Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, I present the Advisory report on the Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008 and the Report into the conduct of the 2007 federal election and matters related thereto. I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the reports.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the reports.

The Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008 was referred to the committee by the Senate on 14 May 2008 as a particular part of the committee’s inquiry into the 2007 election. The separate advisory report specifically addresses the proposals outlined in the bill. The committee has not made any recommendations in relation to the bill or in relation to several options to make below-the-line voting more accessible, believing that there should be further and continuing discussion of the various approaches.

The report on the conduct of the 2007 election and related matters includes 53 recommendations, many of which are designed to restore and protect the franchise for those entitled to exercise it and to modernise electoral processes. Key recommendations include restoring a range of longstanding provisions that provided electors with greater opportunities to maintain their eligibility, such as reinstating the previous seven-day close of rolls period to update enrolment, removing barriers preventing reinstatement to the electoral roll for declaration voters and removing the requirement for provisional voters to provide proof of identity at the time of voting.

In his dissenting report, Senator Bob Brown has noted the committee thoroughly investigated the conduct of the election and has developed sound recommendations on many issues. His proposal to include truth in advertising arrangements is one that could be examined further as part of the government’s broader electoral reform green paper process. Of the 53 recommendations, the four coalition members of the committee have disagreed with eight recommendations, most of which relate to reinstating longstanding arrangements that protect the franchise. The majority of the committee reject the view put forward by the coalition members that reinstating these provisions weakens integrity and somehow rewards complacency on the part of eligible electors.

The years leading up to the 2007 election saw the creation and perpetuation of the myth that electoral fraud in Australia is commonplace. Detailed examination by the AEC reveals that relatively few cases are found to be deliberate attempts to vote on multiple occasions and are referred to the AFP. Only 64 cases of apparent multiple voting were referred to the AFP arising from the 2004 election and only 10 cases were referred following the 2007 election. These figures do not warrant disenfranchising potentially hundreds of thousands of otherwise eligible voters. The integrity of the electoral roll is not watered down by these proposals. Existing checks and balances will continue to apply to those who seek to change their enrolment details or to enrol for the first time.

Further recommendations are made with a view to addressing falling electoral participation rates, made worse by overly prescriptive and burdensome provisions in the Commonwealth Electoral Act. These include recommendations to simplify the proof of identity requirements for enrolment and reinstate provisions allowing electors to notify changes to enrolment details in writing to the AEC; new provisions aimed at facilitating electronic submission of updates to enrolment information and postal vote applications; and moves to allow for information collected by trusted agencies to be used to update the electoral roll, where electors indicate their consent for this to occur. These changes will go some way to removing unnecessary and outdated bureaucratic practices that require electors to satisfy sometimes onerous and time-consuming processes to maintain their enrolment. Existing integrity measures to verify enrolment details would remain unchanged.

Changes to the formality rules made following the 1996 election to address Langer-style voting caused a significant rise in the number of ballot papers ruled informal. This report recommends returning to the previous safety net. This would also guard against the potential for ballot flooding. Too many genuine electors are being disenfranchised in order to address Langer-style voting, with the AEC estimating that up to 90,149 ballot papers would have been admitted at the 2007 election had the previous provisions applied.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank those who participated by making submissions or appearing at the public hearings. I would also like to thank the committee secretariat for their assistance. I commend the report to the Senate.

Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I commence by thanking all members of the committee and the committee staff for their work on these two reports, particularly the committee staff, who really did put an enormous amount of work into this, as did the chair, the deputy chair and other members.

These two reports are the Report on the conduct of the 2007 federal election and matters related thereto and the Advisory report on the Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008. The first report comes from a long line of holistic inquiries which have taken place after every federal election since 1984. The second comes in response to a bill brought into this place by the Greens. All I will say on this matter is that we believe that the existing method of voting serves us well and there is no compelling case for change. This is a bipartisan position.

Although there is a substantial and compelling dissenting report in the main inquiry, it should be noted that we have agreed more often than we have disagreed with the government members. While the coalition would prefer to have a unanimous JSCEM report, we are not prepared to trade away our principles for the sake of agreement. It would not be lost on many that Labor has consistently ignored evidence of electoral fraud over many years, and I have no doubt that this is because, in large measure, the fraud is often committed by Labor Party operatives. I refer honourable senators to the Shepherdson inquiry report for further information with regard to that.

