John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of document 19: Electoral Matters—Joint Standing Committee—Conduct of the 2013 federal election: Senate voting practices—Interim report. I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has an important role after every federal election to review the conduct of that election and provide recommendations for government and the parliament to consider. This interim report tabled by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters focuses on Senate voting and party registration which are issues that caused considerable concern in the 2013 election. I am pleased that the JSCEM has tabled this interim report so that policy and legislative decisions can be made to ensure the will of voters at the next Senate election is properly reflected by the senators who are chosen by the people.

The primary concern of JSCEM has been to address the growing practice of preference harvesting by micro-parties, which has made Senate voting convoluted and confusing; and it has simply warped and manipulated the will of voters. Above the line voting and group voting tickets for the Senate were introduced in 1984 to address the high level of informal voting. Voters were required to number every square on the ballot paper and mistakes in preference sequences meant votes were declared informal. Since those reforms, the vast majority of Senate votes have been cast above the line. However, the emergence in recent years of bogus micro-parties who rely on multilayered preference deals with other parties has distorted this above the line voting system and action needs to be taken. Like the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Reform in 1984, the current Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has been focused on making certain that the will of voters in Senate elections is not distorted or frustrated. This interim report contains what I believe are good recommendations—recommendations that will lead to fair and effective reform of Senate voting and party registration. I trust that the report will be well received, and I think it certainly has been to this stage.

The committee's first recommendation for Senate voting is to allow preferences to be used by voters above the line and to make below the line voting less onerous by requiring voters to fill in only six or 12 squares, depending on whether it is a half Senate election or a double dissolution. In practice, this will mean that the voters themselves will control the candidates and party groups who get their vote and their preferences. So rather than just voting 1 above the line and allowing preferences to flow according to the parties' wishes, voters would be able, for example, to vote 1, 2, 3 and so forth above the line and their preferences would flow through each of those party groups according, importantly, to the voter's wishes. I would say that this reform is uncontroversial and it is certainly overdue.

Similar reforms were considered in 2009 in the then government's electoral reform green paper, Strengthening Australia's democracy. It is unfortunate, I believe, that those reforms did not progress at that time. Five years later, there was overwhelming evidence presented to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that the Senate voting system was still in need of repair. The evidence is well summarised in chapter 3 of the interim report. Above the line voting has developed to a point where bogus microparties engage in what I call 'game theory' and send preferences through a myriad of politically disconnected parties without any concern as to what a voter's real intention might have been. The 'gaming' of preferences by microparties has bastardised the Senate voting system, and the committee's recommended reforms to above the line voting, I believe, should deal with this very difficult problem.

I concur with proposals to simplify below the line voting in Senate elections. There is no good reason why voters should have to give a vast list of preferences for their vote to be formal. If a voter chooses to vote below the line, then the simple requirement for a minimum number of preferences has far more integrity and is less confusing than a system where voters have to decide on which known candidate might get their 72nd or 45th preference and so forth.

The committee's second recommendation, to abolish group voting tickets, is, I believe, a good recommendation also. It is directly linked to recommendation 1. Group voting tickets served an administrative purpose, helping to minimise the level of informal voting. However, group voting tickets are now being abused by microparties and there has been ample evidence presented to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that a voter's true voting intention is getting lost. Preferences are a critical part of our voting system; we all acknowledge that, and the combination of reforms to above the line voting and the abolition of group voting tickets will ensure, I believe, the allocation is controlled by voters. And that is important. I trust that recommendation 3 is adopted by the government and that the AEC is properly resourced to run information campaigns about the changes.

Recommendations 4 and 5 are sensible proposals that will ensure a party seeking federal registration has genuine public support. Currently a party needs only 500 members nationally to be registered. This is below the 750 required for registration in New South Wales, equal to the 500 needed in Victoria and well below the 2,350 members required in aggregate to register in every state and territory. Raising the minimum party membership to 1,500 for federal registration is quite reasonable, especially given the privilege that registration gives a party, such as having their name appear above the line on the Senate ballot paper. I am pleased the committee is recommending that parties operating in only one state need fewer members to register and also that members relied upon for party registration can only do that for one party.

I do have serious reservations about the final recommendation, recommendation 6, regarding a new residency requirement for candidates. I am pleased, of course, that the interim report has had bipartisan support. It is a unanimous report. I certainly did not let my concerns about recommendation 6 stop that becoming a unanimous report as a member of the committee, and I look forward to seeing the government's response to the committee's recommendations. (Time expired)

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would urge the government to very seriously consider and then, having done that, implement—in their exact form or in a form close to that—the recommendations of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. I had the opportunity to participate in most of the deliberations of the committee in relation to the federal election so far as it related to the Senate voting. I certainly agree with all of the recommendations, although in relation to recommendation 1 there could be an opportunity for the government to consider whether the partial optional preferential voting below the line has a maximum sequential number of preferences to be completed equal to the number of vacancies—that is, six for a half Senate election, 12 for a double dissolution and two for any territory or state. That, I think, is an issue which needs a fraction more consideration. I am not unhappy with what is proposed, but there was some evidence given to us by, I think, Mr Green that you should go to 15. Perhaps I should not attribute that to anyone, but there certainly was evidence that we need to go a little bit further than just the number of senators to be elected, for all the reasons which were very well justified by those who gave evidence in that vein.

Optional preferential voting above the line is, I think, essential. I put myself in this category: even the simplest of voters could clearly work out, above the line, how they want to give preferences to the parties. In my state at the last election, there was an issue—and this happened on a number of occasions, but I relate this one issue—in relation to Katter's Australian Party. People who thought that it was a good idea to vote for Katter's Australian Party put 1 in the box, never thinking that by doing so they were preferencing the ALP before the LNP. I do not make assertions as to the fact that every Bob Katter voter was a voter who would, for their second preference, prefer the coalition to Labor, but I am pretty certain that is right. I say that from long experience in the north and in the electorate of Kennedy, which Mr Katter holds.

At the last election, when House of Representatives tickets were being prepared for pre-polling in the four crucial seats in Queensland—that is, the seats which could have gone to Labor or the coalition, depending on the preference flow: the seats of, as I recall, Herbert, Flynn, Capricornia and Hinkler—Mr Katter first issued a House of Representatives how-to-vote card that gave second preference to the Labor Party. Even his own supporters were so outraged and incensed that the initial how-to-vote card disappeared and, by the time the election came around, Mr Katter had a two-sided how-to-vote card for those four crucial seats.

Mr Katter appeared at one of our committee hearings, in Mount Isa, and spent all of his time not talking about the electoral system but blaming the Liberal-National Party of Queensland for its dishonest campaign. There were advertisements which he brandished around for the TV cameras. He just happened to forget there were no TV cameras in the room. He said, 'These are lies. This is why we did so badly. It was a dishonest campaign.' The thing that he was brandishing around said: 'A vote for Katter is a vote for Labor'. He knew his supporters would not like that. He protested so much. Initially, that is how he directed them in the four crucial seats in Queensland—not the others, because it did not matter where he directed his preferences for the others; it would not have made any difference to the outcome. But, in the four crucial, marginal seats, he originally gave them to Labor and, after his own party rebelled, he changed it to a double-sided card.

Mr Katter said, 'I didn't give second preference to Labor.' I said to Mr Katter, 'Have you had a look at your group voting ticket?' He said, 'Nobody looks at that.' I said, 'When people voted 1 for you, or your party, in the Senate, they were actually giving'—do not hold me to these numbers, but it is something like this—'your 33rd, 34th, 35th, 36th, 37th and 38th vote to the Australian Labor Party and your 63rd, 64th, 65th, 66th and 67th vote to the LNP.' I do not want to suggest that this is a personal thing, but I am pleased to say that I led the LNP ticket in Queensland to a stunning victory. In fact, it was the best victory for the coalition anywhere in Australia, although, I have to say, the Western Australians originally did better than us, but on the rerun we in Queensland did far better than any other state. Perhaps inappropriately, I was slightly touched by the fact that, of all coalition candidates anywhere in Australia, I had the highest below-the-line vote. That is not a reason why I raised these things with Mr Katter. Clearly, under the group voting system that we currently have, Mr Katter had lodged his form giving, effectively, his second preference to Labor and his third preference to the LNP.

I guarantee that 99.9 per cent of the people who voted for Katter's Australian Party in the Senate at the last election expected—they may not have liked it but they would have expected it—that their next vote would have gone to the LNP before the ALP. That just demonstrates how inappropriate this current system is. There was lots of evidence given before the inquiry—and I think Senator Mason was a beneficiary of this at the previous election—on how the preferences of a party, if I could use this vernacular, of the Extreme Left were being used to effectively give the deliberative vote to parties of the Extreme Right, and vice versa: people who voted for parties of the Extreme Right would have been appalled to know that, if they had looked at their group voting ticket, their effective second preference went to parties of the Extreme Left. That is why this current system is unfair. I do not think there would be too many Australians who would disagree with that recommendation of the committee.

I would urge the government to change the system sooner rather than later. I appreciate there are some sensitivities, but this is a reform which must be well in place before the next federal election. If perchance there is a double dissolution, and the triggers are there, we certainly need to make sure that these new rules are in place well before any double dissolution is contemplated.

The fourth and fifth recommendations, as the previous speaker has mentioned, are appropriate. They deal with the number of people in a party and the registration of parties. The sixth recommendation, requiring a candidate to actually live in the state in which they are seeking election does seem sensible. We heard that there was a candidate in the Western Australian rerun who had never even lived in Western Australia and was offering himself to be elected as the champion of Western Australia. It just defies sensibility to think that he could even recover any public funding for votes he might get when he had not even been into the state.

All in all, as Senator Faulkner said, this was a unanimous report of the committee. I congratulate Tony Smith, the chairman, and all of the committee members on the diligence with which they addressed this issue and the quality of the report. It is now essential—I will repeat myself for a third time, because I think it is so very important—for the government to act on this report at the earliest possible time. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.