Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I had been partly led away, by some of the distractions, from our response to government amendments (1) to (9), so I might return to conclude those. I will move on from some of the concerns with process to the policy arguments with respect to those amendments. The government's amendments will lead to poor policy outcomes. The Australian Labor Party supports the current compulsory preferential system. Compulsory preferential voting means that 100 per cent of the formal votes elect a senator or go to the seventh unsuccessful candidate in the race. No votes are wasted.

I encourage senators to look at the Hansard discussion we were having earlier with Senator Cormann about choice. He, in my view—but, given the nature of this debate, we will only know when we can see the Hansardwas practically arguing for voluntary voting in his suggestion that people should not be forced to vote for more than the number of parties that they might want to. I encourage the Greens to consider the implications of the approach that Senator Cormann seemed to be indicating in his fairly philosophical and, possibly, not considered government position on that point.

I note that Senator Xenophon is back. He was not here at the time I raised the issue. Given Senator Xenophon's earlier discussion about benchmarking and what standards we might want to test these measures against in the future, I returned to the issues that he had raised and encouraged him to have a look at the discussion that had occurred some time earlier when Senator Cormann became quite philosophical about what things voters should be forced to do. As I said, my reading of that contribution at the time—and we will only know when we get to see the Hansardwas that he was practically moving a pretty strong way down the voluntary voting path. That is certainly not the Labor Party's position. Our view is very clear: no votes should be wasted.

Under optional preferential voting large numbers of Senate votes will be exhausted from the count once their preferences run out. At the 2013 election three million voters gave their first preference Senate vote to parties other than the coalition, Labor, the Greens or the Xenophon ticket in South Australia. Under an optional preferential system the vast majority of these three million votes would have been exhausted. That means nearly a quarter of the formal votes which were cast would not have counted towards the final result. Millions of Australians would have been disenfranchised. The concerns are compounded by the limited information we have about what education campaign may occur for these very significant changes to the way we have voted.