Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This Electoral Legislation Amendment (Assurance of Senate Counting) Bill addresses an important issue regarding the transparency of the Senate ballot count. It's an issue that's been consistently raised in submissions to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, on which I sit, and it's an issue on which the Greens proposed amendments to address several months ago. I want to say unequivocally that Australia has an electoral system to be proud of. There is no evidence of widespread inaccuracies in the current count. However, greater transparency always leads to greater public trust that electoral processes are robust and best practice. We've seen recent international experiences where a lack of transparency, and doubt, have been weaponised to undermine confidence in election outcomes. We saw these very dangerous tactics and false narratives start to circulate around the government's proposed voter ID bill. It was fanned by conservative voices more interested in importing American unrest than ensuring that everyone gets a vote. We were glad to see the voter ID bill dropped from the program and hope that it never returns.

The improvements to transparency and scrutiny of the ballot count proposed in this bill are welcome. They will help Australia to avoid seeds of doubt being used to destabilise public trust in democracy, which is already at an all-time low, and to reduce faith in election outcomes. This bill would be strengthened by requiring scrutineers to have access to digitised records prior to overseeing the audit, and requiring audit reports to be tabled in parliament rather than just a summary published by the AEC, as our amendments would have earlier achieved. However, these are measures that can be implemented with the goodwill of the AEC, and the Greens will push for them to do so as the audit process is rolled out. We support the bill.