Category: Electoral reform

The federal parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has released an interim report from its inquiry into the 2022 federal election, addressing terms of reference including political finance regulation and truth-in-advertising. We evidently still await what the committee has to say about “proportional representation of the states and territories in the Parliament in the context of the democratic principle of ‘one vote, one value’”, which appears to be code for increasing the size of parliament.

The committee’s 14 members include representatives of the main parties plus teal independent Kate Chaney, each motivated to bring particular concerns to the table. One common point of grievance is the nine-figure electoral spending of Clive Palmer, which the report recommends addressing through caps on donations and spending that extend to third parties and associated entities. However, the Coalition dissenting report rejects these recommendations as they stand, complaining of a failure to count union affiliation fees as donations and the potential for Labor to evade spending caps through a multiplicity of union campaigns.

The section proposing spending caps gives consideration to “campaigns with a corporate financial structure”, by way of suggesting measures to prevent Clive Palmer from continuing to conduct mass advertising through his company Mineralogy. Climate 200 argues that any spending cap should be higher for new entrants or independents, reflecting its feeling that caps in New South Wales and Victoria stymied crowd-funded independents’ efforts to make themselves known at the recent state elections. A submission from teal independent MP Monique Ryan further proposed exempting new candidates from donation caps up to a certain fundraising threshold.

The report revives Labor’s position that the threshold for public disclosure of political donations should be reduced from its current level of around $15,000, to which it was hiked from $1500 when the Howard government secured a Senate majority, to $1000, which Labor never managed to give effect to when it was last in government. It further recommends parties should be required to disclose donations in “real time”, where currently the public is none the wiser as to how campaigns are funded (to the extent the disclosure threshold allows it at all) until a year after the event. However, it doesn’t say exactly how real – the Coalition’s dissenting report says within a month should be enough, and that $8000 should suffice for a disclosure threshold.

One of the report’s showpiece recommendations is for truth-in-advertising legislation “based on the principles currently in place in South Australia”. In that state’s case, the Electoral Commissioner takes advice on complaints from the Crown Solicitor’s Office and can request removal or retraction of offending items, issue fines, and – in the event of non-compliance – declare an election void if it is felt on the balance of probabilities that the result was affected. The report favours the AEC to run the scheme over ACMA and the ACCC, notwithstanding the AEC’s own reticence. The Electoral Commission of South Australia also noted that the system presents it with multiple challenges, which were exacerbated when the number of complaints shot from 38 at the 2018 election to 122 in 2022. The Liberals and Nationals are opposed, arguing Labor has no specific proposal or electoral mandate, and expressing concerns about freedom of speech and subjectivity of meaning.

A recommendation to juice up the AEC’s efforts to encourage enrolment and participation among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders is influenced by Labor’s feeling that it nearly lost its Northern Territory seat of Lingiari because the Morrison government strategically starved it of resources. The report notes shortages of interpreters and explanatory materials, deficiencies in the remote area mobile polling program and cuts at the AEC’s Darwin office, along with a claim the Indigenous Electoral Participation Program had been underfunded.

The Coalition’s dissenting report registers its displeasure with the teal independent phenomenon (or what is “now known as the Teal Party”, the veracity of which I leave to others to judge) by calling for independents “conducting their activities in a manner consistent with a registered political party” to be subject to the obligations of one. It also calls for the pre-poll voting period to be further reduced from two weeks to one, having already been cut back from three weeks in the previous term with the concurrence of Labor and the Greens. Also recommended are higher barriers for nominating candidates, given the “potential for candidates to be utilised purely for preference distribution”, and the creation of an offence of “electoral violence or intimidation”.

The Albanese government has made it apparent over the past few days that it has a substantial agenda of electoral reform in mind, which it will hopefully do a better job of delivering on than the last Labor government. My main focus here is on the Prime Minister’s announcement on Friday that the government will look at reciprocating an existing arrangement where voting rights are granted to Australians resident in New Zealand for more than a year, along with other measures designed to smooth relations with New Zealand and otherwise drop the previous government’s obnoxious attitude.

Voting in Australia has been restricted to citizens since an earlier requirement of British subjecthood plus six months’ residency was dropped in 1984, grandfathered so as not to remove existing rights from a now dwindling band of mostly British and New Zealander non-citizens. New Zealand, however, has since 1975 granted voting rights to permanent residents, which raises the question as to why the Albanese government’s proposal should be limited to New Zealanders in particular.