The opposition believes the sanctity of the electoral roll and the voting process is paramount, because that is the basis for achieving a just, democratic outcome. While I am the first to admit that the participation rate could be better, the ‘cure’ proposed by Labor is worse than the disease. As Mr Morrison, the member for Cook, has said in another forum:

If you believe Labor, they say in their majority report tabled last night that the problem with participation is not apathy, but that we are placing too unreasonable a burden when it comes to voting. Please! You fill out a form, you change it when you move and you turn up at your local public school every 3 years and count to ten. I have no doubt some administrative processes could be improved, particularly in the use of technology, by they are missing the point.

Labor are indeed missing the point. It is for this reason that certain elements of the government report cannot be supported by the opposition. Let me draw out in the brief time available a couple of examples as to why the opposition has reached these conclusions.

The Commonwealth Electoral Act mandates that Australians have some basic rights and responsibilities: first, upon reaching enrolment age, to enrol to vote; second, to accurately maintain their enrolment; third, to vote in an election; and, finally, to fully extend their preferences to all candidates in their electorate who are contesting election for the House. As our dissenting report makes clear, these are the basic building blocks of our system of compulsory preferential voting. Yet the majority report of the government members of the committee concludes that these requirements impose an unwarranted inconvenience on citizens. No—a shift to the lowest common denominator approach is wrong, and we oppose it.

We know that their suggestion for closure of the rolls to be mandated to seven days after the date of the writ is a significant threat to the integrity of the electoral roll. It is simply impossible, given the statutory time frame, to remove bogus enrollees from the electoral roll. In a seat like McEwen, which was won by a handful of votes, it is unquestionable that a concerted effort at fraud would not be detected and might well change the result in a seat. The existing arrangements afford a high degree of accuracy and integrity to the electoral roll because they give the Australian Electoral Commission an extra seven days to verify new enrolments and an extra four days to verify changes of address. Therefore, these arrangements should be maintained and Labor’s changes should be rejected.

The opposition members made further recommendations against weakening proof of identity requirements because we do not believe they are onerous and we believe they act as a major disincentive to enrolment fraud. We also recommend against weakening sanctions to ensure correct enrolment. You have the ridiculous situation under the government members’ proposals of having absolutely no penalty for failing to keep your enrolment up to date. We oppose the notion of financial inducement to encourage enrolment because it is not an option; it is the law. We should not be paying people to make sure that they obey the law.

We also recommend against establishing mobile phone polling places in areas which clearly do not need them. We oppose the removal of the requirement for voters to sequentially number their ballot paper for the House of Representatives. Just on this point, government members, if you want to push for optional preferential voting then do so, but do not try to hide behind the fig leaf of saying, ‘Oh, well, we support full preferential,’ and then allowing optional preferential votes to be counted as valid.

Finally, we reiterate our position in relation to prisoner voting. If a person has done something that pushes them so far outside the bounds of civil society that a court believes that they should be locked away from the rest of the community then that person should not be allowed to vote. If you are in serious breach of the laws, you should not be allowed to vote for people who set the laws of this country. It is an outrageous notion that people who are incarcerated should be able to cast a vote, given that their behaviour has actually effectively taken them out of community involvement. I commend these recommendations and the dissenting report to honourable senators.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I concur with the positive findings that have come out of the review of the 2007 federal election by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. One thing that does concern me is that I have been here long enough to see very good reports come out of this committee that are put before the parliament and absolutely zero action as a result. I think it is incumbent upon committee members and members of the Senate generally—and particularly the government, of course—to follow through on these reports to ensure that we do get results. The government has said there is a green paper coming out later in the year. One would hope that a lot of notice of the proceedings and recommendations of the committee will come out of that.

Two important matters that the Greens have been pursuing for some time did not get acceptance from the committee as a whole. The first is above-the-line voting in Senate elections—voters tick the boxes of the parties and the Independents in the order of their choice. It must not be left to the scramble we now have, where the parties get together, try to trade positions and get advantage and hand a preference order to the electoral office before the election. Then, on election day, everybody who votes ‘1’ Labor and leaves it at that has their preferences directed according to the Labor Party; everybody who votes ‘1’ Green and leaves it at that, ditto; everybody who votes ‘1’ coalition, ditto; and so on. But the outcome of that is very often against what the majority of those voters would want—in other words, the machinations in the backrooms are contrary to what the voters actually want.

