Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

What would be the rationale to require a voter to fill in 36 or 72 boxes below the line? I note that all of the crossbenchers present, incidentally, as well as the Greens, supported the government's first amendment, which sought to introduce a form of optional preferential voting below the line. The initial Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters recommendation was that the instruction below the line should be to ask voters to number the equivalent number of boxes to the number of vacancies. So, for a half-Senate election that would be six, for a full-Senate election it would be 12 and for a Senate election in the Territory it would have to do be two. The view was put to us—and it is a view that we accepted and it is a view that was ultimately reflected in the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters report just the other week, in 2016—that you should require voters to preference more than just the available number of vacancies in order to ensure that preferences are passed on beyond the initial group of candidates on the initial ticket. That is something that favours minor parties, with all of the discussion and criticism that there has been of this reform—how this is supposedly bad for minor parties.

We have accepted the recommendation of 12. The current arrangement is that voters have to, of course, compulsorily fill in every single box. The proposition that has been put to us is that that is too cumbersome. There is a savings provision in relation to current below-the-line voting which says that you need to have at least 90 per cent of the boxes below the line filled accurately with not more than three errors in sequence. We believe that the arrangement that we are proposing is simpler and encourages more people to express a preference for individual candidates below the line instead of having 97 per cent of voters voting above the line, as they did at the last election. We believe we have the balance right. I gather that every party representative in the Senate, other than the Labor Party, supports the government's judgement in relation to this. We know, of course, that further government amendments, amendments (2) to (9) on our sheet, are essentially linked to the same proposal. So, what the Senate has already voted in favour of, in terms of our first amendment, is given proper effect in our further amendments, (2) to (9).