When changes to electoral laws are on offer, it always pays to consider how those proffering them might stand to benefit — and I dare say there have been suggestions in right-wing media spaces over the past few days of a Labor plot to preserve its hold on power by unleashing legions of foreign dole bludgers upon our electoral roll. With this in mind I set to work on the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ TableBuilder census data facility to get a detailed look at the demographic characteristics of New Zealand-born non-citizens, only to learn the hard way that they are yet to stock it with data from last year’s census.

Having made do instead with results from 2016, I have produced the chart below comparing population percentages among those aged 20 and over by weekly personal income. The only evidence for the stereotype is that 7.0% of New Zealand-born non-citizens report negative or no income compared with 5.5% for Australian citizens — that aside, our New Zealanders actually tend to be fairly affluent, particularly in the upper-middle part of the range.

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A second chart showing the respective age distributions of Australian citizens and New Zealand-born non-residents offers strong hints as to why this is so: many New Zealanders are here for work purposes, and are thus under-represented at both the young and the old end of the scale. The main reason to think adding them to the electoral roll would be to Labor’s benefit is that few are among the older cohort that uniquely remained loyal to the Coalition on May 21.

Also significant is the uneven geographic spread of the New Zealander population, which was — at least at the time of the 2016 census — concentrated in the resource states of Queensland and Western Australia, where their numbers were respectively equal to 3.8% and 3.4% of the population of Australian citizens. This would add as much as half a quota to Queensland’s population for purposes of determining its House of Representatives seat entitlement, and give Western Australia a reasonably handy fillip as well. Given long term voting patterns in these states, this could give the Coalition a swing to negate the roundabout of Labor’s likely advantage among New Zealand voters. UPDATE: It’s pointed out in comments that this is not the case, since the entitlement is already based on total population without regard to citizenship.

The table below shows the 20 top ranked electorates for New Zealand-born non-citizens, remembering that this is based on 2016 boundaries. All but one of the seats are in Queensland or Western Australia, and all the Queensland seats are in the state’s populous south-east except the borderline case of Wright, which no doubt owes its presence to the Gold Coast end of the electorate (the Gold Coast triumvirate of Fadden, Moncrieff and McPherson all rank among the top ten).

The work of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters’ post-election review will not end there, as committee member Don Farrell has today flagged the following:

• Truth-in-advertising laws. The obvious model here is South Australia, where Labor was told to pull ads before the March state election which claimed the state’s ambulance ramping problems were “worse than ever”. It fell to the Electoral Commissioner to determine that this was not strictly true, which is not a role the Australian Electoral Commission is in a hurry to assume. When the Greens’ submission to the JSCEM inquiry after the 2019 election suggested the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission would be better suited for the job, its chair told the inquiry he considered this a “terrible idea”. Labor’s dissenting report to the inquiry said consideration should be given to a “new, independent, election-focused body”.

• Spending caps. If Clive Palmer’s repeated efforts have achieved nothing else, they have made a powerful case for laws that cap the amount specific parties or third party actors can spend on election advertising. Caps have applied in New South Wales since 2010, though the present government hit a hurdle when union-targeted caps on third party expenditure were deemed unconstitutional by the High Court. The current Labor government in Queensland introduced caps before the 2020 election, though Palmer still found ways to dominate the advertising space with attacks on Labor, for all the good it did him. The Coalition has acquired an interest in the matter after Climate 200’s expenditure on the teal independents’ campaigns, but The Guardian reports Liberal federal director Andrew Hirst has signalled that spending caps will likely be opposed by the Coalition.

• A $1000 threshold for public disclosure of political donations. The Howard government used the Senate majority it gained during its final term to hike this from the $1500 at which the Hawke government had set it at 1983 to an indexed $10,000, and it now sits at $15,200. Plans to reduce it to $1000 were the subject of Rudd government legislation that was blocked in the Senate by the Coalition and Steve Fielding of Family First in 2009, and formed part of Julia Gillard’s deal with the Greens after the 2010 election, which for some reason was never acted on.

• “One vote, one value”. Farrell was apparently asked if he supported “spending caps, truth in political advertising and reforms to improve one-vote one-value”, and replied the all were “in our party policy” and that government would be “producing legislation at some point”. Specifically on the last point, The Guardian reports the committee would be directed to “see what solutions they come up with”. Given constitutional constraints, it is difficult to see that further progress could be made on this front without going down the politically difficult path of enlarging parliament. The Guardian’s report notes suggestions the territories might be granted extra seats in the Senate, but the territories are not in fact under-represented in either house.

