Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Hansard source

Well, it is part of Australian folklore, as I said, Mr Deputy Speaker.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The honourable member will address the bills.

And I am. I am just giving an illustration of how—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The honourable member will resume his seat. The honourable member will address the bills and deal with the matters before the House. The honourable member for Canning.

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a sensitive issue—we know—and I am dealing with it as sensitively as I can.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The honourable member will address the bills and not reflect on the chair.

When I talk about the responsibility for individual electors, there is the incentive for eligible voters to update their address details when they move. For example, if they fail to address this in 21 days they can be fined $110. That is part of the rules. That is an incentive to do so. We believe that the bills are a mere ploy by the Australian Labor Party and the Greens to improve their own electoral chances at the expense of the integrity of the roll. This was in part of the dissenting report, which is part of the deliberations that have been taking place in this parliament.

I give the example of the marginal seat of Canning. When I first won the seat of Canning in 2001, I won by about 526 votes. When there are 46 polling booths you do not have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that I could have lost if something like 12 people—15 people at the most—at each polling booth had either voted twice or manipulated their vote.

We know that the electoral roll on the day is not electronically connected to all the polling booths. Somebody gets a pencil out and rules a line in a particular book. That is fine when they collate them all after election day and find out that somebody has voted early and often—you know, a Labor Party mantra: vote early and vote often. The fact is that when you actually line them up it is too late because the votes have been taken and collated. The scrutineers have no ability to do anything about this because there is no corroboration with the other 46 polling booths—as is the case in my electorate—to check whether somebody has voted more than once.

Another issue—and I have done a fair bit of doorknocking in my time—is that people put themselves down at some very interesting addresses. I noted with interest when I was doorknocking over the years that around Falcon in my electorate there are a lot of empty beach houses, yet it was brought to my attention by some of the residents there that people were receiving electoral enrolment information at houses that had not been occupied for years. I am sure that the only body that would have the ability to control a whole lot of those sorts of votes would be something like a union that has a huge database and that can say, 'Look, you need to put yourselves down at that address because if you can get a couple of hundred people in that area that will help us with our votes.'

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