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

‘Relevance,’ the member says. This article deals with how people are enrolled and it deals with the registration process in the United States. The author says:

Not surprisingly, nations with compulsory voting laws have high voting rates, with a mean turnout of 87 percent. Nations with automatic registration have a mean turnout of 76 percent, while the two voluntary registration countries, France and the United States, have substantially lower rates of 65 percent and 55 percent respectively.

That is about compulsory voting as opposed to non-compulsory voting. It is about registration needs as opposed to registration difficulty, but it is the same fundamental point. He goes on:

Because voluntary registration is a relatively burdensome task that must be fulfilled in most cases at a time prior to the election (in most states thirty days) and thus takes place before the campaign peaks, individuals who are not engaged with the political world are less likely to register than those who are engaged.

He further states:

The first pattern of note in the table

that is, in the article—

is that across all three forms of registration individuals with higher socioeconomic status (education and income), older Americans, and whites register in greater proportions than individuals of lower status, younger Americans, and racial/ethnic minorities.

A final quote from that article:

Given that the pool of registered voters is always skewed toward privileged groups and that registered individuals from privileged groups vote at higher rates than individuals from non-privileged groups, the voting population in the United States tends to be substantially skewed toward higher SES groups, older Americans, whites, and those who do not change residence frequently.

The reality is that people who are less likely to enrol are those with NESB backgrounds, those with lower educational accomplishments and those who move more frequently; and thus, fundamentally, are people who are renters rather than owners. For all the insistence of the member for Stirling about how we have laws in this country and they should be enforced and therefore we should now try to stop people who have been too slack from getting on the electoral roll—we should stop them from voting and participating—we all know that the movement of people in this country and internationally is far greater than it ever was. People have less job security and people are forced to move more often for employment and other reasons. As I said, that article, as do many other articles, points out that younger people are amongst those disenfranchised.

I noticed that the member for Macquarie in his tirade spoke of his sadness or his anger that, on election day, 17-year-old provisional voters were given ballot papers and that some people were given ballot papers for the wrong electorates. What the hell has that got to do with these proposals? Nothing whatsoever. It has also been interesting to hear from government members that they are concerned that during the week of the election the AEC workers have too much to do and cannot properly scrutinise the avalanche of new applications. I am afraid to say that, historically, the AEC has not had the same concern. As an independent authority of public servants, respected by most people in this country and seen as far more professional and neutral than authorities in other countries, it has not made the same complaint. These complaints have come from a number of political parties in this country who have a passing interest in denigrating the system, driving it down and using this as justification to disenfranchise and marginalise people’s participation in the political system.

They say that people are overworked, that the workers cannot manage this huge avalanche—the AEC has systematically denied that over decades; they say they can do it because they hire more people during that period to deal with those numbers that are expected and do occur—but in this legislation, they bring in new demands upon the workers with regard to how many people are going to sign papers and that type of thing. There are a number of other similar provisions that go towards increasing their workload. This measure is driven by partisan considerations.

I would like to cite another very recent article. As I said, I have not had to go back through 5,000 articles on this matter; there are very few people in the world who follow these issues—professionals, academics, politicians—who have the hide to push the line put here today that there is no connection between who is likely and who is unlikely to vote as a result of these changes. There is no-one internationally who would argue that there is no connection between who is being marginalised and voting intention. I refer to an article—once again it is a very recent one; we do not have to go back very far through the avalanche of articles on this matter—titled ‘The effect of socioeconomic factors on voter turnout in Finland: a register-based study of 2.9 million voters’ by Pekka Martikainen, Tuomo Martikainen and Hanna Wass published in the European Journal of Political Research in 2005. Their conclusions from that very thorough survey were:

The results show that income and housing tenure are more important determinants of turnout among older voters than among younger voters, whereas education has a dominant role in determining young people’s turnout. Moreover, class has maintained its discriminatory power in determining turnout in all age groups even though working-class under-representation in participation can be partly attributable to previously obtained educational attainment. Furthermore, the lower turnout of younger voters remains unexplained even if socioeconomic factors are held constant. Lower turnout among lower social classes and among the young will affect the legitimacy of the prevalent model of party democracy.

What they are saying is what everyone else in the world knows, including a multitude of US researchers and academics: there is a clear relationship between the ease of participation in the system, the degree to which people are encouraged, the degree to which people have opportunities to participate in it and certain socioeconomic factors. It is clearly related to racial minorities—

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