I am sure Senator Fielding will not mind me mentioning the fact that, although he got less than two per cent of the vote in the previous election in 2004, he was elected to this place, whereas a Greens candidate in Victoria on nearly 10 per cent of the vote was not elected. They needed 14 per cent because Labor Party and Democrat preferences flowed to Senator Fielding against the wishes of the majority of Labor voters. It is really a case here of getting a more honest outcome based on what the electorate’s intention is. Anomalies like that should not be allowed. Indeed, my colleague Senator Milne—who, agree with her or not, everybody would say is an enormous contributor to this Senate and to this parliament—got, I think, 10 or 12 per cent of the vote in Tasmania.

David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Seventeen.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, it was not, Senator. You are wrong. A Family First contender got less than two per cent of the vote and almost passed Senator Milne on the basis, again, of Democrat and Labor Party preferences. That situation is going to occur again. We ought not to leave anomalies like that where wrong results, results not intended by the voters, are in fact translated into decision making in parliaments. I am surprised the Labor Party has not agreed to this recommendation that we should leave it to the voters and that their preferences should be taken note of. There was an argument that this might lead to increased informal voting. But in New South Wales, where there is above-the-line preferential voting by voters in the upper house elections, which can be more complicated than Senate elections in many states, in fact it led to a decrease in the number of informal votes. So that argument does not hold water.

The second matter is truth in advertising. It should be pretty clear and logical to everybody that voters should not be deceived by patently untrue advertising on their way to the ballot box. There is an enormous tendency by players, as election time comes close, to engage in trying to get the electorate’s attention and its votes by not always being fair to opponents. That is the nature of elections. But we are now in a situation in Australia where the watchdog of private television channels has gone. You used to have to submit your election material and justify claims made in it or they would not allow it to go to air on Channel 9, Channel 7, Channel 10 or whatever. That has gone. Of course, advertising is now available on SBS and there is a lot of advertising through other means as well. We ought to have a watchdog on this in the interests not of the political parties but of the voters. They deserve not to be tricked, cheated and lied to through advertising of any sort on the way to making up their minds about their votes.

The Greens are saying that the government—and I hope the government will seriously look at this; I note that the government has indicated that it will certainly look at our recommendations—should attach to the electoral office, have in tandem with the electoral office or have as part of the electoral office an independent authority which can make such judgments. It is not beyond our wit and wisdom to do that; as I indicated before, we used to have such an authority attached to private television. If you are going to have a fair democracy, it has to be based on fair information. Ralph Nader, the great consumer advocate who then became Greens candidate for the presidency of the United States, said in Launceston in 1980 that ‘information is the currency of democracy’, and how right that is. If you get tainted, fake currency, you are in real trouble.

I hope the government will take these two recommendations seriously. I know there is one that it will not—it got passing mention as far as this committee is concerned—and that is the need for proportional representation in the House of Representatives in this parliament. It is manifestly undemocratic that there are people in blue-ribbon Labor, Liberal or National Party electorates who can live their whole lives and never have voted for a candidate who got into the House of Representatives. That is the nature of single-member electorates. If you wake up on the morning after the election and something over 50 per cent of the voters have elected somebody, something under 50 per cent—in most occasions very close to 50 per cent—are then represented by somebody they voted against. Proportional representation reduces that anomaly enormously: over 90 per cent of people wake up on election day and find that somebody they voted for is representing them in the parliament. There was a debate raging about this when the Constitution was written. The provision is in the Constitution for the parliament to make rules about the voting system, because they did not determine one way or the other.

Catherine Helen Spence, the great democrat from South Australia who, unfortunately, was before her time, because she was not elected in her own right, was a great advocate of proportional representation. She is the much-forgotten mother of Federation in amongst the fathers of Federation that we hear so much about. I put it to the government that in considering its green paper it ought to look at proportional representation to make the House of Representatives in this parliament fairer, more democratic and more reflective of the vote of every Australian in a system based on one person, one vote and one value.

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As this is the first occasion on which I have noted you in the chair, I congratulate you on your appointment to that position, Acting Deputy President Ryan. I add my comments welcoming these reports of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, thanking in particular the many witnesses who have participated in these inquiries, the committee staff for their hard work in producing these reports, and the chair and deputy chair for their stewardship throughout this process. In particular I note the report on the 2007 federal election and matters related to it.

This undertaking of a full and comprehensive assessment of the conduct of each of our federal elections during the life of the parliament that follows them is an important tradition that has arisen through the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. It ensures that we take into account the workings and operations of each and every one of those campaigns. As someone who has personally had the experience of running for a House of Representatives seat and enjoying a result that came down to just 108 votes—I note Senator Wong smiling across the chamber at me—

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We win some; we lose some.

