Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

I have a couple of points. Firstly, the member for Banks said he was dealing with the question of envelopes. Because of the way the ballots can become mixed, in that box will be ballot papers as well as envelopes, so you are dealing with both. The other point is about scrutineers. The act says:

A candidate may appoint scrutineers to represent the candidate at the scrutiny.

The way the amendment is written, I think it is open to interpretation that the Australian electoral official who is in fact opening the box, once it has been sent to him from the DRO together with the reports, examines the envelopes and the ballots and makes the decision about which ones are to be admitted to the scrutiny, and that is all of those ballots and envelopes unless he determines that they have been fraudulently or otherwise dealt with. Having made that decision, all other ballots will be put into the scrutiny. So what he is doing is not part of the scrutiny as set out in the act, and therefore there will not be scrutineers. It is certainly open to that interpretation, and I think we should be alert to that.

The other thing is that the ballots and envelopes that are admitted to the scrutiny or placed in the scrutiny by the AEO will in fact no longer be identified. So, although the balance of envelopes which the AEO determines should not be admitted to the scrutiny will remain identified, the ballot papers which he has determined are to be validly put into the scrutiny will no longer be identified, and therefore a Court of Disputed Returns would be unable to make a determination as to whether the AEO has made the right decision about those ballot papers.

They are the concerns I have. But the opposition are agreeing to allow the amendments to save the votes to go forward; that is the most important thing. And I do think it is less likely to occur in this coming election, unlike the last election. At the last election, the Australian Electoral Commission had not given adequate advice to all its electoral officers as to the change in the law that turned declaration votes, which were pre-poll votes, into ordinary votes, and the ramification of that was that as a declaration vote it could be opened before 6 pm on election day but as an ordinary vote it could not. That was the origin of the difficulty. Hopefully, this time the Electoral Commission will give correct information to all of its officers and that will not happen.

However, we have not touched on one question which remains for another day: once those ballot papers have been counted on the night, they are parcelled up into plastic bags now, I understand; but, if those plastic bags are tampered with, there is no provision in the act for what happens to those.

So we still have an area which we may have to deal with subsequently but, for the purposes of dealing specifically with the recommendations that came out of what happened in the seats of Boothby and Flynn, I think it is important at this stage that we are agreeing to let those amendments go through. And then, as I said, should we be successful in being elected, we will address those other issues in government.

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