Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to take your interjections. Let's get onto this key issue about exhausted votes, because that is one of the major scare tactics that we have seen come in the second reading speeches, particularly from Senator Conroy and Senator Wong but also from many others. It is worth looking at closely, because when you listen to them they come out with these numbers—sometimes very large numbers. They have not substantiated the numbers or said where they come from. So it is worth looking into.

Senator Conroy, when he spoke, spoke about 25 per cent of the vote being exhausted and 3.4 million Australians having their votes stranded—very dramatic, as Senator Conroy can be. It is the sort of thing that is not picked up on Hansard, but it is worth sharing with people who will read this at a later stage, that so often, when Senator Conroy and Senator Dastyari finish these dramatic speeches, they have a wink, they put their thumbs up and they have a bit of a laugh. They know they have been extreme. They know that they are over the top. They know they are exaggerating. They know they are misleading the house, and they have a bit of a joke about it.

But this is serious. Labor has just gone too far this time, and the exhausted vote issue illustrates the depth of the deception. So let's look into what is going on here. When we were at the inquiry, this was one of Senator Conroy's questions to Antony Green:

Do you think a fairer system is one that sees 80 per cent of votes exhaust?

There is clearly an implication there that that is one of the things that will happen here. I acknowledge today—and I have just given the figures—that he has now dropped that down to 25 per cent, but still Senator Conroy and Senator Wong are not giving the details of how they arrive at those figures.

It is useful to go to some of the evidence that was presented to the inquiry, in a very considered way, by Kevin Bonham, because when you read some of the evidence before the inquiry you come to the conclusion that the exhausted vote argument is greatly exaggerated. Kevin Bonham, in his evidence to JSCEM, demonstrated that many voters who vote for a microparty actually then preference a major party. Anyone who votes for the coalition, Labor or the Greens will not be exhausting their vote, and any voter who votes for a smaller party and preferences one of these larger parties is unlikely to be exhausting their vote. In addition, anyone who votes for a party other than the larger parties mentioned, if that party wins a Senate seat or is a runner-up in the battle for the last seat, will not be exhausting their vote.

The ballot paper will be instructing voters to number at least 1 to 6. Most voters will follow the instructions, particularly as how-to-vote cards will show that too. I know that Senator Wong is saying that is highly unlikely because it is a changeover from the previous system. We know there will be an education system. We know the AEC is very effective at doing this. I will also come to the experience in the ACT. Again, we have heard a great deal of talk from Labor. One of their favourite words in this debate is 'hypocrisy'. This is where Labor are being hypocrites.

I will read some of the information from Dr Kevin Bonham's submission to JSCEM. This is where he deals with the claim that the bill will disenfranchise the about 23 per cent of Australians who vote for parties other than Labor, the coalition, or the Greens in the Senate. That is essentially Labor's argument. Let's look at what he says:

This claim rests on the completely false belief that a person who prefers one other party to Labor, the coalition or the Greens will also generally prefer different minor parties to the 'big three'. In an article published on my website, I analysed sample preference flows from microparties when their candidates were excluded from House of Representatives counts. In cases where a microparty candidate was excluded from the count, I found that between 33 per cent and 71 per cent of preferences (varying by microparty) flowed directly to one of the 'big three' even when there was still at least one other microparty in the count.

Obviously not every microparty can be represented in any given state. The House of Representatives' preferences show that once voters are making a choice involving the 'big three' parties and any given microparty, their support for the latter is nothing like as strong as the 23 per cent support for all non big-three parties combined. A vote for a given microparty is not a vote for any microparty come what may, and therefore the idea of measuring the proportionality of support for micros by the proportion of seats they win collectively is a furphy.

That is absolutely clear.