CHAIR —Welcome. The evidence that you give at the public hearing today is considered to be part of the proceedings of parliament. Accordingly, parliamentary privilege applies. I also advise you that any attempt to mislead the committee is a very serious matter and could amount to a contempt of the parliament. The committee has received your submissions numbered 77, 78 and 211, and submissions 82 and 214 from other representatives of your organisation. They have been authorised for publication. Are there any corrections or amendments you would like to make to your submissions?

Mr Brunckhorst —I have condensed the submissions for this hearing because of the limited time.

CHAIR —But do the actual submissions stand and are they authorised? Do you have no corrections to those submissions?

Mr Brunckhorst —Only the variations that we are putting forward today.

CHAIR —Okay. You can make a brief opening statement and then I will invite members to ask you questions.

Mr Brunckhorst —As we were not allotted sufficient time for our five speakers, we have reduced the speakers to two, but we would like to submit a condensed version of our original submissions. We have supplied this in writing to be recorded. The lack of sufficient time allocated to groups, compared to single participants, could be rectified. The desire to participate or not should be part of the submission. The JSCEM could then place the necessary time allocated beside the number of the submission in their publication.

The result of previous elections by the JSCEM, the parliament and the High Court do not instil confidence in our membership. We do not expect the outcome of this hearing to be any different from previous hearings. People are fed up with major parties overriding their wishes. With the help of the Internet and email, we will send Australia-wide the results of the hearings and how much notice parliament takes and try to establish democracy.

Submission 4 is: equal opportunity must be given to all citizens who wish to contest elections. The need to resign from public office to sit in parliament is fair. To be made to resign from your job or renounce your income as a pensioner or get a discharge from the service to be elected does not seem fair when it does not apply to politicians. Not much thought has been put into this area. There is sufficient time to resign from these positions after they are elected and before they are sworn in.

Submission 5 is: eliminate compulsory preferential voting by just filling in consecutive numbers as far as you wish and then leave the rest blank. Submission 6 is: colours should be allocated to political parties to clearly distinguish their advertising literature. This colour system could carry on to electronic voting or machine voting by dropping single-coloured cards to match a set of coloured and numbered buttons that light up. The Aboriginal and

non-English speaking people can follow colours easily. The coloured how-to-vote cards could be displayed in the polling booths.

Submission 7 is: if machine or electronic voting is not introduced, then we maintain the same procedure. The ballot papers should be counted by the scrutineers into bundles of 50 under the supervision of the AEC. The AEC should then check the count under the supervision of the scrutineers. This would reduce the amount of error. The hearing has given Mr Hugo some extra time and our secretary, Mr Smith, will explain submission 3. With your permission, I will go on with submission one, which I believe will correct a number of the complaints you are receiving.

Submission 1 is: to eliminate the two candidate preferred voting system. We believe the aim of the JSCM and the parliament is to give the majority of the people the right to choose the member to represent them. This is what happens when the primary vote is counted. However, when the No. 2 first preferential vote is counted, under the two-candidate preferred system, the minority of voters have the use of their No. 2 vote.

We believe that, if all the No. 2 votes are not counted, giving all voters an equal choice in the outcome of the election, then the greater number of No. 2 votes should be counted to give a bigger majority of voters a chance to use their preference vote, not the lowest number. Most voters I have spoken to do not know that the No. 2 vote has not been used in the outcome of the election. This is the main submission I would like to address, as it eliminates the unfairness in many of the other submissions.

Mr Smith —Submission 3 is: to maintain open freedom of speech and commercial competition from the electronic Australian media, the Australian Broadcasting Authority must release new television and radio frequencies that have been legislated by the Broadcasting Services Act for the last eight years. Eight years have passed since the Broadcasting Services Act became law and the Australian Broadcasting Authority have completely stalled the planning process at the behest of lobby groups such as the Federation of Commercial Broadcasters for radio and television. These powerful media groups have emerged in a totally protected electronic media environment, with current market share guarded jealously against any new service providers.

Channel 9, known in the broadcasting industry as fortress nine, can direct Australian consumers in every walk of life with an incredible ability to skew voter opinions. In the recent federal election, Channel 9 deemed that only the Labor and Liberal parties were eligible to take part in the high rated Sunday night program debate one week before polling day. This immediately sent out an underlying message that these two parties, in the end, were the only players in the election. This Sunday night scripted event between the major players was the vital moment in the election from a marketing standpoint. Consumer lack of access to the minority party messages at this exact moment of collective Australian consciousness relegated them totally to a minor role.

The new digital broadcasting spectrum has been handed to the existing broadcasters and broadcast service providers in an effort to maintain the current status quo. A fair and proper release of digital broadcasting signals would see 30 television stations in every market and up to 250 radio signals in every single market in Australia. This situation would diminish

audience market share from a handful of operators who at this time are able to wield enormous power that they are simply not entitled to.

Legislation for broadcasting is in place now and should be enacted now and swiftly. The eight-year moratorium on new service providers for digital television, and the same mooted legislation for radio, should be removed. The Federation of Australian Commercial Broadcasters say they will be financially disadvantaged if they are not granted an eight- to 10-year grace period against new service providers. This argument holds absolutely no credence in the light of massive profits to the handful of current television and radio service providers. New service providers can offer the smaller political parties a conduit to the general public at critical times in an election.

The Australian Broadcasting Authority has been given the task of releasing the broadcasting spectrum to be used at its full capacity. They have failed to achieve this over the past eight years, to the detriment of voters and the general public. Current radio and television service providers hold a handful of licences in every market enjoying a totally protected broadcasting environment.

CHAIR —Thank you. Before we go to questions, can I add that I forgot to mention that we also authorised your most recent submission, which is submission 219. I did not mention that in my introduction.

Mr DANBY —My question does not relate to the two particular submissions that VALUE have made and your oral submissions, but one of the written submissions from Mr Trewartha who, I understand, is associated with your group.

Mr Brunckhorst —Yes. He could not speak today.

Mr DANBY —His submission suggests that the members of this committee be elected directly by the public. Do I understand his submission?

Mr Brunckhorst —Yes. What he says is that you are members of parliament, you have this hearing and then it goes to parliament—in other words, the same people are getting a double shot at the cherry. It is just the same as saying to the pieman, `You make the pies; now you be the inspector to see if they are any good.' So it is a bit of a double whammy. That is what he is saying.

Mr DANBY —So there should be a separate election for this committee—because it is so important—by people around Australia?

Mr Brunckhorst —No. I say either this committee is binding in its thing and it goes straight to law because it is a parliamentary committee or—

CHAIR —It does not, though. All this committee can do is report and make recommendations to the parliament.

Mr Brunckhorst —I understand that.

CHAIR —The government of the day is then required to respond to that report by either accepting or rejecting the recommendations, and then the government—or the opposition, for that matter, or any independent—could put to the parliament changes to legislation based on those recommendations if they want. And then the parliament may or may not support it. For instance, after the 1996 election this committee made a variety of recommendations in relation to identification for people getting on the roll. The government accepted that particular recommendation and put it into some legislation, but that has not passed through the parliament, because it has not been accepted by the Senate. So the process is very different and we do not have any supreme power to immediately put into law what this committee might do. It is up to the parliament.

Mr Brunckhorst —Rather than have members of parliament in this committee, what he is saying is that if it was autonomous you would get a different view, whereas you people sit again on this in parliament and you vote again on the same things that you have submitted.

Mr DANBY —Mr Brunckhorst, on the point that the Chairman just made, I have just come off sitting on the Joint Select Committee on the Republic Referendum. We made a unanimous recommendation, against a lot of people's predictions, and the government did not go along with that. So what committees recommend, some of which you may agree with, some of which you may not agree with, is then not supported by the parliament who sometimes you would probably agree with and sometimes not agree with. So it is a lot more complicated than saying we get a double bite at the cherry, because we are not the same people, and other people who judge what we put in are not necessarily in agreement with us, even though they might be in the same political party.

Mr Brunckhorst —I can understand that, but I am saying the parliament that sits at the present time is a coalition government, and the final outcome is going to be a coalition decision. So what happens here is negligible compared to what the coalition want at the end of the day. That is why the JSC has not been successful, even though their submissions have been great. They have not been successful, because whichever parliament, whether it be Labor or Liberal on the day, is going to get a Labor or Liberal decision.

Mr Ferguson asked the last speaker: how would it make any difference? In Pauline Hanson's case, she was put No. 6 on how-to-vote cards. If you have had an optional preferential vote, it would have made some difference because her vote being No. 6 never got to a count, because they count No. 2 votes, they count No. 3 votes, they count No. 4 votes. So she never got a count in any vote because she was put No. 6.

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —We have been through this. All I can urge you to do is go through the figures at the last election and maybe write us a letter about which seat in Australia One Nation would have captured if that had not happened. If you can do some electoral research on that, you can come back to us and tell us which seat in Australia that really affected. You might be against it and it might be undemocratic from your point of view, but there is another argument as to whether it actually caused One Nation not to get seats.

Mr Brunckhorst —Can I give you an example on that?

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —Yes.

Mr Brunckhorst —In your electorate, if the Democrats, the Greens, One Nation and every one of those put you last on the ballot paper, you would get knocked out by your Liberal opponent.

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —No, I would not.

Mr Brunckhorst —Yes, you would.

CHAIR —Not in his case. He got 78 per cent of the vote.

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —A lot of others would not have, either. Can I ask you a question about this green slip, red slip, purple slip? Can you just expand on that a bit more?

Mr Brunckhorst —Yes, I can. To give a simpler example to explain why I came up with that system, I was working loading jibs onto cranes and things down on the Gold Coast some years ago. When I delivered the jib, the bloke said, `Give us a couple of 12-foot slings.' I looked in the sling box and there were about 40 slings, because they had been lifting all weights. They looked like curly hair. They were all tangled up and there were no pegs on them to see how long they were. I had all these blooming slings with no idea. It took me ages to find two 12-foot slings for the bloke. So when I got home I got the boss to buy me some paint and I used snooker colours. I made a code—one for red, yellow, green, brown, pink and black, and a couple of extra colours right up to nought—and then I painted the slings red and yellow if it was 12 feet. I painted all the slings and, as soon as the bloke went out on the crane, he came back and told the boss and they got some paint and they painted all the slings. You just had to look in the box and you could see whether there was a 12 foot or a 14 foot.

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —Fair enough, but can you just explain how it would work? I come in to vote. What happens then?

Mr Brunckhorst —You set a machine up like your EFTPOS machine. Even if you have to extend your voting time, you set an EFTPOS machine up and you have got all your votings in No. 1s along here in the different colours of the electors, so that when they press No. 1, that means that they have made a legal vote, so the voting system starts. There is a computer in front of your AEC member there with all the electoral roll on it. So when you come in, you cannot get a duplicate person on the roll because, when you hit it on the computer, it will only read one. So that duplicate voting you were talking about gets eliminated. Everyone has got computers, so there is no trouble to plug into that. These buttons can hook up to the computer but, on a different program that an operator cannot see, they register their votes—1, 2, 3, 4—by pressing lit buttons, and they go out when they press them and a card drops into wherever they go.

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —So there are no slips; you just press a button?

Mr Brunckhorst —Just press a button and the card drops for that person. Then there is no cheating on the ballot box because you do not have to open the ballot box because the

computer counts the numbers of votes counted. If there is any argument, then the box can be tipped out and opened. There is no disputing elections; there is no double voting for anybody. It eliminates a million anomalies in the system.

Mr DANBY —Do you have any idea how much the introduction of machine voting would cost? I know they have it in the United States.

Mr Brunckhorst —Probably about the cost of an election, or two elections at the most. All the people you have would have to do the same job. Otherwise you would not have computers in offices today, if they were not viable.

Mr DANBY —That is a good answer.

CHAIR —Electronic voting has certainly been raised quite often and was looked at during the last inquiry as well. It is something that the AEC constantly looks at. I think we will eventually get to that.

Mr Brunckhorst —It will eventually come.

CHAIR —There are a number of privacy things and a number of other security aspects that need to be followed through. The multiple voting one is an interesting one. If somebody goes and votes in your name at another booth and then you rock up to vote and they say, `Sorry, you cannot have a vote, you have already voted,' but you have not actually voted, there is that aspect of it. That comes into the identification part of it and all that sort of thing.

