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

It has nothing to do with the Senate, Senator Brown, and this is the difference. For the Senate the Australian Electoral Commission are required to publish details of where those votes go. Everyone knows that when you vote '1' above the line those votes are distributed. Copies are available from the AEC at polling stations and they are on the website. They are publicly available, yet what you want to do is prohibit the people being told this is what is going to happen. At the same time as you want to count votes that are not marked on a ballot paper, you want to prohibit people from being told that is exactly what will happen. You want to make it illegal. This is institutionalised voter fraud, because you want someone to be able to mark a box and then count votes that are not on a ballot paper. We could hold these ballot papers up—we are not talking about dimpled chads; we are talking about empty squares that you are going to count as votes for the House of Representatives.

This represents a new low, even for the Labor Party. We in the opposition will oppose this with every breath in our body. If you are serious—and I make these comments personally—about removing informal votes, then you move to an optional preferential voting system. An optional preferential voting system allows any mark on a ballot paper to be counted and you can tell people they can mark it with a tick, a cross, a '1' or '1', '2', '3', '4'—whatever you choose. Yet what the Labor Party is proposing is for voters to put a tick on the ballot paper and we will count it according to what the political party in the House of Repre­sentatives wants.

Accuse me of being cynical, but I think this might have something to do with the current political morass the Labor Party find themselves in. With Labor's alliance partners now sitting on the same side of the chamber, the Australian people know that the Greens-Labor governing alliance is a reality. But I think the Labor Party are concerned because what really worries them is that at the next election, just like the rest of the Australian people, their alliance partners and their voters may not be willing to follow through on the deals that people like Senator Bob Brown have made with leaders of the Labor Party. This is an attempt to grab more Greens votes where preference for the Labor Party is not expressed. Where a ballot paper is left blank of anything other than a single mark, like a '1' or a tick, what the Labor Party wants is to be able to count that. It does not pass the sniff test the Australian people will apply to free and fair elections because you cannot count votes that are not written down on paper. You cannot count a number or a preference when it has not been written down. This shows the desperate lengths to which the Labor Party will go to try to maintain an electoral advantage despite the Australian people repudiating it and its agenda.

The opposition will oppose these measures and support the others that we have outlined in a minority and dissenting report. We will oppose those measures that put the integrity of the roll at risk and that remove the duty for people to enrol personally. We will oppose the use of databases that we know are flawed. Most importantly, we will protect the integrity of the secret ballot in Australia and we will count votes when they are marked. We will not count empty squares as votes. This needs to be stopped to ensure public faith in our electoral system is maintained. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted.