Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to hear that we have the support of Labor for this important bill, the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment (Lowering Voting Age and Increasing Voter Participation) Bill 2018. I am absolutely so pleased to be standing up here speaking in support of the Greens bill for lowering the voting age and increasing voter participation, because we have a huge democratic deficit here in our parliament. If you look around at the people who are representing Australians in the Senate today, they are overwhelmingly older people. I am one of the younger people here. They are overwhelmingly male. They are overwhelmingly white. We need to be doing everything we can to be increasing the diversity in our parliament, whether it's through younger people, females or people of different cultural backgrounds. This bill is critically important for increasing that engagement with politics for young people and, in fact, all people. The measures that are in the bill to allow voters to enrol on the day of an election and to update their details on the day of an election are just as important as the measures to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote.

Before I go into some of the reasons as to why the Greens think that this is incredibly important action to be taking, I want to respond to some of the issues and concerns raised by the Labor Party and the government. I was pleased to hear Senator Farrell's clarification that Labor are supporting this bill—