Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is indeed a chance that they do. I think it is unsafe for the law to rely on the postmark of an envelope in deciding whether or not a ballot has been cast in time. The committee had a rather lengthy session with officers from Australia Post, who agreed that a letter posted in western Queensland may not be postmarked until it reaches Rockhampton a number of days later. That can cause valid votes to be excluded from the count, and that is a disenfranchisement of those voters. As I said earlier, many of the provisions in the legislation are to ensure that people are given the opportunity to vote. The capacity to apply online for a postal vote is another means of ensuring that these situations do not occur. Anyone who has experience in trying to contact known supporters who are overseas when an election is sprung on us would know that getting their postal vote application back from overseas, getting the ballot paper back to them and then getting their vote back in time is often quite a trying exercise.

The mobile polling consolidation makes a great deal of sense because it places in the hands of local Electoral Commission officers the ability to determine when mobile polling will take place. That will address some anomalies in the system. One of the big problems I find is that too many government services in my area—and I am sure it is the same in everybody else’s areas—are controlled by black-and-white rules and local government services lack discretion. I am very pleased to support the fact that, in this legislation, we are giving some discretion to local offices of the AEC to make provisions according to what is going on in their local community.

In his contribution on the legislation, the member for Goldstein reserved most of his invective for the how-to-vote cards bill. Let us not beat about the bush—what occurred in South Australia has led to this. But let us not lose sight of the fact that it was not only the Labor Party that engaged in this kind of activity. Let us be quite clear about the activity that was engaged in in that election. Members of the Labor Party wore T-shirts of an unusual colour for the Labor Party, with a slogan printed on them that included the name of another party and handed out how-to-vote cards, properly authorised, that suggested how another party wanted people to vote. None of what was wrong in that circumstance is covered by this legislation.

Let us not be shy about it. The Labor Party were not the only people doing it in the South Australian election. Health Minister John Hill in the South Australian parliament the other day suggested that the Family First Party—the party who made the big song and dance about the activities of the ALP—also acted in a similar way by dressing their operatives in a T-shirt of a colour not normally associated with the Family First Party and by having slogans on those that were taken from union campaigns of recent times. I am not going to say that either of them was right or wrong, but a couple of interesting questions occur to me in all of this.

First of all, second preference cards have been around for years. As I look around the members gathered here, I suspect that I am not the only member of parliament who has used a second preference card. These usually came about when we were looking for preferences from a party who did not offer them in their how-to-vote card or who you felt might have been offering them to the wrong side. Let us use the Greens as an example. They usually started with something like, ‘If you are considering voting for the Greens, please consider giving your second preference to’—then insert the name of the major party that was distributing the card at the time.

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