CANBERRA - 24 November 2021
This voter integrity bill is a bad bill from a bad Government.
It's a very unnecessary bill, and it's a bill that pretends to be strengthening our democracy, like the former speaker just said, while in fact undermining it.
At its heart, this bill is a voter suppression bill from this bad, unethical Government.
It is a deliberate attempt to suppress the votes of those that they don't think are likely to vote for them.
Mr Deputy Speaker, there are so many problems with this bill and with what the Government is proposing to do that it's really hard to know where to begin.
But the last two Liberal Party MP speakers alerted me to something I might not have considered fully before, and to perhaps give him the benefit of the doubt.
They've sort of got an impairment, an inability to understand that not everyone lives as they do.
This impairment is serious, because from the north shore of Sydney, from the central coast where everyone gets around with their phone full of all sorts of cards and IDs.
And “doesn't everyone have a wallet and doesn't everyone have a phone and a bill? Doesn't everyone have a bill for the tennis club? Doesn't everyone have that one? Doesn't everyone have streams of ID just available ready to go in our ladies clubs or wherever?”
Not everyone lives how most members of those opposite live.
Obviously, those opposite would understand that I'm from the Northern Territory and our citizens are very much in the gun of this bad bill.
Those opposite are trying to make it more difficult for Australians across the board to vote.
We're already looking at an election in the first few months of next year that will be heavily impacted by COVID-19.
It's already being called a “logistical nightmare” for the Australian Electoral Commission.
Voters will already have to do a QR code check-in, there'll be social distancing; people understand that there will be new requirements.
And there'll be another new requirement if this bad bill gets through, and that is to produce some sort of ID.
And that will have much longer waiting times, far longer waiting times at polling booths, unnecessarily long waiting times at polling booths that Australians haven’t had to deal with as much.
But if you think you've ever been in a long polling line, this bill is designed to make you wait even longer and to slow the whole process down, hoping that some people will just leave the queue, maybe come back later, maybe not.
That's what they hope.
But it's going to be particularly tough in the Northern Territory where my electorate is.
Early next year, we’ll already be facing extremely high temperatures.
It's hot, and long waits in extreme heat won't just be a hassle in Northern Australia, they could actually be very harmful to voters’ health around the country, particularly more senior voters and those with compromised health.
Requiring polling officials to check ID will further increase delays, because they'll have to check the authenticity of the document, and there may be confusion as to which documents are accepted.
Those voters whose ID is rejected will have to join separate queues to make a declaration vote, all taking longer, and they won't be told whether their provisional vote will ever even be accepted into the count.
So this is going to diminish trust in our electoral process, and if the Prime Minister's performance in question time today hadn't already diminished voters’ belief in democracy and what goes on in this place, this is going to further drive down the trust that Australians have in this electoral process, not enhance it.
And what the Coalition's proposal would see is Australians turned away from voting, voting take a lot longer for everyone, and our democracy weakened overall.
But really what they should be doing is facilitating voting for more Australians around the country.
There are tens of thousands of unenrolled Australians around the country who are currently not participating in our democracy, and that's a problem.
If the Coalition Government was serious about improving Australia's democracy, there's plenty of things they could be doing.
If Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, was serious about electoral integrity, he would support Labor's bills for real-time disclosure of political donations and lowering the disclosure threshold from $14,500 to a fixed $1,000, making political donations transparent.
If he was serious, he would reform electoral expenditure laws.
He would provide more resources to the AEC to increase enrolment and turnout of voters, not at a minute to midnight.
Instead, in the NT, where we have the lowest rate of enrolment in the country, the AEC has been bleeding staff and resources for years,deliberately.
Those opposite have deliberately been cutting AEC staff out of the Northern Territory deliberately in order to have less Aboriginal Territorians in particular, but also other Territorians not getting enrolled.
I mean, that is it's scandalous, unethical, it's shameful, it's un-Australian, but it's the mark of those opposite.
In our local AEC office in my electorate, the number of staff was over 20 in the past, and then it went down to 15, and then it went down to three.
Three AEC staff in the jurisdiction with the lowest enrolment in the country by far.
Now, why would a Government deliberately do that? Because they want to steal some seats.
They want to take the vote away from some Aboriginal Territorians in particular, so they can try and win a seat.
It's a disgrace.
There was an Indigenous electoral participation program, but what did they do with those personnel, the people who went out to enrol people and educated about the process?
