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

On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, I present the committee's report entitled Advisory report on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address) Bill 2011, incorporating a dissenting report, together with the minutes of proceedings.

In accordance with standing order 39(f) the report was made a parliamentary paper.

by leave—On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, I present the committee's advisory report on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address) Bill 2011. There are 1.5 million eligible Australians missing from the Commonwealth electoral roll. The Australian Electoral Commission estimates that 600,000 of those 1.5 million eligible electors had previously been on the roll. Many of the 600,000 were removed from the roll when they moved house and failed to update their details with the AEC. This bill will help reduce the number of people removed from the roll. The AEC will have the power to directly update the address details of people who are already on the roll.

In Australia, enrolment and voting is both a right and an obligation. All Australians should take responsibility to meet their enrolment obligations in order to ensure they can participate in selecting their representatives. The methods to enrol and update enrolment details are not onerous. However, some electors neglect to update their details unless they are motivated by an impending electoral event, while others believe that the Commonwealth roll will reflect state enrolment or change of address details that have been supplied to another government agency.

Currently a change to address details must be elector initiated. When the AEC receives information about a change of residential address, it writes to the person instructing them to update their details, but it cannot take the next logical step and update the details. Worse still, if the person fails to respond, the AEC is obliged to remove them from the roll on the basis that they are no longer entitled to be enrolled at the previous address.

The AEC's Continuous Roll Update process is limited because it can only use the third-party data received to encourage the elector to update their details; it cannot do it for them. However, if the person does not respond, the same data can be used to remove them from the roll. It is a fundamental inconsistency that this data can be used to remove eligible electors from the roll but not keep them on the roll.

The state of the roll necessitates the introduction of direct address updates as a matter of urgency. It will provide the AEC with greater flexibility to help counter the trend in declining enrolment over the last decade. It is appropriate for the AEC to have this power and to determine the agencies from which it will receive data. The AEC will continue to use data from Centrelink, roads and traffic authorities and Australia Post, which has been tried and tested in the CRU and objection processes.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank my fellow committee members for their contribution to the inquiry. I also thank the groups and individuals who participated by making submissions or appearing at the public hearings. I also thank the committee secretariat for their assistance. I commend the report to the House.

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

by leave—I rise also to speak on the report of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Maintaining Address) Bill 2011 and particularly to draw attention to the dissenting report. The JSCEM is a very political committee. A number of reports we have brought in come down with the Labor Party and the Greens on one side and the coalition on the other. It is that way because we are utterly opposed to the agenda that the government, together with the Greens, is running.

This time I draw the House's attention to the euphemisms we see in legislation, such as the title 'maintaining address'. It is not at all about maintaining an address; it is about changing an address without the knowledge or consent of the person who is on the roll. Once again we have these euphemisms that mislead people as to what is being attempted. The bottom line is that under the Electoral Act there is an obligation on an elector to enrol. There is plenty of case law that says the act of enrolment is part of the entitlement process to vote.

There is an obligation on every elector, when they change their address, to notify the Electoral Commission of that change of address. If people are not on the roll, it is because they have failed to meet that obligation. In terms of the electoral law itself, there is strict liability. If someone fails to notify of their change of address, there is meant to be a prosecution—there is meant to be a fine. There has never, ever been one issued.

I asked the AEC if I could look at the letters they write to people when they find from their matching process that someone may have changed their address. The letters are pathetic. They just say, 'We think you have probably moved; would you mind telling us your new address?' There is nothing about the fact that they have an obligation. On one letter, there was a mention of a fine. On all the rest, there was nothing.

One of the things that makes me so angry about this whole process is the fact that the AEC is lock-step with the Labor Party and the Greens to get this change in. They do not live up to their obligation to keep the integrity of the roll as the most important obligation they have under the electoral law. They never put forward any evidence; it is always just 'a submission'. It is never backed up by research or anything that is brought to the committee that shows how things work.

But we were very fortunate this time. We called as a witness Dr Clarke from the Australian Privacy Foundation and he made a submission to the hearing. As well as being from the Privacy Foundation, he is a man who works as a consultant focusing on strategic and policy aspects of e-business, so he knows something about data matching. I quote what he had to say when he was talking about matching names:

Name is enormously variable in its recording and is routinely 'scrubbed'—

a new word introduced to the whole debate—

that is the term used—in order to try to muck around with the data, modify the data, in order to make it seem right. It is differently scrubbed by every different agency, so we have differential collection for different purposes in different ways with different data-quality measures with different data-scrubbing measures, and then we bundle all this together and match it. The false positives that arise from this are enormous, as indeed are the false negatives, because there are enormous numbers of occasions where matches could in principle be discovered which in fact are not discovered by the algorithms that are used. It is extraordinarily error prone. In circumstances like these you would think enormous care would be taken, enormous justification would have to be provided, proportionality would be taken account of and it would only be done when there are very serious benefits to be gained.

If you go to the report of the JSCEM committee into the 2010 election, one of the recommendations that was made by the majority—that is, Labor and Greens—was the process of updating enrolment details of electors on the basis of data that the Electoral Commission chooses. To date it has chosen three, but there is nothing to prevent it choosing anything it likes in the world—no scrutiny, no nothing. When the majority of the committee recommended that this process take place, it then said that approval of the agencies chosen by the AEC should be made by disallowable instrument—that is, subject to tabling and disallowance. Is that provided for in this bill? No, definitely not, because Labor and the Greens think there will be a political advantage to them.

It opens up the opportunity for fraud and it lowers the integrity of the roll itself. When this was introduced I said, 'This sounds to me like the precursor to the automatic enrolment procedures that the Greens and the Labor Party are also anxious to have where again these highly suspect sources are used to put people on the roll without their knowledge or without being contacted.' Why do I say they are not contacted? For the simple reason that the Electoral Commission writes to the new address and says, 'We believe you're at this address. You've got 28 days to tell us if you're not.' But of course if they are not at that address they do not get the letter, so they do not respond and they have 'changed' for their address. So when they turn up wanting to vote with an existing address, where they may still live, they are not on the roll.

The whole thing is just a fudge. It is totally dishonest to call the bill the 'maintaining address' bill when it is a 'changing address' bill. We see this government, which is based on a farrago of lies, again and again using misleading language to try and bring about an advantage which they see will follow to them as playing the voters off a break. Very simply, the coalition is rigorously opposed to these measures. There was no evidence given of what has transpired in other jurisdictions where it has been tried as, again, the AEC, Labor and the Greens are lockstep. We will vote against the legislation and we will take measures to rectify the situation should we be returned to government.