting those accusations at all. It does make one wonder what their intentions are.

If we go back to what exists in Australia, we now have automatic enrolment. It is inevitable that a mistake will be made because nothing is perfect. When that mistake happens, the people who have constantly criticised this process and constantly warned of the mistakes can legitimately say, 'We told you so.' But I am sure there will be some sort of excuse and attempt to obfuscate and to avoid responsibility from the Labor Party and the Greens. Various other measures that are being put in place seem dedicated to preventing a paper trail which can be useful in determining whether or not there is electoral malfeasance going on.

I am humble enough to say that, if there are a million people not on the Australian electoral roll, that is more a reflection on the members of this place and the members of the other place than it is on any law in our country or the citizens for not complying with the law. If people are choosing not to enrol, then the government should have the courage to enforce the law and go after those people, as the Victorian Electoral Commission tried to do. But the government does not wish to do that. It wishes to surreptitiously increase the role and reach of the state by conscripting people onto the electoral roll.

We heard the complaint from Senator Polley that the reason we have had these people added to the roll was that in the past the Electoral Commission cleansed the roll. As it should, because I want my Electoral Commission taking people off the electoral roll if they are not entitled to be on it or if they are not entitled to exercise the vote at the address which they claim. That might just be an oversight because they forgot to change their address after they moved house. The AEC uses data-matching facilities to send people letters and remind them, saying 'We understand you may have moved house. We understand that you have not changed your enrolment. Here is an opportunity.' There is a warning letter, saying 'If you don't change your enrolment, we will strip you of your entitlement.' Letters are sent to old residences saying, 'Sign this and send it back to demonstrate that you still live there.'

Many Australians have gone through this. It is not a hard process to comply with, yet now under automatic enrolment the opposite happens because if the AEC is of the belief, after looking at various databases, that you should be on the roll and you are not or that you should be on the roll at a different location than the one which you are at, after they send you letters or an SMS or email and you do not respond, they will add you.

There is a major and significant difference to the integrity of the roll between adding people when they do not respond and removing them. The job of the AEC should not be mistaken as saying, 'We want to get everyone on the roll.' The job of the AEC is to maintain the integrity of the roll. There is a subtle difference there. Because if we start having people on the roll at places they are not entitled to be at because of mistakes by the AEC or mistakes by state government databases that the AEC relies upon when it compares births, death and marriages to the national database on citizenship ceremonies, to the state databases on school leavers or driver licences or car registrations, would anyone in Australia have faith that all those are error free?

If people fill out a form as a citizen entitled to vote, we take that form at face value because a citizen has put their name to it and signed it. If they have not signed it appropriately, then they have committed an offence. But the government and the AEC and the Greens do not want to actually go after people who have not enrolled. They want to conscript them onto the roll and add them, quite possibly, without their knowledge. The experience of the last Victorian election is that—contrary to the wishes of those opposite and the Labor Party and the Greens—there was a much lower rate of voter turnout amongst those that had been automatically enrolled than there was amongst the general enrolment. That is to be expected. It is what you would expect from people who might not even know they have been added.

There was a statistic quoted earlier that, if someone has not voted at their first three elections, they are highly unlikely to vote at future ones. That may be the case. But does anyone seriously pretend that that is due to that person being denied the right to vote? I would suggest that person is going to a great deal of trouble to not enrol. That is more a reflection upon us as politicians than it is upon citizens or the Electoral Commission.

Why is this amendment so important? The coalition consistently opposes automatic enrolment. This represents an extension of it and a worrying extension. There has been a very good reason why there is a very strong privacy wall around ATO information. It is pierced occasionally but rarely. In fact, in this chamber and the other place only weeks ago, those of us on this side were being lectured by members of the government that those very privacy laws prevented the government telling us how much the mining tax had raised on the off chance that it might identify someone. Those were simple numbers about what revenue a tax had collected that people see twice a year in MYEFO and the budget papers. Yet now, after the government relented on the absurdity of that situation, we have this bill which proposes that the ATO data can be released to the Electoral Commission in order to facilitate the automatic enrolment process.

There is another risk here. I have the utmost respect for the staff of the AEC, despite the occasional disagreement. I have said before on the record that I think the AEC crossed the line and advocated policy when they supported automatic enrolment, because it was a contentious issue. That said, I think we can look at our electoral processes as some of the best in the world in terms of their administration. I think there are legitimate concerns about training of officials, about the budgets that are provided, about the length of time people are waiting and about the focus on issues like a so-called polling period rather than a polling day, but they are all within the bounds of what I would call reasonable debate.

The more we use external databases, the more we are not relying on people of the AEC, the more we are not relying on people who are aware of the sensitivity of the role of the AEC and of the information. I am not alleging anything here about the ATO; I am certain that their staff understand, probably more than anyone, the importance of privacy of ATO data. But I am also certain they are not trained in the code of conduct or appropriate behaviour for Electoral Commission staff, just as people at VicRoads or the New South Wales RTA would not be.

We are using sources of data that are collected for a different purpose, in this case the purpose of taxation administration, and we are giving it to another party. The opposition has constantly and consistently opposed this. In respect of the ATO, we are crossing another line, one which is actually about people's relationship with the Commonwealth, people's relationship with the tax office and whether or not it is appropriate that information be shared. I have long been a person who is very concerned about the data matching that goes on within the Commonwealth and state governments in this country and its impact upon privacy, and again I do not think there is a justification being made for this particular change.

The assertion that there are one million people missing from the electoral roll is made to imply that somehow they are being denied the opportunity to enrol to vote. No-one has come up with a single example to illustrate whether that is the case. The assertion that we need to maximise the number of people on the roll is seemingly made at the expense of legitimate concerns about integrity. And no-one can guarantee that these databases will not result in a mistake being made. That is not to say there is not a mistake now if someone has made a false assertion, but we have a trail by which that person can be pursued. If in a close election, like the McEwen electorate in 2007, we find out in a few years, after the operation of this automatic enrolment process, that 50 people out of an electorate of 105,000—I think that is what it was then—were mistakenly enrolled, when the margin after the count finished was a couple of dozen votes, what does that do for faith in our electoral system?

Anyone on the other side of this chamber who relies or who seeks to rely on the coalition not pointing out that flaw given our constant warnings about the risks of this approach will be hoping in vain. We will point out the flaws, we will point out why this was done, we will point out how often the warnings were made, and we will point out the fact that we made the point about flawed databases elsewhere. I am not particularly optimistic this afternoon about the success of this amendment, but I am hopeful that people will note that, yet again, the coalition is making the point that this is a flawed process and that the sharing of this data is not appropriate for an electoral roll that is an important document and is one that should be based on citizens asserting their acquired or born right to exercise their franchise in this country.