Senator PAYNE (NaN:47:00) —I do not know whether it is the advent of laptops in the chamber—and a very effective tool they are for those of us who are interested in using that sort of technology—but one of the issues that I want to speak about this evening is electronic voting and Internet voting in particular. I was recently in the beautiful New England town of Tamworth, where, of course, as one does, I perused the local newspaper, the Northern Daily Leader. It is not necessarily the sort of publication in which you might expect to come across an article on electronic voting but there it was—pride of place—an article discussing possible moves to electronically based voting, in fact reporting statements made by my colleague Senator Chris Ellison, the Special Minister of State. In this article he was indicating the enormous potential for Internet based voting in this country and voicing his support for the efforts of the Australian Electoral Commission in keeping a watching brief on this issue.

For some time I have been looking at what advantages Australians can take of new technology to their benefit—for example, how the Internet can help those in rural and regional areas or women in certain parts of the community to overcome barriers to accessing information. I also canvassed the potential impact of the Internet on Australian and international politics. This is a potential which the Australian government is embracing with great enthusiasm. It is not only in influencing the decision making process involved in politics that technology can have a great impact, and those people who have dual interests in technology and voting systems have busily explored the possibility of using new technology to conduct ballots.

As I have said before, IT has impacted on virtually every aspect of our lives, from banking to education to communication and much more. Sometimes we do not even notice the effect of technology as we undertake our day-to-day tasks, and so far the use of technology in voting systems seems to be, to some degree, the exception to this. But there is absolutely no reason that the democratic process cannot also gain from new technology. In reality, the Australian electoral process and the voting system that we currently use have not changed significantly in the last 100 years—the computerisation of rolls and all those sorts of things, yes, but for the actual voting system itself there have been no great changes. So I think we have a unique opportunity now to consider how we might reinvigorate the electoral system.

So if you consider the possibilities on both a large scale and a small scale, you see we conduct ballots on a regular basis in Australia—in fact, some members of the community say too often. From federal elections to those at state and local level and to elections at schools, at universities, for organisations, and in the workplace, we are always participating in some sort of a ballot. We in the chamber know better than most how often you get to vote these days on a number of things. Mostly we still use that very traditional means of crossing our names off an electoral roll, whether literally or figuratively, and filling out a paper ballot. What technology offers is an enormous capacity to streamline this. There are two key means through which technology could be introduced into electoral systems here. One is through introducing computerised systems at the polling place and, of course, the alternative is the prospect of remote access to cast a ballot.

That second means is not just a theoretical possibility. Across various parts of the world, in fact, the theory has been put into practice, testing the use of technology in conducting ballots. In the United Kingdom a number of local councils trialed electronic voting at the recent elections they held in May. Similarly, in New Zealand some testing has taken place. Interestingly, Costa Rica has been trialing the introduction of technology in their electoral systems and at their national elections two years ago the entire country was able to vote electronically via computer kiosks at polling stations. They had technical support provided from AT&T and policy guarantees from the Centre for Information Law and Policy in the United States, and voters cast their electronic ballots at polling locations. They undertook that process to test the ease of using its methodology, with a long-term view to full use of electronic voting in the future.

The well-known corporation Unisys managed an electronic voting project in Brazil. They were involved in the training of personnel, the installation and the maintenance of equipment and the more technical side of an operation that allowed 35 million Brazilians to vote electronically for their municipal councils. So there has been a lot of `testing of the water' in this process.

The United States obviously has been most prolific in its take-up of Internet technologies in politics. The overwhelming majority of candidates for office in the United States have an impressive Net presence, including, most interestingly, for their fundraising efforts in this recent campaign. It has become a key part of their political system, and it is bipartisan. In the last lot of presidential elections, the Democrat and Republican candidates noted the importance of their web sites to their campaigns. Both Bob Dole and John Kerry, Republican and Democrat respectively, said that one-third of their new campaign volunteers registered via the Internet. In 1998, for better or for worse, Jesse Ventura won a surprise victory in the gubernatorial race in Minnesota. Part of the reason for that was said to be his capacity to energise a demographic which utilises the Internet heavily—obviously the wrestling demographic.

The Internet is obviously fundamental to this year's US electoral cycle. Both the Republicans and the Democrats, through their national conventions, sought to have a `virtual' convention presence so that the process was accessible for those who could not be there physically. It is not just in regard to proselytising that the Internet has played a role in US elections. From the perspective of administration, they have also sought to utilise technology to improve their whole electoral processes, which are pretty complicated at the best of times. Oregon has experimented with mail-in voting, South Carolina is allowing its citizens to register to vote over the Net, and in 1996 the Reform Party utilised the Internet as a means of selecting their presidential candidate. In schools, colleges and universities electronic voting is used to run elections. At Kansas State University in March, the first student-body binding Internet election was held—unfortunately I do not have a report on who won. The United States government has been considering how to enable overseas residents, both military and other, from a number of states to vote online for the elections that they are holding in a couple of months. In Florida they trialed electronic voting in 12 counties in 1998.

More recently, the Democrats in Arizona chose to conduct their presidential primary election with the aid of the Internet. Voters were offered the options of voting at a polling place using a paper ballot, voting at a polling place using the Internet or voting via remote Internet connection. Of the 86,000 people who cast a vote, 45 per cent chose to utilise either the polling place Internet facility or to log on themselves at a remote location. A brief analysis of the results from that ballot indicated that it did not turn out any aberrant results. There were no great surprises, which hopefully goes some way towards alleviating concerns that Internet polls might bring about different results to more traditional ballots. In this case, Al Gore won comfortably over Bill Bradley, which was a result that was mirrored across the country. In a number of very remote regions of Alaska, the state Republicans have used an Internet straw poll for their state presidential primary.

There is a range of examples, and the question must be: what does it mean for Australia? I think it is important to acknowledge that Australia has been keen to involve technologies in our political process, both to engage more people in the political system and to make the system open and accessible. That is one of the reasons why I am very proud of the web site that I operate. In 1998 in our federal election, the AEC hosted the largest live Internet event ever conducted in Australia—that, of course, was the virtual tally room. It was visited by an estimated 85,000 people, who were able to obtain results at a divisional, state and territory, and national level. Following the polling day, results were updated at least daily and polling place figures were also made available. So the Australian community is, at the very least, open to the use of the Internet in the political cycle.

Particular applications of new technologies internationally present lessons and indicators for our context. The most important thing that should be taken from some of those examples I mentioned is that choice should always remain available. Not everybody will be comfortable with using the new technologies. A presidential primary is pretty different from a national or state election here, but the fact remains that in the Arizona example I mentioned nearly half the voters who participated in that ballot participated online. Obviously we need to look at things like security, the protection of privacy and the need to guarantee a secret ballot, but I think we can do that. Senator Ellison, in his discussions on this issue, has also noted concerns about access to technology as a key issue when contemplating these sorts of changes. But I think that they are changes that we can take up enthusiastically, using them to move forward. (Time expired)