Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I have pleasure in joining this debate on the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2006 because I think this is one of the most important bills we have before us in this session. It is important because of the impact it will have on people seeking to exercise their democratic rights and also because of what it says about the government. This is a classic case of a government measure serving its interests, not the interests of the electors or the Australian community. It is a principle bill. It is based on the principle of self-interest.

I certainly do not accuse the government and the Liberal and National parties of inconsistency in this. They have been totally consistent. A lot of the measures in these bills have been measures they have been seeking to have given effect over a long period of time in both the state and the Commonwealth jurisdictions. Unfortunately the change in the balance of power in the Senate has given them the opportunity to do that. Last year we saw them rush through all sorts of very contentious legislation, which I think is bad legislation, such as the sale of Telstra and the Welfare to Work changes. What we are seeing here today is the icing on the cake as far as the government are concerned. It is their chance to change the electoral laws to suit their self-interest.

I think you can make a respectable case that politicians should not be in charge of the electoral laws. I have always thought that we ought not to be in charge of our pay and conditions. I think it is a good principle that somebody else sets people’s pay and conditions. That is just as applicable to politicians as it is to anybody else. I think it has always been the case that we have not accepted people setting their own rules in terms of their behaviour and, whether it be the police or business, we have set up mechanisms whereby other people regulate the rules under which they operate.

I think you can mount, as I say, a very respectable case that someone other than politicians ought to draw up the electoral laws because clearly we are players in that game. We have the capacity to work out what is in our own self-interest and, in bringing our views and our contributions to the debates about those things, we, like all people, sometimes have difficulty in divorcing ourselves from our personal interest in the broader community interest. That has been a criticism of both sides of politics on various occasions over the years. I accept Labor has had its episodes where that has been the case and some episodes that I am not particularly proud of.

We have made progress in these matters through the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. That has been a very good process for the parliament. It has allowed transparency in the debate on each federal election and we have got some quite good process from it. But this is a clear case of a government who has power making sure that it uses and abuses that power.

The measures contained in this bill seek to implement a number of principles that the Liberal Party have been pursuing for many years in both state and federal elections. The first is their attempt to reduce the number of Australians eligible to cast a vote in elections. This is not a general approach of theirs; it is quite specific. There are groups in the community who they would prefer to see not exercising their vote. Those are young people, Aboriginal people, poor people and people in prison. This has been a consistent theme across the years from the Liberal Party. The reason for this is that they are perceived by the Liberal Party and the government as not voting for them. The government’s motivation on this is self-interest. They are seeking to exclude from eligibility to vote sections of the community who they believe do not support them. To be fair, there is some evidence that those groups do not support them. We can argue about that. But it has been a long-held position of the Liberal Party to reduce the numbers of Australians who are eligible to cast a vote or to make particular groups ineligible, and I will come back to this in a minute. There is a long history of this.

The second element to the approach is the Liberal Party’s long-held belief that one should be able to make electoral donations to political parties without that information being made public. They have long encouraged the practice of political donations being kept secret. They have a view, I think well founded, that they will benefit from that system—that public disclosure will somehow reduce the number of donations that they can receive and that they will benefit from donations not being publicly disclosable. We see in this bill measures that seek to achieve that end.

As I say, these have been very consistent themes from the Liberal Party over my political experience. People like Senator Ray go back further than I do, but I got active in politics in the 1970s. This is the same agenda we saw from the Court government in the 1970s. I give the government credit—they have been consistent in their attempts to reduce the number of people who are eligible to vote and to keep political donations secret. Those two themes run through some of the measures in this bill to which the Labor Party strongly objects.

The other theme among some members, of course, has been compulsory voting. There has been much dispute inside the Liberal Party over many years about that. It is advocated very strongly by people like Senator Minchin, again for the same reasons: they think it would benefit them if compulsory voting was abolished. They think more low-income people and young people would fail to register and fail to vote and that that would advantage them. That is another stream to modern conservative thought in Australia. I understand it was considered for being part of this package but in the end they baulked. Maybe they thought the reaction to it would be too strong.

The public reaction to this ought to be strong because this is a government with absolute power in this parliament changing the rules to suit itself. It is fundamentally threatening to the way the electoral system works, it fundamentally disenfranchises people from being able to vote and it fundamentally encourages the influence of money and political donations in Australian politics. They are both bad things—things that this parliament ought not to endorse and that the Australian people should be very worried about.

As I said, these questions are questions upon which the Liberal Party have been consistent. The measures in this bill that look to strengthen the identification provisions of voters are the sorts of things that the Liberal Party have pursued over many years. They are not based in fact. They try and hide behind an argument about electoral fraud and about how people falsely register and falsely vote. All the evidence in this country points to the fact that there is no significant fraud in our electoral systems. There is no evidentiary base for these approaches. What this is about is increasing the hurdles that people have to jump in order to get on the electoral roll and increasing the complexity of getting onto the electoral roll, and therefore preventing people from getting onto the electoral roll.

The identification measures are part of that. If you look at the tests that apply in terms of a driver’s licence and how, if you do not have one of those, you are required to have two other persons with ID to verify your registration et cetera, I know who that is directed at. That is directed at Aboriginal people in this country. They know that those questions of ID will effectively rule out thousands of Indigenous people from registering. That is what those measures are about. Those requirements—which have never been found to be necessary in the past, for which there is no evidentiary base, for which the AEC has never found any need in the past and which all the inquiries have recommended against—have been introduced because they will act as a bar on a lot of people, including a lot of Indigenous people, enrolling to vote.

I go back to the Liberal Party attempts in the late 1970s to stop Indigenous people voting in the Kimberley. There was the famous Court of Disputed Returns case between Ernie Bridge, the Labor candidate, and Ridge, the Liberal candidate—Bridge v Ridge—where the Liberal Party sought to disenfranchise Indigenous voters. They sent lots of young lawyers—and I would not be surprised if a couple of members of this current parliament were part of that—who bullied Electoral Commission staff in order to disenfranchise as many Indigenous people as was possible to prevent them from voting. They used every tactic available to them. As a result, a lot of Indigenous people were disenfranchised. The election was overturned in the Court of Disputed Returns. So we saw a deliberate attempt to stop people voting because the Liberal Party thought that it was in their electoral interests for Indigenous people not to vote.

We saw a range of measures introduced to make sure that Indigenous people did not get to register. One of those, which was introduced in the 1970s, was a requirement for the application to be signed by a JP. You had to find a JP to sign your enrolment form before it could be accepted. There were not a lot of JPs in the Kimberly, and there were not a lot of JPs who had a lot to do with Indigenous people—unless the Indigenous people were coming before them and being jailed. It was a very effective mechanism for preventing Indigenous people from being enrolled.

It was a very effective mechanism for stopping other Australians from being enrolled as well. Senator Ray might remember the state campaigns in Bunbury and Mitchell in 1983, which were a large part of the election of the Labor government in that year. I was the campaign manager and 90 per cent of my effort went on getting people on the electoral roll.