Scott Ryan (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business and Fair Competition) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to begin by thanking the secretariat for the extraordinary effort in getting this report out under a very tight time line. With the changeover in the Senate and the Senate sitting this week and a number of other committee reports due, the secretariat did an extraordinary job of incorporating the changes. I think all committee members would accept that. I would like to express my personal thanks as well.

The report, as Senator Brown has outlined, is quite comprehensive. But it contains some very troubling recommend­ations, and I will emphasise several of them this afternoon. What Senator Brown referred to as 'vote saving' is nothing short of vote theft—and I will go into that in more detail. I would like to highlight that it was not the committee as a whole that made this contentious recommendation; it was merely the Labor members of the committee and occasionally a Greens member of the committee as well. One of the contentious but recurring recommendations from the Labor members of the committee would effectively prohibit political parties from processing postal vote applications. There has been no demonstrated need to prohibit political parties from being able to process postal vote applications before they are forwarded to the AEC. There are no examples of people missing out on votes. There are no examples of these being withheld. It is merely something that supports the agenda of the Australian Labor Party and the Greens. In particular, there is a proposal to have only the AEC process postal vote applications and then put a list up on the website so that people like the Greens or the ALP who do not go to the trouble of trying to encourage voters to use postal votes—those who may not be able to access a polling booth on election day or who may not be able to access a pre-poll facility—can see all the details of those voters on the website and the ALP or the Greens can target specific voters for their political interests. This also poses a real security risk. Do we want to be posting on a website details of people who have applied for postal votes weeks out from an election with a high correlation between applying for a postal vote and people going away? This is effectively a sign that their homes will be empty, yet there was no consideration of those issues when this was proposed and when this proposal was challenged by members of the opposition.

The ALP majority have again tried to recommend what they now refer to as direct enrolment. Direct enrolment on the Australian electoral roll is by someone complying with the law and filling out a very simple form, signing it, having it witnessed and then it being placed on the electoral roll. That is the obligation of every Australian citizen and others on the electoral roll, but it is not good enough for the Labor Party. They want to be able to take data from databases like drivers licences and high schools and add people to the electoral roll automatically. They say they will check this by SMS, email or letter, but if you do not return it they will assume it is okay. Let us outline the perverse nature of this. If they send you a letter to an address they have which is incorrect, by virtue of you not returning it they will deem the address to be okay—that it is a correct enrolment and you will be added to the electoral roll. Not only does this profoundly undermine the integrity of the electoral roll through using databases that are not fit for purpose but also this removes the paper trail we have to protect the electoral roll when there are cases of voter fraud.

At the moment one must actually sign a form. That form is kept physically and electronically and when people use provisional or postal votes their signatures can be compared. We have had seats in this place in recent years decided by fewer votes than members of a footy team, yet the Labor Party is intent for its own purposes on conscripting people to the electoral roll using databases that are not fit for purpose and not having any process in place to ensure the integrity of the roll is retained. It is disappointing to the opposition that the Australian Electoral Commission expressed some support for that measure, because it is by its nature very contentious.

I have a couple of statistics that were highlighted in the previous opposition minority report on this issue and that we have restated today. A 1999 report by the House of Representatives Standing Com­mittee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration—this is outlined on page 183 of the minority report—found that in an ANAO report there were 3.2 million more tax file numbers than people in Australia at the previous census and there were 185,000 potential duplicate tax records for individ­uals. Also, 62 per cent of deceased clients were not recorded as deceased in a sample match that the ANAO undertook. This is the data that the ALP wants to use to enrol people to vote. Even though people fill out much more complex forms to access Centrelink payments or vaccinations or put the kids in school, the little DL sized form that we ask people to write their name and address on and sign and have witnessed is apparently too much to get people to enrol.

But that is not the worst proposal outlined here. What Senator Carol Brown euphemisti­cally referred to as the South Australian ticket vote model is nothing short of vote theft and institutionalised fraud. Let me tell you what will happen under this. After you have been conscripted and enrolled without any choice, potentially at an incorrect addr­ess, you have the right under Australian law to cast an informal ballot. We require you to turn up; we do not stand over your shoulder to make sure you cast a formal ballot. How­ever, if you decide just to tick a box knowing your vote will be informal, what the Labor Party now wants to put before the House of Representatives is that if you just mark a vote for a minority party or the Greens or an Independent, for example, that vote can then be counted according to the how-to-vote card of that particular candidate. What you call—