Senator FAULKNER (Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (4:42 PM) —I am in continuation in relation to the motion before the chair. I was talking about three gaping holes in the middle of the government's logic in their approach to enrolment fraud. I had mentioned that the AEC did not have a method of checking whether a witness falls into one of the prescribed classes of witnesses and I was about to quote the AEC, whom I had asked to advise on this particular issue. Firstly, the AEC said to me, `The AEC has nothing against which it could check the witness occupation details. The AEC ceased collecting electors' occupation details for Commonwealth purposes some time ago, and even that information was frequently out of date.' That is the first gaping hole.

Secondly, they said, `The AEC has no way of checking whether that witness actually sighted the ID.' And, to get the trifecta up, that `the AEC has no way of checking whether the ID was genuine.' The government has known for at least two years that its bureaucratic enrolment system would have no effect on enrolment fraud. The AEC's concerns about how ineffective the regulations would be were well summed up in a recent submission to the JSCEM committee, where it noted that these reforms would not have stopped Karen Ehrmann and Andy Kehoe. Nevertheless, the government wants to spend about $5 million of taxpayers' money, per year, for a complex bureaucratic system that even the AEC says will not improve the security or the accuracy of the roll. Cynically, the government is asking taxpayers to fund a system that will do nothing to stop electoral fraud but will entrench a much more serious rorting of the rolls by stopping young people and the disadvantaged from enrolling.

It is important to remember that the government waited until the eleventh hour before the last federal election to table the regulations and then threatened massive and complex change to electoral enrolment. Not only did the government keep ordinary Australians in the dark about the new enrolment rules, but it also kept the AEC in the dark. The AEC, the organisation whose job it is to administer elections and inform all Australians about the electoral system, did not know when this massive change was to be brought in.

The AEC was left in an invidious position of producing and issuing, under embargo, new enrolment forms to all Australia Post outlets. By tabling the regulations just before the election, but lacking the courage to proclaim the relevant amendments and so implement their new system, the government's claims that it is concerned about the integrity of the electoral roll have really been exposed. What an admission: they were too complex and the changes would have caused such chaos during the election that they were abandoned by the government itself. So, along with the AEC and most of the states, the opposition has made it very clear that constructive measures to improve the integrity of the roll will be supported. We will not, however, support changes to the system that do nothing about fraud while potentially disenfranchising very many people. All states and territories have commented on the regulations.

Senator Abetz —All Labor.

Senator FAULKNER —All states and territories that have commented on the regulations have strongly objected to them, as they will impose extremely onerous requirements on first-time enrollees, while imposing much weaker requirements on those who are transferring enrolment.

In the interests of maintaining the joint enrolment arrangements, and recognising the requirements of the Commonwealth and state governments, the Victorian Attorney-General and the Victorian Electoral Commission have been very active in developing an approach which offers a means of establishing a stronger proof of identity for enrolment and which is not so onerous as to disenfranchise already under-represented groups on the electoral roll.

A meeting of electoral commissioners and chief electoral officers was convened on Friday, 8 February 2002 in Adelaide to discuss possible alternative approaches to enrolment verification. The meeting considered the use of a range of information from databases, including Medicare, the ATO, passports and driver licence records. And driver licence records were considered to be a viable alternative for enrolment and transfer of enrolment purposes. Driver licences are held by some 90 per cent of the population and are already used to assist in the verification of identity for other government and commercial purposes.

If the driver licence approach were to be used, people applying for enrolment or transfer of enrolment would be required to include their driver licence number on the enrolment form. This would replace the need to have the form witnessed. If the person did not have a drivers licence, then he or she would have the form witnessed by an elector who did have a drivers licence and who would include the witness's drivers licence number on the form. Not only is the simplicity of this compelling; it would work, and we should do it. If the government proposes this sort of mechanism—simple, effective, certain to work—I can assure the government that those proposals would be strongly supported by the Labor Party.

The licence regulation authorities would be required by law to provide state and territory electoral authorities with driver licence numbers linked to name, address and date of birth information for the enrollee. This information would also be passed on to the AEC to assist with enrolment verification. Electoral authorities would then use the driver licence information to verify the identity of a person applying to enrol or a witness to an enrolment form as the case requires. Naturally, state, territory and the Commonwealth governments would need to pass complementary legislation to make the system work. In stark contrast to the regulations that the Senate is considering today, there was general agreement amongst electoral officials that the driver licence approach could be implemented.

Of course, further work on the implementation would need to be undertaken if the Commonwealth, states and territory governments were to agree to the driver licence approach. The meeting considered that the driver licence approach would provide real safeguards against potential enrolment fraud. The identity requirements would apply equally to those applying as first-time enrollees as well as to those transferring enrolment. The driver licence approach would also address the situation that was publicised in Queensland where there were a small number of cases of enrolment fraud amongst electors who had previously been correctly enrolled. If a person enrolled for an address at which they did not reside, or provided a fictitious address, then the address provided on the enrolment form would not match that on the driver licence database and inquiries would be made. The Commonwealth provisions, by contrast, would do nothing to address that sort of situation.

Electoral commissioners and chief electoral officers are very keen to preserve joint enrolment arrangements. As such, if the driver licence approach has the support of state, territory and Commonwealth governments, electoral authorities believe that it has a number of very clear advantages. Primarily, the driver licence approach would not be onerous for people applying for enrolment or transfer of enrolment. People are already familiar with using driver licences as identification. You do it when you open a bank account, when you cash a cheque, when you apply for a passport, and so on. In addition, the enrolment form would be very simple and very clear compared to the enrolment form needed under the Commonwealth's proposed provisions.

It is now obvious that the reason the government has ignored the alternatives is that the other models for improving the integrity of the roll did not have the political spin-off that the government wanted. That is, the government wanted to make it harder to enrol to vote for people in remote communities, harder for the homeless, harder for the disadvantaged, harder for the people with poor English, harder for the illiterate—harder for these more alienated people in our community.

What we in the opposition suspected all along has now become clear—the new enrolment witnessing rules brought in by these regulations are all about politics and have nothing whatsoever to do with the integrity of the electoral rolls or improving the electoral law in this country. The Commonwealth's enrolment provisions fail to address the potential for enrolment fraud, but they will ensure that it is more difficult for all eligible people—especially young people and others underrepresented on the electoral roll—to enrol.

I have no doubt that the new enrolment form will confuse, and thus deter, many people from enrolling to vote. It will particularly affect people who are on the margins of our society, those whose intellectual capacity, whose language skills, whose eyesight or whose ability to find a witness or produce an ID is less than that of anyone who sits in this chamber. The homeless, and people living in remote areas of Australia will be the hardest hit.

These new enrolment procedures have been on the drawing board for over two years. Over that time the government has consistently ignored sensible alternatives from the AEC and from state governments. By ignoring the legitimate concerns raised by the states, who are partners with the AEC in managing the roll, the government has risked the separation of the national and state electoral rolls. Such an outcome would be disastrous for the integrity of the electoral roll. It is for those reasons that I urge the Senate to support this motion to disallow the regulation.