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A lot of news at the moment concerning matters pertinent to this blog, with Christian Porter announcing yesterday he will not contest the election, Greg Hunt universally expected to follow suit with today’s last parliamentary sitting day of the year, and voter identification legislation scuttled after a deal between government and opposition.

• Annabel Hennessy of The West Australian reports a nominee has already come forward for Liberal preselection in Christian Porter’s loseable northern Perth seat of Pearce: Miquela Riley, a former naval officer and current PwC Australia manager who performed a thankless task as the party’s candidate for Fremantle at the March state election. Other potential nominees identified are Libby Lyons, former director of the Australian Government’s Workplace Gender Equality Agency, and Alyssa Hayden, who held the state seat of Darling Range from 2018 until her defeat in March and was earlier in the Legislative Council from 2009 to 2017.

• The most widely named successor to Greg Hunt as Liberal candidate for the Victorian seat of Flinders is Zoe McKenzie, an NBN Co director and former chief-of-staff to Abbott-Turnbull government Trade Minister Andrew Robb. The Age reports other potential starters are Mark Brudenell, chief-of-staff at Latitude Financial and former adviser to Malcolm Turnbull as both Communications Minister and Prime Minister, and Simon Breheny, former Institute of Public Affairs policy director.

• A deal between government and opposition has resulted in the abandonment of plans to introduce voter identification at the coming election. In exchange, Labor has agreed to support a bill that will halve the expenditure threshold at which third parties will have to file disclosure returns, over the objections of critics who argue the associated red tape will discourage charities from political campaigning. It appeared unlikely the voter identification bill would have gained the required votes in the Senate, with Jacqui Lambie having announced yesterday she would vote against it.

• Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats are pursuing a High Court action against recently enacted legislation that will prevent parties other than the main ones having words like Liberal and Labor in their name. Absent a favourable outcome, this will presumably result in formal challenges against the Liberal Democrats and the New Liberals, the latter of whom have withdrawn their application to change their name simply to TNL.

This week should see the fortnightly federal voting intention poll from Roy Morgan, the regular fortnightly Essential Research poll which is scheduled to feature neither voting intention numbers nor leadership ratings, and possibly the more-or-less monthly Resolve Strategic poll from the Age/Herald. Until then:

• Tom McIlroy of the Financial Review reports the Centre Alliance will push for an inquiry into the government’s voter identification bill when it comes before the Senate, to which it will presumably progress swiftly after coming before the House of Representatives today. Three further electoral bills come before the House on Tuesday: to reduce the thresholds beyond which those who spend money on their own election campaigning are required to lodge annual disclosures; to provide for measures deemed desirable under emergency conditions such as pandemics, including greater flexibility with postal and pre-poll voting; and to require security assessments and such like for the computer systems and software used to conduct the Senate count. Two notable bits of detail include bringing forward the deadline for receipt of postal vote applications from the Wednesday before the election to the Tuesday, and requiring the Australian Electoral Commission to publish the Senate vote data files within seven days of the return of the writs, having presumably been allowed to play it by ear in the past.

• A preselection vote on Saturday to determine the successor to Victorian Liberal Senator Scott Ryan, both in respect to the vacancy arising from his imminent retirement and the third position on the Coalition ticket at the election, was won by Greg Mirabella, Wangaratta farmer and husband of Sophie Mirabella. James Campbell of the Herald Sun reports Mirabella won the final round by 165 votes to 141 over Simon Frost, staffer to Josh Frydenberg and former state party director. Incumbent Sarah Henderson comfortably won the ballot for the top position, with the second reserved for Bridget Mackenzie of the Nationals. Other unsuccessful candidates were Emanuele Cicchiello, former Knox mayor and deputy principal at Lighthouse Christian College, and Ranjana Srivastava, an oncologist who also contested the preselection for Casey.

• A dispute within the New South Wales Liberal Party affecting preselections for Warringah, Hughes, Gilmore, Eden-Monaro, Dobell and Parramatta reached a new pitch at a meeting of its state executive on Friday night, which resolved to close nominations on December 3 with plebiscites likely to follow in February. However, James Massola of the Sydney Morning Herald reports the issue could be settled next week by a deal between Scott Morrison and Dominic Perrottet, potentially through the federal executive choosing candidates with plebiscites. Broadly speaking, the dispute pits centre right powerbroker Alex Hawke against the combined forces of the moderates and the hard right, with the former wanting candidates to be promptly installed by the state council and the latter wanting party plebiscites at the cost of delaying the process until February. One aspect of this is that Scott Morrison, who is close to Hawke, is backing state MPs (specifically Holsworthy MP Melanie Gibbons run in Hughes and Parramatta MP Geoff Lee’s for the federal seat of the same name) for preselection in federal seats while Dominic Perrottet, from the hard right, would sooner avoid the resulting state by-elections.