They sent them to Brisbane to enrol people in Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory.
Guess what, Mr Deputy Speaker?
From Brisbane, those AEC staff didn't enrol many Territorians in remote communities. None.
So that was deliberately done, so there's less voters in the seat of Lingiari.
I mean, three people in an office for somewhere the size of the NT, that’s a boss, someone who answers the phone, and another person who does something else.
Very professional public servants, but pretty limited capacity in the jurisdiction with the lowest enrolment in the country.
Sounds like a deliberate thing to do.
Now, if the Prime Minister wanted to, he could do something to fight dangerous misinformation and disinformation which has been spreading all over social media, if wanted to strengthen Australians’ faith in the democratic process.
He would also legislate for a powerful and independent national anti-corruption commission.
He would stop pork barrelling in marginal seats.
He would make laws so people like the former Attorney-General couldn't take $1 million in secret donations from a so-called blind trust.
There's lots of things the Prime Minister could do.
But instead of that, the Prime Minister has decided on the eve of an election to make it harder for some Australians to vote, so that people who won't vote for him maybe can't vote at all.
And really, this is what it's all about. It's about voter suppression.
We've seen it in the United States: the Republican Party have spent years finding new ways to block voters that they think will vote Democrat to get into ballot booths.
So this is got that sort of mentality and that sort of prejudice written all over it.
This bill will have a disproportionate impact on people living in remote Indigenous communities, and if those opposite were truthful, they would agree with that.
It has a disproportionate impact on those dealing with homelessness.
It has a disproportionate impact on those escaping domestic violence, who often don't have easy access to identification because they have to flee.
So it's making it harder for all those groups.
Young people and culturally and linguistically diverse communities will also be adversely affected.
Many young adults move around a lot, they rent in temporary accommodation, which makes it hard to keep their ID up to date.
They're also less likely to have other forms of ID, such as passports, a lot of young kids aren't getting a driving license, they may not have any tax documents or bank cards, they might lose their wallet when they're out having a couple of beers.
Who knows? It could be any reason why a young person or anyone might not have ID on the day.
But, it's quite passing strange, isn't it? These groups that I'm outlining and their vulnerability, and perhaps where the Prime Minister has made an assessment that we're probably better off with those people not having a vote, and we might get across the line a couple of couple of seats.
That's why it is so shameful. Is so shameful.
Older people can face similar problems, if they’re no longer driving they don’t have a license, some might think that they don't have the right form of ID.
You know, the magical sprinkling of fairy dust that we've heard from previous speakers, it doesn't get to everyone.
I mean, those opposite of the Federal Government have had the worst communications campaigns to do with the vaccines and action around the pandemic.
What makes us any more confident that there will be good communication programs coming out in the lead up to the election about the ID stuff?
We know it just won't happen because they don't want those people to vote.
Migrant communities also face substantial barriers.
Many people in some of those communities have struggled for years with formal name and identity issues, such as bad transliterations from other alphabets and those whose names have been anglicised when they've arrived in Australia.
So, in other words, different forms of names.
We're supposed to believe that all this is just sort of magically taken into account, but we know that's unlikely.
We saw in the 2015 Queensland election that voter ID requirements led to voters being turned away from polling places without being given the option to complete a declaration vote because polling officials did not understand the new system.
So we're supposed to believe that 100,000-plus AEC people are going to be trained up over Christmas for the election in the new year and will have a perfect understanding of the new system.
The Government says that voters will be able to have someone else on a declaration form, attesting that they are who they say they are, but they've offered no guidance on how those declarations will be followed up to ensure that anyone's telling the truth anyway.
I can clearly see that it's all a crock.
They’re yet to explain what happens if a person's ID does not have the same address as their enrolled address.
Under these proposed changes, a person could still vote multiple times in their own name by going to different polling places.
And that bells the cat because the thing that they say is a problem that’s not really a problem, they can't even stop people from doing it.
It's just so obvious.
So I hope enough members of this place have the integrity to make a wise decision when they come to vote on this bill.
The Electoral Commissioner has said many times that existing measures have effectively addressed that issue of multiple voting, as small as it is.
Just three months ago, this very parliament created a designated electoral register for those identified as having voted more than once, and they will only be able to vote by declaration vote.
So in summary, this is a very disappointing piece of legislation, particularly for people that I represent because they know what this is designed to do.
It's designed to have less people having a vote that should, and that is un-Australian.
Thank you.
---------
ENDS
