Mr LAURIE FERGUSON (1:08 PM) —The Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Electoral Integrity and Other Measures) Bill 2005 is quite clearly driven by partisan self-interest. The reality was perhaps summarised by the member for Casey, who said that Australia ‘has a better than good system’. For many years the conservative coalition parties have sought to make it far more difficult for people to participate in our political system. That sentiment is based on the kinds of comments of the member for Macquarie, who spoke of anecdotes. He said, ‘It is possible that there is fraud.’ He said there have on occasions been convictions and allegations and anecdotal evidence, and then he relied on some rather questionable material from a group of people who perhaps have been rather obsessed with this issue over recent decades. Their publications do not stand up to analysis. Just because people put out publications does not mean that one has to believe in the Moonie Unification Church or a flat earth or anything of that sort. The reality is that not very much evidence has been produced by those opposite with regard to systematic fraud in our political system.

Those of us who are interested in alternative systems look at the United States where, on election day, they have to largely rely on volunteers and retired people to staff their polling booths. The United States do not have an independent electoral commission to determine boundaries in a way which both parties in this country do not really dispute. They have state systems of selection of electorates in their national parliament based on partisan determinations within that state. In California, if the Democrats control the lower house of that state assembly then the boundaries will be skewed in their favour, and that is the reality there. That is a system that is held up to us by many people opposite.

We have a strong drive in this legislation to restrict people’s access to the system. It is claimed by coalition members that this legislation is not partisan and that they are not doing this because they wish to either marginalise or deprive a particular group of people of voting rights; it is just that they want to make the system cleaner, more thorough and more protected. However, despite the fact that they say there is no evidence that these things can be driven by partisan consideration, international evidence is to the contrary. I do not need to spend months scouring through material in the Parliamentary Library. This week, amongst material that I was offered, I noticed an article by David Hill entitled ‘American voter turnout’. Admittedly, this article deals with the contrast between states in the United States that have difficult registration laws and those that have very liberal registration laws.

Mr Baldwin interjecting—

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —‘Relevance,’ the member says. This article deals with how people are enrolled and it deals with the registration process in the United States. The author says:

That is about compulsory voting as opposed to non-compulsory voting. It is about registration needs as opposed to registration difficulty, but it is the same fundamental point. He goes on:

He further states:

The first pattern of note in the table—

that is, in the article—

A final quote from that article:

The reality is that people who are less likely to enrol are those with NESB backgrounds, those with lower educational accomplishments and those who move more frequently; and thus, fundamentally, are people who are renters rather than owners. For all the insistence of the member for Stirling about how we have laws in this country and they should be enforced and therefore we should now try to stop people who have been too slack from getting on the electoral roll—we should stop them from voting and participating—we all know that the movement of people in this country and internationally is far greater than it ever was. People have less job security and people are forced to move more often for employment and other reasons. As I said, that article, as do many other articles, points out that younger people are amongst those disenfranchised.

I noticed that the member for Macquarie in his tirade spoke of his sadness or his anger that, on election day, 17-year-old provisional voters were given ballot papers and that some people were given ballot papers for the wrong electorates. What the hell has that got to do with these proposals? Nothing whatsoever. It has also been interesting to hear from government members that they are concerned that during the week of the election the AEC workers have too much to do and cannot properly scrutinise the avalanche of new applications. I am afraid to say that, historically, the AEC has not had the same concern. As an independent authority of public servants, respected by most people in this country and seen as far more professional and neutral than authorities in other countries, it has not made the same complaint. These complaints have come from a number of political parties in this country who have a passing interest in denigrating the system, driving it down and using this as justification to disenfranchise and marginalise people’s participation in the political system.

They say that people are overworked, that the workers cannot manage this huge avalanche—the AEC has systematically denied that over decades; they say they can do it because they hire more people during that period to deal with those numbers that are expected and do occur—but in this legislation, they bring in new demands upon the workers with regard to how many people are going to sign papers and that type of thing. There are a number of other similar provisions that go towards increasing their workload. This measure is driven by partisan considerations.

I would like to cite another very recent article. As I said, I have not had to go back through 5,000 articles on this matter; there are very few people in the world who follow these issues—professionals, academics, politicians—who have the hide to push the line put here today that there is no connection between who is likely and who is unlikely to vote as a result of these changes. There is no-one internationally who would argue that there is no connection between who is being marginalised and voting intention. I refer to an article—once again it is a very recent one; we do not have to go back very far through the avalanche of articles on this matter—titled ‘The effect of socioeconomic factors on voter turnout in Finland: a register-based study of 2.9 million voters’ by Pekka Martikainen, Tuomo Martikainen and Hanna Wass published in the European Journal of Political Research in 2005. Their conclusions from that very thorough survey were:

What they are saying is what everyone else in the world knows, including a multitude of US researchers and academics: there is a clear relationship between the ease of participation in the system, the degree to which people are encouraged, the degree to which people have opportunities to participate in it and certain socioeconomic factors. It is clearly related to racial minorities—

Mr Baldwin —Where’s the Australian research?

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —Where is the Australian research? All Australian research says the same thing. As I said, I am citing these two articles only because they are so recent.

Mr Baldwin interjecting—

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —It is pathetic. The article further says:

So not only do we have the fact that there are clear connections with socioeconomic circumstances—employment, housing tenure et cetera—but we have a parallel development of youth disinterest. This legislation is going to worsen that reality, because a very high proportion of those people who are not enrolled are those in the younger group.

On the issue of false enrolment, it is preposterous to say that either major political party in this country has the time or the resources to run around trying to double vote in large numbers on election day. For all of the citation of instances of this, it usually involves people who are cheating social security, people who are trying to get drivers licences and that type of thing. Members opposite have quite rightly also cited instances in the Queensland branch of the Labor Party, where it occurs for internal Labor Party reasons. No-one is denying it can occur, but to defeat this marginal problem—and the government has said there is very little evidence to show it has any impact on any electorates whatsoever—should we marginalise and try to deny 300,000-plus people a vote every election day? There are a few exceptions that will allow enrolment for 17-year-olds who become eligible to vote during the election period and for people who become citizens in that week, but they are a minor part of it. Essentially, 300,000-plus people are going to have difficulties voting.

Should we go down that road because of innuendo, anecdotal evidence or allegations by a defeated candidate in his own seat, and I can think of one case where, quite frankly, the Labor Party would suspect the complainant. It is very interesting that one of the things that emerged in the Macquarie electorate was that a particular religious group, which was very attached to the coalition member at that time and which had religious reasons as to how and when it voted, voted via other people. It is very interesting that one of the main things that came out of this investigation was that the members of a group that one would largely see as being attached to the coalition, because of their religious motivation and their religious reasons as to when they vote, were the ones who seemed to have voted. One must suspect who it was that actually might have done any voting on their behalf.

Should we use such a draconian rule to deprive people and make it difficult for them to vote, marginalise them from the system, have them become less involved, make them more cynical et cetera? One of the realities is that the average person down at the hotel or at the soccer game on the weekend whinges and whines about having to go and vote. But, at the end of the day, having done that, people feel they have some involvement, that they have some responsibility for the outcome. They might not have been that interested, they might not have voted for the government, but at least they were part of the process. The alternative is to have a political system that has a large number of people further disenfranchised, further disillusioned. Even if, for a moment, we give one-tenth of a degree of credibility to the claims of those opposite, to go down this road is to go one step too far.

I do not deny for one moment that there are instances of this. In fact, I am one of the few members to have written to the AEC about specific cases, including one involving the Regents Park branch of the Labor Party in my electorate some years ago. If the Liberal Party wanted to really do something worthwhile to destroy genuine fraud in this system, they would look at the difficulties in relation to sections 101.5 and 131.6 of the Criminal Code. We have a situation where, if a person enrols at an address and it appears that they failed to change their address—but that it was not really malevolent or deliberate—then they have to be prosecuted within a year of that action. Large numbers of people, because of the interaction of the Commonwealth Electoral Act and the Criminal Code, cannot be prosecuted because of time limits. So if those opposite want to do something practical about the very real fraud that occurs to a very minor degree in this system, they should do something about that.

Another issue in this legislation is the question of political donations. Once again, this is just driven by crude politics. For all the concern they have expressed for little old ladies sending them $10, and the material of that kind that has been dished up in previous debate, the truth is that this is essentially to facilitate a cover-up of where donations come from.

The average Australian will think it is quite reasonable that, if people are giving large amounts of money, they should know whether that affects political decisions. Whilst there might be many people in this country who are civic-minded and just like supporting political parties, anyone who has half a brain, quite frankly, knows that a large number of political donations, the vast preponderance of them, are given by corporate interests and others—trade unions et cetera—who have a vested interest in political outcomes.

When you consider issues like privatisation and the controversy over the Smartcard in the last few days, people would like to know whether a particular political decision of a party was motivated by the $20,000 or $5,000 donation that it got or whether particular companies in particular industries seem at a particular election to be more interested in funding one political party than another.

Mr Baldwin —The trade unions would have no vested interest in your decisions?

Mr LAURIE FERGUSON —I have just said that it is quite right and proper that donations from the trade union movement should be out there in the public arena. I am not resiling from that. Of course they should. I have never had a complaint about that.

The truth is that this measure is aimed, essentially, at making sure the Australian public has less knowledge of who is donating and why. Tax deductibility, we all know, once again, is more likely. I can only speak from my own experience and probably that of the adjacent electorate of Parramatta, looking at the campaigns of the previous member for Parramatta, and at my campaign and my opponents’. The Labor Party is less likely to get donations over $1,500 at a local level, particularly, than the coalition. So to change the tax deductibility of donations is also, quite simply, quite crudely, quite obviously, related to trying to advantage the current government.

The other issue I want to talk about is the question of prisoners and their voting rights. I think the comments of Chief Justice McLachlin in the Canadian Supreme Court in Sauve v Canada are very telling:

That is the truth.

People are in jail for a variety of reasons. We know that Indigenous Australians—who, coincidentally, live 17 years less on average than other Australians—are severely overrepresented in the system. Are they professional heroin dealers and murderers? No. They are usually in jail for street offences, alcoholism and issues related to their poverty. Now we will have a situation where they will be denied a say in the political system.

I am not saying that the Liberal Party is going to go down this road, but we could look at the situation in Belarus. All of Europe has been campaigning over the jailing of Alexander Milinkevich in recent weeks because of the sham elections in Belarus. If we look at the United Kingdom, there was a huge political issue about the poll tax. Many people were jailed—for a political reason. And now, under this system, the government  would be saying that people who disagree with them could possibly be denied the franchise. I do not want to say that they are going that far, but this is a Pandora’s box that has been opened. If you start saying that anyone who is serving a sentence cannot vote in the Australian system then obviously there is the possibility that in a crisis, particularly with a dramatic political event in the country, people who object to the policies of the day—whether about the Vietnam war or whatever it was—could be denied their say in the political processes and their right to participate in changing that system. You could go around the world and find such examples—famous writers or people who were very wealthy in later life. A particular senator of this parliament served a term in Sydney during the famous IWW cases of the early part of the 20th century. A senator of this parliament had actually been convicted, as had another member in South Australia. These people, the government is saying, should not have the right to vote.

As I say, this is only the thin edge of the wedge. If we want to look at international comparisons, it is quite interesting to look at Europe. If we look at the countries that we would most associate ourselves with—the Western democracies—very few if any of them have these kinds of restrictions. Where do we find anything like this? We find similar restrictions in Hungary, Estonia, the Czech Republic et cetera—hangovers from the Soviet period, and maybe a reaction there.

So we have a situation where those that we would most like to emulate—progressive Western countries—do not have such restrictions. Where they do have these restrictions is in the United States. We have seen the situation in Florida where the President’s brother actually disobeyed Florida state law which says that people who have been jailed in Florida can never vote again—not just cannot vote while they are in jail but can never vote again. They basically got a private corporation, not an electoral commission like in our country, to scour the Florida electoral roll and they tossed off the roll people who had served sentences in any other American state. Those people could not get access to the legal system to get themselves back on the roll. And we all know that Florida was won by a very small vote. So that is the long-term outcome of these possibilities. (Time expired)