Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Senator McLucas just shows her ignorance, embarrassing ignorance, by interjecting: 'How do you know that?' Because, you see, we are given electoral roll updates, aren't we? And we then send letters to those people, welcoming them for being on the electoral roll for the first occasion for this election. When those letters come back, you scratch your head and ask the question: 'Is it because they don't like, for example'—and I will pick on myself—'Senator Abetz?' But you then find out that Labor mail has also been returned from that address. Then you have got to ask the question; 'Why is this so?' A lot of the Australian Electoral Commission staff did assist me when I went around and indicated that, in the lead-up to an election, putting people on the electoral roll is not as robust as it is under normal circumstances. I know the Australian Electoral Commission at Senate estimates always claims that it is exactly the same. You talk to the people at the coalface face-to-face who are tasked with that and they will tell you a different story.

Accidents occur. I am not going to go into any conspiracy theories here, but accidents and mistakes occur. I am sure the fact that Medicare has 62 per cent of the deceased people still on their files is not because of any conspiracy but because they are too slow; they do not update their files appropriately. It is the same with the Australian Taxation Office. We do not want that to occur. If Centrelink does it, for example, what you get is money being paid to dead people. It is an absolute waste of taxpayers' money that Labor specialises in, but at the end of the day it is only money. But when we are dealing with the Australian electoral roll, the Commonwealth electoral roll, we need to know that every single name on that roll is actually that of a living person who is entitled to vote. We want integrity. We want robustness.

Simply purporting that somebody should be put on the electoral roll because of a certain degree of information being provided to the Australian Electoral Commission does not cut it with us in the opposition. We believe people should have to proactively show some identification and sign the request for the electoral roll so that there is actually a document that can be called upon, and of course that is what caught out certain individuals in Queensland with the Shepherdson inquiry. Absent those sorts of documents, people might appear on the electoral roll without anybody's fingerprints on that particular enrolment.

Realistically, how often is this going to affect an election in Australia? Not often, if at all. But we need to have robustness. We need to have integrity. We saw the election for the former member for McEwen, Mrs Bailey. It was contested to the High Court and back. I forget the final margin—possibly Senator Ronaldson can assist me—after the 2007 election.