Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

From time to time, I will put a question to the public: 'How would you vote if you were me?' I asked that recently on the government's proposed voter identification laws. The laws would require people to provide some form of government issued identification when presenting to vote on election day. I had just over 33½ thousand submissions. Overall, nearly two-thirds of voters opposed the laws. Sixty-four per cent of people taking my survey opposed the laws. In every state and territory, a majority of voters opposed the bill.

I want to make it clear that when I do a survey I don't hand over the wheel and say whichever side gets the most votes decides how I'll vote. I have a job to do. It's not my job to get other people to do my job. I'm supposed to use my judgement and values, and I don't apologise for that. One of the things I value is politicians who care what I think. I want to be that kind of politician. I want to know what my supporters think, because that's how politics gets better. So when I do a survey I'm not asking people to decide for me; I'm asking, 'If you were in my shoes, how would you vote and why would you vote that way?' I'm asking it as much to see their position as I am to see their reasoning behind it.

It's like a massive team meeting, where everyone who wants to speak up gets the chance to have their say. I would say that's called democracy. I listen to the arguments and I make my decision. I have listened to the arguments and have generally tried to engage both sides of the debate. On balance, I don't think the laws do the job. I'll be voting 'no' on the Morrison government's laws. It's not because the laws are racist. I don't accept they are. I can accept that they might have a bigger impact on the Indigenous community than everyone else, but that doesn't make it racist. All the law does is ask for identification. I don't think it's racist to ask for identification. If you get asked for ID when you get on a plane and airlines, they are not racist for asking for it. But just because it's not racist doesn't mean it's not bad.

I thought about the problem the bill is trying to solve, and some opponents of the bill have argued that there isn't a problem here to solve. Maybe that's true, and maybe it's not—it doesn't really matter, actually, because I can accept that there might be a problem here and still think this bill is bad.

To be clear, I don't think there's evidence that there is widespread voter fraud. I don't think there is evidence that it's becoming widespread. But it doesn't take widespread fraud for it to potentially decide an election result. Seats are getting tighter these days. If 280 voters in Bass in Tasmania voted differently in 2019, the Liberals would not have won that seat and I'd have had the numbers in parliament to form a majority government; 280 voters isn't a lot. So, just because there isn't widespread voter fraud doesn't mean there isn't a need to prevent it. To put it another way, if you car is never broken into, do you need to lock it? If your house has never burned down, do you need insurance on it? The best time to prevent a disaster is before it's happened, I reckon—probably the only way to do it. I don't know whether the problem is big, but it doesn't matter to the argument. So, let's say there's a problem. The next question is: does this fix it?

Asking someone for identification might make it harder for them to vote under someone else's name. How often that's happening—well, nobody knows. Let's say it's happening a lot; let's presume it is. Would it make it harder for someone to vote more than once? Not really—not on the day, anyway. You'd be able to go from booth to booth, flashing your ID and ticking the box, but you'd get caught in the end, when someone went and tried to balance the books. But you wouldn't get caught on the day. So, once your votes were thrown out, you'd have just wasted a perfect Saturday being a plain pest. That's all you would have done—and probably eaten too many snags on the barbie! So, you'd be caught anyway. That would be captured under the current rules that are already there. The only way it might not be caught would be if you were attempting to vote as more than one person. Asking for ID would stop that—asking someone for identification, asking them to prove that they are who they say they are. That's about all it does. That's the problem this bill seeks to address. It's the only thing it could really solve.

The first question I would ask myself is, does this bill fix a problem? Maybe not a current problem, but it could prevent a future one from developing. Second, is this solution appropriate to the problem? Well, maybe—partially. It would prevent people from voting using someone else's name. Nobody knows whether people are doing that, but, if they are, this would stop it. Third, are there benefits from fixing this problem? Sure. I want people to have confidence that the election results are based on the proper exercise of democracy. I want people to have faith in election outcomes. I don't want us rioting because elections are being 'stolen'. I want us knowing that conspiracy theories about vote rigging are simply that: fake news. We won't get there if we don't show the public that we take the integrity of elections seriously.

Fourth, are there risks from fixing this problem this way? Yes, absolutely there are. The risk is the unintended consequences in terms of the effects this would have on the voters at large. That's not a small thing. You're asking 16 million Australians to prove they are who they say they are, in order to stop maybe 1,000 people—and I don't know, because I haven't seen the evidence on the table, so we're guessing here, generously—from doing the wrong thing. These 1,000 people would be spread throughout the country and wouldn't have a measurable impact on an election result. The people who can't prove that they're themselves are given other ways to vote, but we don't know whether those alternatives are not enough or are too much. If you offer too many alternatives you just make it easy for people to avoid the rules anyway. So, there's a risk that this bill will end up making things worse, so some people who are entitled to vote just won't—in order to make sure that other people who are trying to vote more than once do not.

Finally, my fifth question would be, do the benefits outweigh the risks? No way—not even close. Put it this way. I'm prepared to accept that there's a possibility that there's some benefit from these laws. But if you're going to be honest about this you've also got to be fair-minded enough to accept that there's risk. Are there enough protections to allow people to vote legitimately without ID? Well, that's the big question, isn't it? Does this bill actually get the right balance?

As I was reading through the responses, to be honest I wasn't any clearer on the answer. Then I realised that that's because there is no way to know.

We're making a big change to the way people vote and we are really doing it blind. We are blindfolded. We haven't done it before, so we don't know if the protections that the bill puts in place are appropriate. Are they enough? Are they too much? Will they work? Will there be time to communicate the changes to the public? If we had a bit more time to work through those questions, we might be able to get a clear idea of what works and what doesn't. But we haven't been given the time to work out those questions; we've had a solution dropped in our laps that's basically a solution with a blindfold attached. We're told to put it on and see what happens. I don't think so.

If the protections in place aren't enough, then thousands of people trying to vote legitimately, as is their democratic right, will be prevented from doing so. That would be a disaster. That would be a disaster many times worse than the problem this bill is supposed to prevent. If the protections in place are enough, then maybe a thousand people trying to vote illegitimately, which is wrong, will be prevented from voting multiple times. That's a good thing. But we've already got some protection against instances of multiple voting, so at least we're only strengthening our protections against a problem.

Nobody has any idea what effect this bill will have on an election that is supposed to happen in three months, maybe—six months at most; who knows? We're in the shadow of a fresh election and we're being asked to make radical changes to how we vote, with no trials and certainly no evidence, apparently just on a theory. That's what we're doing here. This is where we've got to in the Senate. These people are supposed to be looking at all the evidence under a microscope and making sure that evidence is correct. We haven't done that. As a matter of fact, it makes us, as senators, look really poor. We're supposed to be making the laws of the land. This is where we're at. We just flick things up there and vote for them without evidence on the table. That's where your Australian parliament has got to today. Well, I'm not going to be a part of that, and that's why I'm out. I'm voting 'no' on the Liberal Party's voter identification laws, and they're my reasons.