Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister representing the Prime Minister (Senator Birmingham) to questions asked by Senators Marielle Smith, Wong and Grogan.

I want to speak about the lies of the Prime Minister that we've seen in recent months but particularly in recent days. We all know about the Prime Minister's ability to bend the truth. We saw it first with simple things like his football team. He claimed he was a Cronulla Sharks supporter when we knew all along he was a rugby union supporter. Deputy President, I know you come from Western Australia and that rugby union and rugby league are not particularly strong sports over there, but in New South Wales and Queensland these are important distinctions, and for the Prime Minister to mislead the Australian people about who he really supports and who his football team is is very worrying. Of course, it went much further during the period of the sports rorts scandal. You will be very familiar with that, Deputy President, where we had the colour-coded document and documents being transferred between Senator McKenzie and the Prime Minister to direct funds that were supposed to be for women's sports around the countryside to marginal seats that the government was trying to win.

But there's been a more recent big lie from the Prime Minister, and I want to talk about that. That's in the form of the legislation that will come forward to us one of these days about voter identification, the so-called voter integrity law. What's the big lie here? The big lie is that there is something wrong with the Australian electoral system, that there are all these people in the community who, at election time, are multiple voters. It is simply not true. At the last election there was a total of 2,000 people who voted more than once. Out of a population of almost 16 million people who voted at the election, there were only 2,000 who voted more than once. The evidence from the Australian Electoral Commission is that most of those people who voted more than once were over the age of 80 and, in many cases, English was their second language. We do not have a problem with multiple voting in this country. In fact, the AEC commissioner, in evidence recently in the estimates process, described the issue as 'vanishingly small'. So why is it that we find the Prime Minister saying that that problem requires every single Australian, 16 million voters likely at the next election, to come along on election day and show some form of identification?

For 120 years, Australians have got themselves on the electoral roll; they've gone along on election day; they've queued up and perhaps had a sausage—like we had this morning with the protest outside the front of parliament—they've got their name struck off, been given a ballot paper and gone along to vote. Now, for the first time in our electoral history, 16 million people are going to be required to produce some identification before they're allowed to vote.

Why would you do this? One of the clear consequences of that, of course, is you're going to be spending a lot more time at the polling booth, perhaps double, perhaps three times as much time as you're spending there at the moment. In the worst pandemic in Australian history, when you're trying to keep social distancing, why on earth would you want to keep people at the polling booth longer than is absolutely required to exercise their democratic vote? I'll tell you the answer. This government is so worried about the next election, so worried about their polling results, that they want to suppress Australian voting numbers. They don't want anybody who is likely to vote against them— (Time expired)