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

If the member recalls, I said there are many people here in this House, including him, I am sure, who were not aware of the intent of this legislation—of how this works on the ground—but the grand poobahs who were behind this legislation were aware of it.

In the AEC’s submission, it said:

It can be clearly stated, in relation to false identities, that there has never been any evidence of widespread or organised enrolment fraud in Australia.

In 2001 the AEC said:

It has been concluded by every parliamentary and judicial inquiry into the conduct of federal elections, since the AEC was established as an independent statutory authority in 1984, that there has been no widespread or organised attempt to defraud the electoral system … and that the level of fraudulent enrolment and voting is not sufficient to have overturned the result in any Division in Australia.

The last time I spoke on this bill I quoted Emeritus Professor Colin Hughes, a highly respected former Electoral Commissioner, and I think it is appropriate to do so again today. Professor Hughes wrote in 2005:

The thorough review of the electoral roll conducted in 2002 by the Australian National Audit Office concluded that ‘overall, the Australian electoral roll is one of high integrity, and can be relied on for electoral purposes’. There are adequate safeguards in the current electoral laws and procedures to deal with any future attempts at fraud without stripping the vote from hundreds of thousands of citizens.

This is a man who is revered by all sides of politics, who is an academic expert appointed by the previous government to many roles within the Electoral Commission and whose views should be listened to.

Let me return to the provisions of the bill. Schedule 2, part 1, item 2 inserts a new paragraph in the Electoral Act which is designed to reduce the number of provisional votes being rejected. It states that when a divisional returning officer examines the declaration envelope that contains a provisional vote, and where the DRO has some reason to doubt the signature on the declaration envelope is the actual signature of the voter, then the divisional returning officer may check the signature against the most recent record that contains the elector’s signature. Only if the divisional returning officer is of the view that the signature on the envelope and the signature on other records is not the same should the vote be excluded at this point of the count. That has been the system since at least the late seventies. This was a system that tried to incorporate and involve as many Australian citizens as possible. As I have said, we have a compulsory voting system in the democratic system: it is our ethical responsibility as democrats on all sides of parliament to include as many people as possible.

I understand in the Senate that some of the current opposition’s obsessions with integrity of the electoral roll are being addressed by an amendment that would allow the Liberals, without losing face, to keep their obsession with people producing photo identity at the polling booth but also give people the common-sense rights that they had and under which the previous government, the current opposition, was elected time after time after time.

This is a very important provision. We know from the evidence presented at many hearings of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters that the overwhelming majority of people casting provisional votes are genuine voters who are trying to cast a vote and have no intention of misleading or deceiving the returning officer. In nearly every case, when they have made a mistake in completing and signing the envelope, it is the result of inadvertence rather than malice. Many such voters are elderly, do not have a high level of education or may not have proficient English. It is not fair for their votes to be excluded because they made an honest mistake.

The provision will give the divisional returning officer the discretion to check the voter’s signature and make an independent judgment about the voter’s bona fides, rather than automatically excluding the vote. This will, I hope, reduce the number of provisional votes unjustly excluded from the count. The member for Fisher said that the period of grace that was given Australian voters when the writ was issued—that is, five working days after it is issued—and the previous system of comparing signatures for allowing provisional votes were ‘a rort’. I call them democratic necessity, ethical democratic behaviour and the kind of system that the previous government was elected under. I find it a great shame and a great traducing of Australian democracy that this issue has not been made more of and that the Liberal Party has been allowed to get away with this rort. What I fear is that, if people who have gone to divisional returning officers and changed their electoral address were expecting to be able to vote via the provisional voting system and then become aware at election after election that they are going to be rejected, they will be ‘routinised’ into not trying to exercise a vote. This will be a great victory for the antidemocratic element in the previous government that tried to change this legislation.

As I have said before, this bill fulfils a Labor election commitment, and will help to make our already great election system even better—fairer, more open and more inclusive. I commend this bill to the House.

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