Mr Brunckhorst —Everybody has got a drivers licence or a Medicare card or something that they could show. You have to do it if you want to go and draw money out of a bank or anything, so it is not an impossible dream.

Senator MASON —You mention in your submission the discrimination against pensioners, soldiers and school teachers with respect to article 44 of the Constitution about offices of profit under the Crown. I think it is an important issue and I commend you for raising it. When the Constitution was first drafted, offices of profit under the Crown were very few and government tentacles very small. Now, the tentacles of government are very large and offices of profit under the Crown are very many. I was one of them, potentially—even as a university lecturer. Your point is well argued because in my case I had three legal opinions saying that a university academic is an office of profit and three saying it is not. It is an issue that I think we will address as a committee one day. With the tentacles of government getting larger and larger and larger, it potentially discriminates against more and more people. I want to commend you for raising it. I think it is a fair issue.

CHAIR —I think it is a matter that this committee will probably be having something to say on. Currently, in most government departments, if you want to stand for election you are guaranteed your job back if you are not successful. That has basically been a traditional thing that has been put in place.

Mr SOMLYAY —Not in Queensland.

CHAIR —Isn't it?

Mr SOMLYAY —No.

CHAIR —In most parts of Australia governments have recognised that you should not lose your job because you want to put your hand up and stand for parliament; therefore, in most cases, they have guaranteed those jobs back. So it is something that has been looked at. I do not understand, though—

Mr Brunckhorst —Could I just speak on that before you go any further?

CHAIR —I was just going to ask you a question on this point. I am not quite sure I understand why you then put the rider on the end of that by saying it does not apply to politicians. If we are not re-elected, we do not have a job, so, effectively, it does apply in the same sense.

Mr Brunckhorst —If, for example, at an election there is a sitting member that goes out at the end of his term, he can sit again for that election, can't he?

CHAIR —He stands for election.

Mr Brunckhorst —He stands to be re-elected, yes.

CHAIR —For an election? For re-election?

Mr Brunckhorst —His pay does not stop at that time.

CHAIR —Okay, I see—when the election is called.

Mr Brunckhorst —When the election is called his pay does not stop. It stops when he finishes his term. Yet a school teacher's stops or a pensioner's stops. That is why it is not a very hard problem to solve. All you have to do is put it into the law: instead of putting that you cannot be a candidate, all you have to change it to is you cannot be sworn in. It is as simple as that. The whole problem is solved with about three hits on a typewriter.

Mr SOMLYAY —It would not really. It would be a constitutional change.

Mr Brunckhorst —I am saying if you pass the law to just change those few words—

Mr SOMLYAY —It has to be a referendum.

CHAIR —It is a constitutional change. It has to be a referendum.

Mr Brunckhorst —They do not worry about that. You just put in an amendment into the referendum. You have got the Australia Act without a referendum. You have got millions of things changed in the Constitution. The meaning has been changed a hundred times in the Constitution with amendments.

CHAIR —No changes have been made to the Constitution without a referendum of the people.

Mr Brunckhorst —The amendments are changes, as far as I am concerned. If you say that book is blue and amend it to be red, even though it has not changed the book it has changed the name on the front if you print red on it. That is what I think about the Constitution. It gets changed so many times it is not funny.

CHAIR —We will not argue the point, Mr Brunckhorst. I am sorry, but the Constitution does not change without a referendum.

Mr DANBY —I would like to ask Mr Smith about his views on the electronic media. I would have thought it was normally outside the bounds of this committee to deal with some of the claims he makes about digital television and that kind of stuff. Are you making similar submissions to parliamentary committees that deal with communications?

Mr Smith —Yes. I have been in constant written contact with Bob Greeney of the Australian Broadcasting Authority in Canberra for many years. For probably five or six years, we have been regularly conversing about broadcasting. They have a big convention coming up in Canberra later this year, which I am looking forward to going to.

Mr DANBY —Who is `we' as in `we have got a big convention'?

