Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications and Cyber Security) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a few brief comments on the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Assurance of Senate Counting) Bill 2021. Labor will be supporting this bill because electoral reform should always be done in a consultative and bipartisan fashion. The ultimate aim of electoral reform should be to enhance our democracy, not undermine it. While this bill will provide increased assurance to candidates regarding the veracity of the AEC's systems, I do just want to make a few points about this bill from a cybersecurity perspective, my own portfolio perspective. The member for Scullin has gone through in quite some detail what this bill does, and I won't go over that again. But, from a portfolio perspective, the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Assurance of Senate Counting) Bill 2021 requires an independent audit and risk assessment of the counting and scrutiny software used in a Senate election to be undertaken. So, prior to the next election, the Electoral Commissioner will arrange for an independent body accredited by the Australian Signals Directorate—that is a very common practice for certifying and assessing IT systems in the Commonwealth—to conduct a security risk assessment of the AEC computer systems used to scrutinise the Senate vote. The accredited assessor must provide a report to the AEC as soon as practical. After receipt of this report, the AEC must publish a statement of assurance on the AEC's website.

I know there are some election wonks and tragics who obsess over these issues following this debate on Twitter at the moment, but for a civilian who is following this debate and doesn't live in the weeds of how Australian elections are undertaken and to avoid any conclusion I just want to note that there isn't electronic voting in federal elections in Australia. No-one is going in and pushing buttons on a computer in Australia. But, as anyone who has voted in recent elections knows, the ballot paper and the number of candidates in Senate elections can be enormous. So it has been necessary for the count to be assisted by the scanning of ballots into a computer system that then uses optical character recognition to determine how the elector voted to assign their preferences. This is all done in the full view of human scrutineers. So, to be clear, this is a verifiable human process first. Then there is a subsequent computer process to help capture the preference distribution.

I really want to be absolutely clear here—and this is the only reason that I'm speaking on this bill today—in saying that the integrity and security of the Senate count isn't in question by anyone of any credibility or authority in Australia. We should be absolutely clear on this. The Electoral Commissioner has given evidence that there is thorough testing undertaken of the AEC's distribution-of-preferences software and that the AEC works with our internationally renowned national cybersecurity agencies to ensure the integrity of its systems and its compliance with the Commonwealth cybersecurity guidelines.

The AEC's website outlines the integrity and assurance measures the AEC currently has in place, and they are not particularly different to what we're talking about in this bill, frankly. So why is there a bill to have an independent cybersecurity audit of the AEC's counting system proposing that the AEC does not much more than what the AEC already does? Well, the answer to that lies in the Senate. This bill is a product of another import of US politics into the Australian political system. This time it is of disinformation and conspiracy theories springing from the 2020 US presidential election. The government has introduced this bill in response to a somewhat less constructive proposal by One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts.

Senator Roberts has been seeking to import the disinformation narrative that there were widespread issues with electronic voting machines in the United States at the last presidential election. It's a false claim, propagated by former President Donald Trump and his supporters to advance their equally false narrative that the former president did not lose the last US election. It's a narrative that tries to cast doubt on the democratic process of the United States—our great security ally who we share similar democratic values with—and seeks to undermine public confidence in elections. Senator Roberts, along with some other members of the coalition, frankly, are pandering to conspiracy theorists and autocrats by spreading these messages in Australia, where they have even less basis. And let's just be clear about the credibility of the people spreading this kind of conspiracy theory in the United States. Mike Lindell, the 'MyPillow guy' who's been running this conspiracy, is such a grifter that he's managed to grift himself in the process of doing this and cost himself millions and millions and millions of dollars in a complete fool's errand of trying to prove fraud in the US. He has undertaken a series of quite humiliating live streams involving cybersecurity experts attempting to prove fraud, which have turned up absolutely nothing of the sort.

The idea that someone would seek to import this kind of nonsense into Australia is pretty depressing, frankly, for the health of Australia's democracy. Internet brain worms do not respect international borders, and, unfortunately, we share an information ecosystem with a lot of these never-do-wells in the United States. Those of us who care about the health of our democracy and our democratic institutions in Australia need to stand up to this kind of thing in Australia. We don't need to enable this kind of conspiracy-broking and disinformation. We don't need to play footsies with extremists here. Anyone who is tempted, or thinks that there is short-term political advantage in playing to these kinds of people, needs to understand that, as that great US president John F Kennedy once said, those who seek power by riding on the tiger's back usually end up inside.

Australians can have confidence in the Australian Electoral Commission and its ability to conduct free and fair elections. I know as a member of parliament that the Australian Electoral Commission is not beholden to elected representatives. They act with an extravagant disregard for my submissions to them about what they ought to do in my area of the woods. The latest redistribution of electoral boundaries in Victoria has managed to redistribute my house, my electorate office and my kids' schools out of my electorate. That's not my preferred outcome, but I wouldn't swap it for the alternative, because it is an independent outcome. It's an outcome developed with an utter disregard for partisanship or for political advantage. It's an independent process.

While this bill does seem to have been introduced by the government in response to Senator Roberts's private senator's bill, which was more problematic, it doesn't contain the same deficiencies that his private senator's bill did. Labor will support this bill on the basis that it doesn't cause any harm and will provide some enhancement to transparency and public trust in an already unimpeachable, rigorous system. I do just want to place on the record today that Australians do not have anything to be worried about; this is not a real issue that's being addressed.

I encourage other members of this place to think about their roles as custodians of our democratic system. All of us here are only in this place by virtue of the health of our democratic institutions. We all owe obligations to the system. This place doesn't exist just as a platform for us. It's not a tool for us to exploit for our own interests. It's a system that we all have an obligation to invest in and to sustain. It doesn't sustain itself. It's in moments like this, frankly—when you have people from outside the bounds of reasonable debate casting insinuations, spreading disinformation and seeking to undermine public confidence in our democratic system for their own short-term political gains—that all members of good faith are called on to rise up and really reject that kind of thing. We all need to treat our democracy better in this place, and in that respect I'm happy to join with the government in supporting this bill today.

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