Senator RYAN (Victoria) (12:28): I would like to begin by thanking the secretariat for the extraordinary effort in getting this report out under a very tight time line. With the changeover in the Senate and the Senate sitting this week and a number of other committee reports due, the secretariat did an extraordinary job of incorporating the changes. I think all committee members would accept that. I would like to express my personal thanks as well.
The report, as Senator Brown has outlined, is quite comprehensive. But it contains some very troubling recommendations, and I will emphasise several of them this afternoon. What Senator Brown referred to as ‘vote saving’ is nothing short of vote theft—and I will go into that in more detail. I would like to highlight that it was not the committee as a whole that made this contentious recommendation; it was merely the Labor members of the committee and occasionally a Greens member of the committee as well. One of the contentious but recurring recommendations from the Labor members of the committee would effectively prohibit political parties from processing postal vote applications. There has been no demonstrated need to prohibit political parties from being able to process postal vote applications before they are forwarded to the AEC. There are no examples of people missing out on votes. There are no examples of these being withheld. It is merely something that supports the agenda of the Australian Labor Party and the Greens. In particular, there is a proposal to have only the AEC process postal vote applications and then put a list up on the website so that people like the Greens or the ALP who do not go to the trouble of trying to encourage voters to use postal votes—those who may not be able to access a polling booth on election day or who may not be able to access a pre-poll facility—can see all the details of those voters on the website and the ALP or the Greens can target specific voters for their political interests. This also poses a real security risk. Do we want to be posting on a website details of people who have applied for postal votes weeks out from an election with a high correlation between applying for a postal vote and people going away? This is effectively a sign that their homes will be empty, yet there was no consideration of those issues when this was proposed and when this proposal was challenged by members of the opposition.
The ALP majority have again tried to recommend what they now refer to as direct enrolment. Direct enrolment on the Australian electoral roll is by someone complying with the law and filling out a very simple form, signing it, having it witnessed and then it being placed on the electoral roll. That is the obligation of every Australian citizen and others on the electoral roll, but it is not good enough for the Labor Party. They want to be able to take data from databases like drivers licences and high schools and add people to the electoral roll automatically. They say they will check this by SMS, email or letter, but if you do not return it they will assume it is okay. Let us outline the perverse nature of this. If they send you a letter to an address they have which is incorrect, by virtue of you not returning it they will deem the address to be okay—that it is a correct enrolment and you will be added to the electoral roll. Not only does this profoundly undermine the integrity of the electoral roll through using databases that are not fit for purpose but also this removes the paper trail we have to protect the electoral roll when there are cases of voter fraud.
At the moment one must actually sign a form. That form is kept physically and electronically and when people use provisional or postal votes their signatures can be compared. We have had seats in this place in recent years decided by fewer votes than members of a footy team, yet the Labor Party is intent for its own purposes on conscripting people to the electoral roll using databases that are not fit for purpose and not having any process in place to ensure the integrity of the roll is retained. It is disappointing to the opposition that the Australian Electoral Commission expressed some support for that measure, because it is by its nature very contentious.
I have a couple of statistics that were highlighted in the previous opposition minority report on this issue and that we have restated today. A 1999 report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics, Finance and Public Administration—this is outlined on page 183 of the minority report—found that in an ANAO report there were 3.2 million more tax file numbers than people in Australia at the previous census and there were 185,000 potential duplicate tax records for individuals. Also, 62 per cent of deceased clients were not recorded as deceased in a sample match that the ANAO undertook. This is the data that the ALP wants to use to enrol people to vote. Even though people fill out much more complex forms to access Centrelink payments or vaccinations or put the kids in school, the little DL sized form that we ask people to write their name and address on and sign and have witnessed is apparently too much to get people to enrol.
But that is not the worst proposal outlined here. What Senator Carol Brown euphemistically referred to as the South Australian ticket vote model is nothing short of vote theft and institutionalised fraud. Let me tell you what will happen under this. After you have been conscripted and enrolled without any choice, potentially at an incorrect address, you have the right under Australian law to cast an informal ballot. We require you to turn up; we do not stand over your shoulder to make sure you cast a formal ballot. However, if you decide just to tick a box knowing your vote will be informal, what the Labor Party now wants to put before the House of Representatives is that if you just mark a vote for a minority party or the Greens or an Independent, for example, that vote can then be counted according to the how-to-vote card of that particular candidate. What you call—
Senator Carol Brown: That’s what happens for the Senate.
Senator RYAN: 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.