Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005 is quite clearly driven by partisan self-interest. The reality was perhaps summarised by the member for Casey, who said that Australia ‘has a better than good system’. For many years the conservative coalition parties have sought to make it far more difficult for people to participate in our political system. That sentiment is based on the kinds of comments of the member for Macquarie, who spoke of anecdotes. He said, ‘It is possible that there is fraud.’ He said there have on occasions been convictions and allegations and anecdotal evidence, and then he relied on some rather questionable material from a group of people who perhaps have been rather obsessed with this issue over recent decades. Their publications do not stand up to analysis. Just because people put out publications does not mean that one has to believe in the Moonie Unification Church or a flat earth or anything of that sort. The reality is that not very much evidence has been produced by those opposite with regard to systematic fraud in our political system.

Those of us who are interested in alternative systems look at the United States where, on election day, they have to largely rely on volunteers and retired people to staff their polling booths. The United States do not have an independent electoral commission to determine boundaries in a way which both parties in this country do not really dispute. They have state systems of selection of electorates in their national parliament based on partisan determinations within that state. In California, if the Democrats control the lower house of that state assembly then the boundaries will be skewed in their favour, and that is the reality there. That is a system that is held up to us by many people opposite.

We have a strong drive in this legislation to restrict people’s access to the system. It is claimed by coalition members that this legislation is not partisan and that they are not doing this because they wish to either marginalise or deprive a particular group of people of voting rights; it is just that they want to make the system cleaner, more thorough and more protected. However, despite the fact that they say there is no evidence that these things can be driven by partisan consideration, international evidence is to the contrary. I do not need to spend months scouring through material in the Parliamentary Library. This week, amongst material that I was offered, I noticed an article by David Hill entitled ‘American voter turnout’. Admittedly, this article deals with the contrast between states in the United States that have difficult registration laws and those that have very liberal registration laws.

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