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note the role that Senator Wong played in that campaign—

Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We lost a couple in that seat before.

Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You had indeed lost a couple in that seat, at least one of those by an even smaller margin some years before. Increasingly we get very close election results in individual seats around Australia, and it is only a matter of time before we have an election somewhere in the future where potentially we will have a result on election night that actually is not a result, because it is not yet known and will hang in the balance in too many undecided seats. In each election, it now seems, we are seeing an increasing number of seats coming down to the wire. It is with that that the merit of reports such as this one stand out.

One of the key recommendations we made in this report, after extensive discussions with the Australian Electoral Commission and the many other participants in this inquiry, is about the treatment of prepoll votes. Increasingly, Australians are choosing to exercise their right to cast a ballot in advance of election day. For whatever reason, we are seeing more and more Australians go into the ballot box to exercise their democratic right and privilege in the days and couple of weeks leading up to polling day. The problem that has ensued, of course, is that because those prepoll votes have not been historically counted on election day it is increasingly the case that more and more votes are put aside on election night and we have a diminished chance of seeing an outcome. We need to see those votes counted on election night to increase the likelihood of having clear results in individual seats and a clear result across the nation. I am pleased that all parties in the majority report of this inquiry have supported the concept that amendments should be made to the Electoral Act to ensure that those prepoll votes are counted, as are ordinary ballots across the rest of the system, on election night. This will be an important change that will deliver better outcomes for Australia in the way our elections are conducted.

Whilst I recognise the many other recommendations that the coalition and other minor parties have supported in the majority report, I do note that there are a number that we do not support. Unfortunately, whilst this is a very valuable process that leads to sensible outcomes such as those surrounding prepoll matters, equally it often leads to a little politicking along the way as well. We should greet with some cynicism and scepticism any of those recommendations that do not enjoy bipartisan support, because they will usually have been made for some type of partisan advantage. I would not put it beyond our friends in the Labor Party to engage in partisan advantage in these matters. We need to treat with a rather large grain of salt those areas in which they have dissented from the views of the coalition or other parties, because it is quite likely that they play to the advantage of the majority party.

We need to be very focused on the responsibilities of the AEC under the Electoral Act. Amongst those responsibilities is a need to focus on accurate enrolment—enrolment that is accurate as to the identification of a person and where that person lives. Another responsibility is the conduct of the election: how, when and in what circumstances a ballot is cast; and how we ensure that only one ballot per person is cast. Then, of course, there is the count: ensuring that preferences are fully exhausted and that the count is undertaken in an appropriate way.

The government have unfortunately chosen to make some recommendations that go against evidence given to the committee and which will undermine the integrity of some parts of that process. They have chosen to make a recommendation about changing the timing of the closing of the rolls. This was despite hearing very clear evidence from the Australian Electoral Commission that the number of people missing at the date of the close of the rolls in 2007 was 100,370 persons whereas in 2004 it was 168,394 persons. Despite the closure date for the rolls being brought forward, we saw fewer people miss out on being on the roll. That was because the AEC ran an effective campaign to ensure that people were accurately enrolled before the closure date. That campaign ensured that people knew they had to have their house in order before the election was called. This was a sensible mechanism that ensured the AEC was not flooded, as they had been previously, with more than half a million changes to enrolments in the days after an election was announced. Instead, it ensured that every enrolment was correct and in place and there was a better outcome in the time frame that was provided. Labor’s recommendation in this regard must be rejected.

We also see suggestions that the changes made prior to the last election to proof of identity for provisional voting should be repealed. Once again we see a situation where the evidence does not stack up, because most people—around 75 per cent—produced their proof of ID when they turned up to cast a provisional vote. That is not surprising. People produce proof of ID all the time nowadays and they do so quite validly. We should not make it easier to cast a vote or to enrol to vote than it is to go to the video store and get a membership card. We should be ensuring that reasonable identification provisions exist—and, in provisional voting, that is quite critical. More than three-quarters of those people who turned up had their ID on them and, for those who did not, a surprising number never bothered to come back with that identification. You have to wonder about the intent of those voters.

This is an important report. I draw the attention of the parliament and the Senate to, in particular, the dissenting comments of Senator Ronaldson, Mr Morrison, me and others. They highlight some areas where we need to be cautious about reforms to the Electoral Act that are perhaps being made for partisan purposes. But I welcome the report and hope that the government embraces the majority recommendations, especially those that will strengthen our processes in the years to come.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.