Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I'm proud to second this important motion by my friend and colleague the member for Curtin. Australians are proud of our electoral system. We cherish the system of compulsory voting along with the freedoms and the protections that go with it, so it is a wonder that the Commonwealth Electoral Act permits political parties to intervene in the process of requesting, receiving and returning postal votes. It allows parties to combine postal votes with party political material to collect Australian voters' personal information and onsell that information to unknown third parties. The parties' involvement is all about getting voter information. It is not about facilitating voter access. If it were, the parties would send those postal votes straight to the AEC—but they do not do that.

Parties do not make it clear to postal voters that they will be processing applications in this way, that they are harvesting voters' personal information for campaigning purposes. Parties do not make it clear to voters that they can and do onsell voters' personal information for a profit. Many post-election complaints received by the AEC relate to privacy concerns. At the 2025 election, the details of more than 670,000 voters were harvested by political parties. One wonders how many of those 670,000 might have complained had they known what was being done with their data. The AEC has warned that third-party postal vote applications cause confusion, privacy concerns and processing delays.

Adding potential insult to injury, the tight timeframes between an election being called and the return of the postal votes, when extended by the parties' unnecessary elongation of the process, mean that submitting a postal vote via a party risks your vote not actually being returned on time. As with so many integrity measures, federal legislation is behind the states and territories. Most voters are unaware that combining postal vote applications with political material, while it's allowable under Commonwealth legislation, is specifically outlawed by the Victorian state Electoral Act. The AEC would like it gone too.

It's extraordinary that third-party postal vote data harvesting has been allowed to go on for so long. This bill amends the Commonwealth Electoral Act to ensure that postal vote applications can be sent to the AEC only by voters. It's an important integrity measure. It's a simple fix to a significant problem. I thank my colleague for raising this issue and I commend the bill to the House.

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