Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yesterday at a public hearing the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters heard dramatic information from the refreshing new head of the Australian Electoral Commission, Mr Killesteyn. His evidence was not about economic matters; it was about the democratic deficit in Australia. There are 1.2 million Australians not enrolled to vote. This is after all the years of activities of the previous government which, in my view, were deliberately designed to minimise the number of people on the electoral roll. The electoral participation rate at the last election stood at 92.3 per cent of the Australian population, and I repeat: 1.2 million Australians were not enrolled. This is after herculean efforts by the Electoral Commission at the last election, spending $30 million on advertising to enrol 200,000 Australians. We only got the number of people enrolled to 13.6 million after that vast expenditure of money, which financially affected the AEC’s ability to operate and do its normal tasks.

Yesterday the committee asked Mr Killesteyn about a whole different methodology for the AEC’s operations. How people could, with an electronic process for changing their address, without further cost to the Australian taxpayer, be able to get themselves on the electoral roll. All of us as parliamentarians know that there is a process that continually takes people off the roll, but we make it so difficult for our constituents, ordinary Australians, to get back on the roll. We really have to do something about this, and any democrat, whether they are in the opposition or the government, should be interested in this. It would take 300,000 extra people to be enrolled in Australia to get us back to 92.3 per cent, the participation rate we had at the last election. We have to enrol 300,000 people by 2010, and it took the AEC $30 million of advertising to get 200,000 people. What balance is this meant to reflect?

All through the last few years the previous government talked about the integrity of the electoral roll. Let me go through some of the figures that were revealed at the electoral matters committee hearing yesterday so members can understand the almost bogus nature of this issue. There were about 17,000 apparent multiple votes at the 2001 election, for instance. For 15,000 of those, or 88 per cent, there was an indication from responses that no further action was required. There were 920 people who the AEC got no responses from—letters were undelivered or people were not able to be found. There were 896 examples of multiple voting. People like Mr Pyne, the member for Sturt, have railed about the integrity of the electoral roll at previous elections. Of those 896 multiple votes, 739, or 82 per cent, were elderly people who, completely by a matter of confusion, innocently or because of poor comprehension, voted twice, at a mobile polling booth and then on the day. We know the kinds of circumstances where this can happen without any kind of malevolence by elderly voters. That was 82 per cent of cases of multiple voting.

So there were only 138 cases referred to the AFP, of which five were accepted for investigation. So we have 13.6 million Australians and only five proven cases of electoral fraud, which the DPP decided not to follow up. But we have 1.2 million Australians unenrolled. What does this say about the kind of balance that we have in this debate? It is a complete imbalance and the Electoral Commission, with its new Electoral Commissioner, will hopefully do the will of this new government and get more Australians on the electoral roll, increase democracy in this country and not focus solely on a few bodgie votes—five at the 2001 election. This is a pattern, by the way, and I have been pointing out that this pattern has been happening for years.

Between 1990 and 2009, there were only 72 proven cases of electoral fraud. There were six electoral events and 72 million votes—one per million. When we have such a good electoral system, why are we focusing on disenfranchising Australians and, at the same time, allowing hundreds of thousands of our people to be disenfranchised? I hope the new Electoral Commission gets good advice from the electoral matters committee so that we go and enrol people, we stop taking people off the roll and we particularly stop forcing young people and provisional voters to lose their democratic rights at election time. It is a scandal and it has got to stop. (Time expired)