Mr Smith —The Australian Broadcasting Authority are having a big convention on digital broadcasting. It struck me the night that the opposition leader and the Prime Minister were on TV that that was the moment in time that people in Australia decided which way they were going to vote. There were only two of them there, and how many political parties are there? The leader of the Democrats was excluded, the leader of One Nation was excluded, the leader of the Greens was excluded and other reasonably well followed parties were completely excluded from that scenario.

No-one can deny that Channel 9 is the most powerful conduit to the people that this country has. It is owned by the richest man in this country, and he has got there because he has an exclusive conduit to the people. It is an incredible marketing situation that has evolved here at the turn of the century when we have fantastic technology—30 service providers in every marketplace—to be able to individually influence people in freedom of speech. That is what we are talking about here because the focus now is on the electronic media. It is the most powerful thing in the world. The transfer of information now has left the industrialists in its wake in terms of money. The major players, the people who are earning the big money—and where the power lies—are in the electronic media. There is absolutely no doubt about that. In Australia it is focused on a handful of people who have control over what happens in the marketing of the message to the people. It should not be allowed.

We have the technology now to change that situation, yet the Australian Broadcasting Authority just refuses. They snuck the legislation for TV broadcasting through the Senate on the night the Aboriginal legislation went through the Senate. It went over on the back of that. Everyone was focused on the legislation for Mabo and no-one saw that the same

night—or there was hardly any mention of it in any of the newspapers the next day—digital television legislation went through the Senate.

This legislation excludes a service provider such as me starting up a niche television service, say, on the Gold Coast or any other market for the next 12 years. In 12 years time I will be thinking about retiring. I have had 30 years in broadcasting and I am totally excluded from taking part in the digital revolution, which is a fantastic technology for everybody in this country. The existing service providers demonstrated in the last election the power they have to organise and skew opinion whichever way they want it to go. They are incredible tools. The average man in the street and probably a lot of people do not realise the power that these people have. It is awesome. There is no other way to describe it.

Mr DANBY —Your submission is a bit unusual in the sense that most submissions to this committee that I have heard before deal with the iniquities of people involved in politics. Is there a widespread value in the community or in your group in particular about the power of people in the media to skew politics?

Mr Brunckhorst —I would like to answer this. A little while back we had a show on TV called The Inventors —everyone used to tune in to it—and there would be a discussion on different things in front of the public. If a committee like this were on TV with some sort of identification for voting that could be scrambled on an email—where you asked people for submissions on whether they like certain subjects, yes or no—you would find the public view this way, which would be helpful to parliament. If you ran a show like The Inventors used to be run, you would find the public view. That is what he is saying about the media: it has the means to have so much input from the people that it is a shame you are wasting its use.

Mr DANBY —I am sure the chairman would like to have this committee shown live on television. But, because of the ratings of parliament, Order in the House is put on after midnight because they say that people are not interested. So how do you answer that?

Mr Brunckhorst —It is a disgrace.

Mr Smith —It is a disgrace. It should be on TV. There is room on the spectrum in Australia for that program to go on television. I used to watch the Australian parliament in prime time on cable TV in America when I lived there, and yet you cannot do that in your own country. I used to watch Bob Hawke in parliament when I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina. I come back to the Gold Coast to live: not a chance of seeing parliament on television, except on Channel 2 at three o'clock in the morning.

CHAIR —Question time is broadcast live.

Mr Brunckhorst —I can add to that on why question time is not watched. If you had a fine of, say, $100 per person every time someone interjected, you would find in about four weeks you would have everyone watching it because it would be interesting. You cannot even get up and say what you want. If you people all started shouting at me and shouting me down it would not be very interesting what I am saying here today. That is what is wrong with your TV show.

Mr SOMLYAY —I can assure you that when you stand up to answer a question and get shouted down it is not very pleasant either.

Mr Brunckhorst —I know. But if you put a $100 fine on each one it would not last long, you would see.

Mr DANBY —I do not think the interjections are the reason it is not high rating. That is a different argument.

CHAIR —Thank you very much, Mr Brunckhorst and Mr Smith, for your submissions. We have all of your written submissions.

Mr Brunckhorst —Could I just bring up the proxy votes? That was not mentioned.