• Dominic Perrottet’s concerns apparently do not extend to the done deal of Bega MP Andrew Constance contesting preselection for Gilmore. However, Constance’s field of competition has now expanded to include Jemma Tribe, a charity operator and former Shoalhaven councillor, and Stephen Hayes, a former RAAF officer and staffer to Christopher Pyne. They join Shoalhaven Heads lawyer Paul Ell, who by all accounts has strong support in local branches, while Constance is favoured by Alex Hawke and the centre right.

• Sharon Bird, who has held the Illawarra seat of Cunningham for Labor since 2004, has announced she will retire at the election. With the seat seemingly the preserve of the Right faction, candidates to succeed her reportedly include Misha Zelinsky, Fulbright scholar and assistant national secretary of the Right faction Australian Workers Union, who aborted a planned challenge to Bird’s preselection before the 2016 election; Alison Byrnes, an adviser to Bird; and Tania Brown, Wollongong councillor and an administrator at the University of Wollongong.

• Labor’s candidate for north coast New South Wales seat of Page, which was held by Labor through the Rudd-Gillard period but now has a Nationals margin of 9.4%, is Patrick Deegan, who works for a domestic violence support service and also ran in 2019.

The Age/Herald has published its latest monthly federal voting intention poll from Resolve Strategic, with better results for Labor than the last two: the Coalition is down two to 37%, Labor is up three to 34%, the Greens are up one to 11% and One Nation is down one to 3%. This comes out at roughly 51-49 in favour of Labor on 2019 election preferences. The breakdowns provided for the three largest states have it at about 50-50 in New South Wales and Queensland and 52-48 to Labor in Victoria. Scott Morrison’s personal ratings show a combined very good and good result of 47% (down two) and a combined poor and very poor result of 43% (down two), while Anthony Albanese is respectively on 30% (down one) and 41% (down five). Morrison’s lead as preferred prime minister is little changed at 44-26, compared with 45-26 last time.

Also out yesterday was the regular fortnightly Essential Research poll, which includes approval ratings for the state Premiers, based on small sub-samples from the relevant states – although these have been juiced up in this survey for Western Australia and South Australia. This provides the first numbers first published for Dominic Perrottet, at 47% approval and 28% disapproval from a sample of 352. Daniel Andrews is at 52% approval and 40% disapproval from a sample of 275; Annastacia Palaszczuk is at 66% approval and 27% disapproval from a sample of 217; Mark McGowan is at 82% approval and 13% disapproval from a sample of 441; and Steven Marshall is at 61% approval and 27% disapproval from a sample of 443.

The regular question on the federal government’s handling of COVID-19 records one-point increases in both the good and poor ratings, to 46% and 31% respectively. The good ratings for the state governments are 57% for New South Wales (up two), 43% for Victoria (down three), 59% for Queensland (down nine), 78% for Western Australia (down two) and 66% for South Australia (down one), from the same sample sizes as noted in the previous paragraph. The poll also records what is no doubt a pandemic-induced slump in the view that immigration is too high, at 37% compared with 56% in January 2019, although too low is only up from 12% to 16%. There are further questions on immigration, as well as climate policy, in the full release. The poll was conducted Wednesday to Sunday from a sample of 1781.

Also out recently are two localised polls from Redbridge Group, one targeting the Perth seat of Swan, which the Liberals hold on a post-redistribution margin of 3.2%. Consistent with other polling showing a swing to Labor approaching 10% in the state, the poll has Labor on 43% (33.2% in 2019), Liberal on 32% (44.7%), the Greens on 10% (12.3%), the United Australia Party on 6% (1.8%) and “a local independent” on 9%, if responses to a forced-response follow-up for the undecided are included. A very great deal of further detail from the poll is available in the full release, including state voting intention results that suggests Mark McGowan’s government is at least as popular now as when it annihiliated the opposition in March. The poll was conducted by automoted phone polling from October 9 to 12 from a sample of 814.

