Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

Our democracy is precious and fragile, and we need to do everything we can to protect it. One of the reasons I ran for parliament in 2022 was the declining trust in our institutions and in our politicians. People increasingly feel cynical about politicians and their motives. In a rapidly changing world where democracies are being eroded rather than strengthened, we must evolve our democratic rules and processes to protect the public interest. Australians want fair and transparent elections. They place their trust in our election processes, and that includes postal voting.

There's a common practice in our postal voting process that makes people suspicious, degrades trust in the AEC and confirms the growing belief that political parties will do anything for power. The private members' bill I'm introducing today will fix this problem. It addresses a major complaint to the AEC and implements a majority recommendation from the final report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. I will go through why this matters, what that practice is and how we're going to fix it.

Since 2004 the number of Australians voting by post has more than tripled. In 2004 only five per cent of voters voted by post. By 2022 this had increased to 15 per cent. Many people prefer to vote this way because they might have limited mobility, are away from home or just want to avoid the crowds. Postal votes are an increasingly important part of the electoral system, and the integrity of this voting process matters. Currently, political parties and candidates are allowed to distribute postal vote application forms and, crucially, to collect them. It has become common practice during an election campaign for a party to send a bulk mail-out of unsolicited mail to every home in their electorate. Along with campaign materials, the mail-out may contain an application for a postal vote, and it's only if you look very closely that you see that the postal vote application form has a tiny authorisation by a political entity. A reply-paid envelope often addressed to something vague like 'processing centre' is also included, so unsuspecting voters complete the application form, pop it in the reply-paid envelope and post it back to the processing centre.

This is when it gets dodgy and when the integrity of the process is weakened. The processing centre is not the AEC. If they were being transparent, the processing centre should be called 'the politician's data-harvesting centre'. Unknowingly, the voter is sending to a political entity their name, their address, their date of birth, their phone number, their email, their security question and answer, and a copy of their signature. This data can be stored, used or shared all without the voter's knowledge or consent, and more than 600,000 voters were duped in this way at the last election. I get so many emails from constituents worried about privacy and data breaches, and their data being stolen by online scammers, yet here we are in Australia with our data being harvested by our own political representatives.

When I explained this practice during the campaign, people were horrified and outraged that this is not only legal but also routine behaviour by the major parties. This loophole is particularly bad because political parties, their contractors and their volunteers are exempt from the Privacy Act, including the Australian Privacy Principles, which regulate how personal data is collected, how it's used and whether it can be disclosed or sold to third parties. This means that political parties can collect, store and use personal data without informing individuals. They're not required to notify voters if their data is breached and there's no legal obligation to secure that data that they collect. Not only can they store and use the data for microtargeting, profiling or future campaigning without consent but they can also sell this personal data to third-party data brokers or analytics firms. We have no idea if they currently do this, because there's no oversight, but searches of the PO box that the reply-paid envelopes are directed to show some connections with companies that trade in personal data.

We must be particularly careful about what data we let political parties harvest, and whether people are providing that data with full knowledge of how it is being used. The AEC hates this practice. They hate political actors using the postal-voting application process to access personal data. In April 2022, the AEC commissioner, Tom Rogers, wrote to all registered political parties, warning against distributing potentially misleading postal vote applications to residents. He referred to reports of incorrect forms being distributed to voters, the AEC's purple colour being used on some forms and voters being directed to generically named websites en masse with the potential to mislead.

In a submission to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, the AEC said:

The distribution and collection of PVAs by candidates and parties creates eligibility confusion and privacy concerns amongst voters.

This is not how a healthy democracy should function, and this bill puts a stop to it.

This bill amends the Commonwealth Electoral Act to ensure that only voters themselves, not political parties or candidates, can submit postal vote applications to the AEC. It prohibits third parties from on-sending an application for a postal vote on behalf of a voter. It's a straightforward fix. It doesn't cost anything, it doesn't limit political communication and it doesn't interfere with anyone's right to vote. What it does do is protect Australians' personal information. It restores transparency to the postal voting process and it helps rebuild trust in our electoral process—something we should all be working together to strengthen, not exploit.

With this bill in place, parties can still send postal vote application forms to voters to assist them but they cannot include sneaky reply-paid envelopes that direct those forms back to them or their associates—so they can't harvest voter data. The form must be sent to the AEC directly. The AEC can then send the necessary papers so the voter can vote by post. The relationship between the voter and the AEC is protected under this bill without political actors inserting themselves into that relationship for political gain. There are many other areas of electoral reform that need to be addressed, and I'll be dealing with some of those in my submission to the JSCEM inquiry and evidence to that committee.

This is one problem with a simple, straightforward and immediate fix, and I urge the government to address this issue before the next election. It fixes an unpopular and unethical practice that's despised by voters and the AEC. We need to make it stop. I commend the bill to the House and cede the remainder of my time to the member for Kooyong.

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