CHAIR —Proxy votes?

Mr Brunckhorst —In the Senate. You had a proxy vote for the parties along the top of the line and you had no proxy vote for the independents.

CHAIR —The above the line and below the line voting?

Mr Brunckhorst —Yes.

CHAIR —You mean that you had to be in a group to be above the line?

Mr Brunckhorst —You were just given the Labor government, the Liberal government, or whatever—a proxy vote. Proxy votes are not mentioned in the electoral acts.

CHAIR —Are you talking about group voting?

Mr Brunckhorst —Yes, which becomes a proxy vote.

CHAIR —Whereas, an independent, because they are not part of a group, therefore are not above the line but are below the line, and if you want to vote for that individual you have to vote below the line.

Mr Brunckhorst —Why shouldn't the individual be able to fill in a form for what he wants as the selection, the same as a party can, if you have to have proxy votes at all?

CHAIR —It is not proxy voting. It is called group voting.

Mr Brunckhorst —It is proxy voting when you give someone the right to use a proxy vote.

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —It is simply because of the mechanics of the ballot paper. Say that there were 20 different independents unrelated to each, unconnected to each other, and we had to give them all a box so they could vote above the line: we already have

complaints in Australia about how big the ballot paper is, and it is the mechanics of that that is the main reason.

Mr Brunckhorst —That is why we should not have it.

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —So you are basically against above the line voting?

Mr Brunckhorst —I am basically against putting more than six or eight numbers on the vote. When you get an old person, 80 years of age, having to come in and fill in 54 numbers to get a reasonable vote for what they want, it is not fair.

Mr SOMLYAY —That is why we have above the line voting.

Mr Brunckhorst —Well, above the line voting should be for every member. It should be equal.

CHAIR —Independents can form a group of independents, if they want, and then they can be above the line.

Mr Brunckhorst —Why can't they be above the line and they could fill in their preferences before the election?

CHAIR —They could be, if they are part of a group.

Mr Brunckhorst —But why can't they as an individual? Why should they be discriminated against? You are trying to get a fair voting system and now you are arguing that this is fair, that you should give preference to the parties. The parties should not have a preference.

Mr SOMLYAY —At the moment we have a ballot paper with all the candidates on it. If you want to vote for a party, you can do it by voting above the line. If you don't, fill out the ballot paper.

Mr Brunckhorst —But why don't you give the independent the same right? He can fill in the under part for you then.

Mr SOMLYAY —Then he would not be independent.

Mr DANBY —I think you will find that what happens is that individual candidates are sometimes well organised enough to get their submissions in in time to the AEC and that there are group votes of individuals who are above the line and who do indicate their pattern of preferences. There are laws that govern us that say that you have to have these things in by a certain time, and individuals do not necessarily always do that.

Perhaps political parties are better organised, but all of the minor political parties as well as the major political parties and some groups of individuals do that. So it is very much up to individuals to group themselves with like-minded independents and do that. But they have to comply with the same regulations that the parties do.

Mr Brunckhorst —Why don't you legislate that no laws can be passed to change the Electoral Act 12 months before an election? With the last election, they would not have had time anyhow because they brought in that compulsory preferential voting just before the election. It did not give anyone else time. They all knew it was coming up—you parliamentarians had been working on it for months—and then a little bit before the election the independent gets a new law to say, `This is what you are going to vote under this time.'

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —Despite what a lot of people have been saying today, we understand that that was the system some years previously. We went through a period when we allowed that, basically to make it easier for a large number of people to vote, because a lot of people accidentally voted 1, 2, 2 or 1, 2, 3, 3. They did not intend to, but they accidentally did it. We went through that period. Before that, we had the system we have now. This is not some new invention; it had previously existed. The change was an interregnum when we had the other system.

Mr Brunckhorst —If the two-candidate preferred system is not got rid of, the two major parties get preference above everybody else in the electorate because their 2 votes are never counted. If you want to keep the two-candidate preferred, then you should change it to count the major one, the one most voters passed, and count their number 2s to see if you like it when the last ones go to the ones right down the bottom.

CHAIR —Thank you very much for your time.

[11.52 a.m.]