The other Redbridge poll targeted the three Sydney electorates of Banks, Lindsay and Macquarie, and it has the striking finding that the United Australia Party is on 19%, with Liberal on 32%, Labor on 31% and the Greens on 9%. The pollster reports this as converting to 53-47 to Labor, though I am unclear as to how this was determined as there does not appear to be a full release of results as there is with the Swan poll. The combined result in these seats at the 2019 election was Liberal 47.3%, Labor 36.8%, Greens 6.6% and United Australia Party 3.1%, with the Liberals on 53.7% and Labor on 46.3% two-party preferred.

The other big electoral story of the hour was yesterday’s revelation that the federal government will shortly introduce a voter identification bill to parliament, which has naturally caused the spectre of Republican-style voter suppression to be invoked. However, the bill seems to follow the model followed by the Newman government in Queensland at the 2015 election, which was promptly repealed by the new Labor government, and I have always been of the heretical view that this did little harm and perhaps even a degree of good with respect to public confidence.

According to The Guardian, acceptable forms of identification will include “passports, drivers licences, proof of age cards, and student cards, as well as government-issued documents including Medicare and pensioners cards, and recent documents from financial institutions and utility companies”. Furthermore, those without identification will still be able to cast a declaration vote, to be admitted to the count once it is established that the voter’s name has not already been marked off. Nonetheless, Antony Green notes that the relative ease with which this was administered in Queensland was aided by its lack of an upper house, whereas it is likely to mean delays in counting when two ballot papers are involved.

Both Labor and the Greens immediately announced their opposition to the bill. One Nation, however, will presumably be on board, having earlier introduced voter identification legislation of their own in response to delusions endemic on their end of the ideological spectrum. That means the government will need to win over one or more of Jacqui Lambie, Rex Patrick and Stirling Griff.

The government introduced four electoral reform bills to parliament yesterday. Antony Green offers a good overview that notes what’s missing from the recommendations of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters’ inquiry into the 2019 election: the particularly contentions measures of voter identification and optional preferential voting, and arrangements for handling an election during the pandemic, which will presumably have to follow at a later time.

To summarise:

• The most striking is a bill to triple the number of members required of a registered political party to 1500 and to disallow the registration of parties whose names contain, with limited exceptions, words already used in the name of a pre-existing party. The former requirement does not affect the significant exception that exists for parties with seats in parliament, as applies to Katter’s Australian Party, the Centre Alliance and the Jacqui Lambie Network (Antony Green notes it also helped Fraser Anning’s Conservative National Party to both register and blag free ABC air time before the last election, not that this proved notably helpful to them). Parties will have three months after the passage of the bill to either pass muster or face deregistration, in which case they will not be identified on ballot papers or eligible for public funding. This would appear to be one in the eye for the Liberal Democrats, who this week confirmed Campbell Newman as their Senate candidate in Queensland.

• A bill encompassing “counting, scrutiny and operational efficiencies” gives effect to JSCEM’s recommendation that the pre-poll voting period should be cut from three weeks to two, which the Coalition, Labor and Greens members were all on board with. It also allows for pre-poll votes to be pre-processed in the two hours before polls close so the actual counting of the votes can begin without delay, which should address an issue of recent election nights in which election day booths are mostly in by 8pm but pre-poll voting centres often aren’t until 11pm to midnight. Similarly, the bill allows for postal votes to be pre-processed so more of them can be counted on Sunday.

• An “electoral offences and preventing multiple voting” bill includes a measure to prevent those suspected of multiple voting from persisting in doing so, and one to target behaviour the Liberal Party has complained of being subjected to by GetUp! activists, specifically “violence, obscene or discriminatory abuse, property damage and harassment or stalking”. Former electoral administrator Michael Maley wonders if the latter measure might capture heckling or asking difficult questions; electoral law expert Graham Orr notes it brings the activities of FriendlyJordies to mind.

• A bill to lower the threshold for which third parties campaigning at elections will have to register as political campaigners, requiring them to file annual financial disclosure returns. The current six-figure threshold does seem on the high side, but the cause of “public confidence in Australia’s political processes” would surely be better served by lowering the threshold for declaring donations to political parties.

Other news:

• The Australian Electoral Commission has published the full panoply of reports and data relevant to the now finalised federal redistributions of Victoria and Western Australia. Antony Green has worked his estimated margins into a finalised 2022 federal election pendulum.

• Rachel Siewert, Greens Senator for Western Australia, announced on social media this week that she will resign her position in the Senate next month. This will allow the party’s preselected lead Senate candidate, Dorinda Cox, to build her profile ahead of next year’s election, a common practice for the Greens.