Topic: Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Improving Electoral Administration) Bill 2013
Leon Byner: inaudible Remember if you’re either a resident or a citizen you are entitled to vote. Having said that, there are over a million people who are entitled to vote who are not registered. Now that’s, if you like, the good side, but there is a dark side to this and to explain how and why we have a number of parties today – and I do encourage you to get involved in this debate because whatever kind of government you want, and that’s totally up to you, should be voted in honestly, voted in honestly. The system has been changed where the potential for dishonesty has been made more so. Let’s talk with first of all a Liberal, we’re talking here about Senator Scott Ryan, Liberal senator. Senator, thank you for your time.
Senator Scott Ryan: Thanks Leon.
Byner: How has it come to the electoral roll being data matched with motor registration, Centrelink and tax file numbers?
Senator Ryan: After the 2007 election, I joined the Senate with Nick Xenophon in 2008, the Labor Party put up what they called automatic enrolment legislation. That was knocked back in the Senate a couple of times, but two years ago, well just under two years ago, it was put through the Senate and the Parliament by Labor and the Greens. It is a law that allows the AEC to access other databases, like school-leavers and motor registration, in order to determine whether people should be on the electoral roll and then it adds them without necessarily their knowledge.
Byner: Ok this all started because listeners were calling, not only 5AA, but our stations interstate, who were dutifully checking to see if they were on the roll and they were expunged off the roll. We’ve also got information that there are, for example, a few people who give rent accommodation to students who are not residents or citizens. They bought a vehicle and they then received a letter from the electoral office offering them the ability to enrol.
Senator Ryan: Well that’s interesting, I haven’t heard of that particular example, and that issue of non-citizens being added to the roll was one of the issues I’ve been campaigning against since the day it was introduced. That’s one of the very issues that I have raised on a lot of occasions so I would be interested in seeing those. The AEC used to take people off the roll if they sent you a letter and you didn’t get back to them, occasionally. That was about making sure that people who moved didn’t stay [enrolled] at their old address. The difference is now they are adding people that way. That’s a very big difference. It used to be that you had to fill out the form. Of all the government forms everybody is required to fill out, the electoral form is probably the easiest, yet Labor and, to my disappointment the AEC, are saying you shouldn’t have to fill out a form. That has a real risk, in my view, of being not only the wrong way to go about it, but when we’re looking at electoral fraud inaudible.
Byner: What’s the potential problem here for us?
Senator Ryan: In my view, people are being added to the roll when they shouldn’t be and any process run by people is going to make mistakes. Our electoral roll is very good, I don’t think we should be putting it at risk by saying ‘we are going to add people without their consent, without a signature, without you filling out a form’.
Byner: Isn’t this data matching also controversial because if we go back to the 80s, the Australia Card fell over because of inaudible data matching.
Senator Ryan: That’s before my time Leon. I do remember the debate, I was just finishing school at the time. I am not an expert on data matching, but I do know when the Auditor General looked at things like the tax file numbers back in the late 1990s, there were hundreds of thousands, and in one case more than a million records that were incorrect and we don’t want that in our electoral system.
Byner: We know that there are 3.2 million more tax file numbers than there are people. Some of those could be businesses, but nevertheless, in that case alone there is potential to add people. You only need a tax file number to earn money, it doesn’t mean you are a resident, it doesn’t mean that you are a citizen.
Senator Ryan: That’s exactly true and I go back to this point: an electoral enrolment form is not a hard thing to do. There is plenty of assistance if you need it, they’re available on the web, they can be picked up from the post office. When my wife and I had our son just over a year ago and I filled out the Centrelink form for the Medicare number it took about a day, the enrolment form you can do in a few minutes. It is not a large burden to ask people to fill out this form so that we get a paper trail and someone of testifying ‘this is me, I’m entitled to be on it’.
Byner: That was Scott Ryan from the Coalition.