Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that the views of the member for Mackellar have been consistent, and she has aired those views in the substantive debate on this bill and in the hearings that we have had of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, but I just have a fundamental disagreement with where she is coming from. Firstly, the Electoral Commission draws its information from a number of agencies. We are just adding the Australian Taxation Office. They have agreed—there have been discussions with the Australian tax office and Treasury—to participate if the legislation is amended and the tax office is added. The tax office, as I said in my speech on the second reading, has provided information to a number of other organisations, so the Electoral Commission is nothing different in relation to that. We have had that discussion. We just agree to disagree. I understand that the views of the member for Mackellar are genuinely held, but my view is that it is pretty hard to argue that the tax office is less reliable than other organisations from which the Electoral Commission draws its information. I know that the member for Mackellar has had a longstanding interaction as a member of parliament and as a senator with the tax office, but we have had that debate. I just disagree, and I think the government disagrees.

The one that puzzles me is the amendment that basically says, 'Let's contract the time for a prepoll vote from 19 days to 12 days'—in other words, one week less. I know that the member for Mackellar is being nostalgic here in terms of 'election day is election day', but that is not our modern society. The parliament and the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters over a number of years—when either side has been in government, when there has been an opposition chair, or whatever—have relaxed the provisions and made it easier to have postal votes and pre-poll votes. Indeed, one of the recommendations raised for the last election was that you could have a pre-poll vote if you were outside your electorate. We just took the view that we were not going to force people in that instance to lie and maintain that they are not within eight kilometres, they are interstate, or whatever. The figures are such that pre-poll voting is for a lot of people the preferred method of voting, as against filling out the forms for a postal vote application and then having your vote excluded because there is a challenge to a signature or something else like that.

What will result here, if the opposition gets their way with this amendment, is different systems for postal vote applications and for pre-poll applications. We have already contracted by one day the ability to have a pre-poll vote so that we can make sure there is uniformity with printed ballot papers for both the Senate and the House of Representatives. So it is now the Tuesday, four days after nominations close. In that week that the opposition would take away, people going overseas would not be able to have their postal votes processed. The postal vote would be the only form of voting left for them, as against rocking down to the electoral office and doing a pre-poll vote before they go overseas. As I understand it, a lot of votes—100,000 votes—were made in that one-week period about which the opposition are now saying, 'We do not want you to have the opportunity to vote.' That is how many people voted in terms of pre-poll. As long as they are legitimate votes, as long as you are dealing with people who are entitled to vote then the method of voting—pre-poll, postal or voting on the day—should be irrelevant. We just want people to vote. We want them to participate in the system. People now have different work patterns to what they used to have. In the old days, the weekends were more like a holiday.

What I am worried about is that the opposition seem to be following the Republican approach, which featured at the last presidential election in America, and which is about restricting the availability of early voting. When you scrutinise this recommendation, it falls short of the common sense argument and the existing argument. It is actually a safe way to vote for people who cannot vote on the day—better than mucking around with applications for postal vote applications.

People are voting with their feet because they have shown more and more since 1993 that this is a preferred way and we should not cut this option out for them. I am not doubting the motives of the member for Mackellar. I think that the way we have behaved in relation to scrutinising this bill is the way we ought to behave. People have argued the philosophies and the principles. It is just that I think it is like trying to unscramble a scrambled egg. Postal votes and pre-poll votes form between them, I think, 25 per cent of the vote. I am nostalgic like the member for Mackellar, but I also say this—and I say this from a political point of view—if you did a study, you would see that it suits the Labor Party to restrict the access of pre-poll voting and postal voting in a lot of instances, based on the way those votes fall on election day. I do share the concerns of the member for Mackellar that a lot of people will vote before the launch of a party's manifestos or whatever. But what is the greater good? The greater good is more opportunity for people to actually register a vote, especially in a society that more and more is becoming mobile. I support the current situation that the government is putting forward and oppose the amendments put forward by the member for Mackellar.

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