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 advisory report, incorporating a dissenting report, on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Improving Electoral Administration) Bill 2012, together with the minutes of proceedings.

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

by leave—The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Improving Electoral Administration) Bill 2012 introduces a suite of measures in response to seven recommendations of the committee's report, The 2010 federal election: report on the conduct of the election and related matters. The bill:

In referring the bill, the Selection Committee wished the Electoral Matters Committee to further scrutinise its amendments and ensure consideration was given to any unintended consequences. During the committee's inquiry, issues arose regarding the exclusion of ballots, the new prepoll voting arrangements and the ability of the Australian Electoral Commission to use taxpayer information to update the electoral roll.

The bill provides that prematurely opened ballots must be excluded from the count. At the 2010 federal election, ballot boxes were opened prematurely due to an official error in two prepoll voting centres. Due to the legislative ambiguity regarding the appropriate response to these breaches, the Australian Electoral Commission sought legal advice. The advice was that it would be prudent for these ballots to be excluded. The commission subsequently recommended to the committee that the appropriate action be clarified in the Electoral Act and that votes should be reinstated if the incident proved to be an official error.

The bill does not contain a vote savings provision and the committee did not support one in its 2010 federal election report. Having carefully considered the evidence in this inquiry, however, the committee took the view that votes should be reinstated if a ballot box is handled unlawfully by any person but no tampering of ballot papers has occurred. The committee's view is that this balances voter enfranchisement and electoral integrity. The committee recommends that the vote savings procedures proposed to this inquiry by the Electoral Commission be incorporated in the bill.

I want to acknowledge that Mrs Bishop, who is at the table, was the one who pursued this in the public hearings. The committee were unanimous in the view that we should support the approach she proposed in relation to that matter. I think it needs to be acknowledged that, but for the member at the table's persistence in this matter at the public hearings, the committee may well have maintained its earlier view. This issue is about enfranchisement and the member is to be commended for her pursuit of this matter.

The committee heard also that the Electoral Act lacks clarity on whether the penalties faced by an electoral official who deliberately and unlawfully interferes with a ballot box or ballot papers are the same as the penalties facing a member of the public for this offence. The committee recommends that the bill be amended to clarify this in the legislation.

The removal of the requirement for a prepoll ordinary voter to complete a certificate will provide efficiencies in polling place management and align the Commonwealth with a number of state and territory jurisdictions. Moving the commencement of prepoll voting back by one day will allow sufficient time to print the many millions of ballot papers required for a federal election. Moving the deadline for postal vote applications forward by one day will reduce the chance that postal votes will be received too late. Increasing the fixed periods of time to inquire into further objections to a proposed electoral boundary redistribution will provide the Electoral Commission with valuable additional time to conduct these inquiries. Allowing the Electoral Commission to use certain taxpayer information to update the roll of electors is a logical extension of existing continuous roll update processes and direct enrolment using third party information. The committee is satisfied that this will not undermine roll integrity.

These provisions of the bill were recommended in the 2010 federal election report of the committee and continue to be supported by the committee.

On behalf of the committee, I thank the organisations and individuals who assisted the committee during the inquiry through submissions or participating at the public hearing in Canberra. I also thank my colleagues on the committee for their work and contribution to this report and the secretariat for their work on this inquiry. 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—There were serious differences between the government and opposition on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Improving Electoral Administration) Bill 2012 referred to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. These differences are ongoing. They relate to the protection of the integrity of the roll. In many of the dissenting reports we have written since the government introduced automatic enrolment, we have made the point—and we continue to make the point—that we believe it destroys the integrity of the roll.

We object to the proposed changes which allow the Australian Taxation Office to give material to the Electoral Commission not only because they put at risk the integrity of the roll—it is utilising material which has been developed for another purpose and the accuracy of which cannot be vouched for—but because people's individual details in tax office material have always been regarded as sacrosanct. There have always been serious penalties for anyone in the tax office who divulges such information. The proposed changes to the act will in fact remove penalties for any officers involved in such behaviour.

With regard to the proposed changes to the Taxation Administration Act, we point out in our dissenting report, as we do quite often, that a 1999 report by the House of Representatives Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration, Numbers on the run: review of the ANAO audit report No.37 1998-99 on the management of tax file numbers, found that there were 3.2 million more tax file numbers than there were people in Australia at the then most recent census, that there are potentially 185,000 duplicate tax records for individuals and that 62 per cent of deceased clients were not recorded as deceased in the sample match. It was again pointed out in evidence given at the public hearings initially, dealing with automatic enrolment, that a single roll that may be given to the Electoral Commission is in fact a composite of a lot of other sources, all of which are not checked either. If we look at another example of inaccuracy of government-held information, in this case the integrity of the Medicare enrolment data, the ANAO audit report stated:

ANAO found that up to half a million active Medicare enrolment records were probably for people who are deceased.

I cite those examples just to show that the integrity of the roll is very much at risk. When the bill comes up for debate we will be able to deal with these matters in more detail.

We also think it is still necessary for someone who is exercising a prepoll vote to sign a certificate. We are against the concept of an election period which equates election day with a period of up to 19 days if the amendments go through, and we feel that that is bad on two counts: 19 days is too long—it should be restricted to 12—and also to not have a requirement to sign a declaration as to how you are complying with the act in seeking a prepoll vote is again to denigrate election day in favour of an election period.

We then came to the opening of a ballot box prior to the closing of the poll on election day. I will deal with this more in my speech in the second reading debate on the bill itself, but there were enormous concerns shared by the committee as a whole—and I am grateful to the chairman of the committee for acknowledging that I did pursue the matter vociferously. To me it is unconscionable that votes which people have cast in good faith can be excluded from scrutiny because a box has been opened prematurely. We needed to have a saving clause, and I am very grateful that we reached agreement on many of those principles—where we disagreed was on the question of account. I will deal with that in the second reading debate.

At all times there has been a profound disagreement between the government and the opposition about the integrity of the roll. I cite very often the legal precedents which say that you cannot go behind the roll—once the roll is established, you may not challenge who has gone onto it. Therefore, you have to be able to vouch for the integrity of who goes onto it—and it seems to me, in a land where we value the right to vote, that the requirement that you as an individual when you reach 18 or become a citizen to fill out a form to become a citizen enrolled to vote is not very onerous. I think that philosophical divide will continue and, should we be successful in being elected at the next election, it is certainly a matter we will address.