The Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters has completed its inquiry into the 2022 federal election with a final report that addresses matters not covered in an interim report in June, and expands on some of its conclusions relating to campaign finance, truth-in-advertising laws and Indigenous enrolment. Highlights and observations:
• The most interesting recommendation is that Senate representation for the two territories should be doubled from two seats to four. In terms of representation per capita, this would elevate the Australian Capital Territory from the fourth-best represented jurisdiction to third, overtaking South Australia, without disturbing the Northern Territory’s second place behind Tasmania. The justification for having the territories at the top end of the scale is the federal parliament’s power to overrule territory legislation, as was done in past times in relation to euthanasia and same-sex civil union laws. The report quotes Kevin Bonham identifying the realpolitik of the situation in pointing to the high probability that four ACT seats would go three left and one right (it does not seem to have been suggested that the four Senators should be worked into the system of six-year staggered terms applying to the rest of the Senate, in which case only two would be elected at a time, except at double dissolutions). Naturally, the Coalition’s dissenting report gives this recommendation the thumbs down.
• A section curiously named “Proportional Representation – ‘One Vote, One Value'” ends with a recommendation about the tangentially related matter of the size of parliament, which it says should be considered by a separate stand-alone inquiry. Whereas folk wisdom would have it that parliament is a sty with too many snots in the trough, the committee prefers to think that “an increase in the number of electors in a division over time incrementally reduces the value of each elector’s vote and capacity to engage in the political process”. A bigger parliament would count as “one vote, one value” to the extent of ameliorating the over-representation of Tasmania (which has five seats due to the constitutional minimum for the original states) and the Northern Territory (which has two because that’s the way it goes). Here too the Coalition is opposed, noting the lack of a government mandate and the existence of a “cost-of-living crisis”.
• The committee has at last recommended ending the practice of parties mailing out postal vote applications with their own offices as the return address, allowing them to harvest data before passing the applications on to the Electoral Commission. This has long been held in low regard by everyone but the major parties, but the committee had always found spurious reasons for continuing it. To its great discredit, the Coalition dissenting report objects that the practice is in fact “an extremely useful part of supporting voter turnout”, for which one naively hopes it will cop a bollocking over the coming days in more consequential media outlets than this one.
• The majority report recommends removing the archaic three-day blackout on television and radio at the end of the campaign — but only as an extension of the truth-in-advertising laws recommended by the interim report, presumably on the basis that these would substitute for the blackout’s aim of scotching last-minute misinformation campaigns. The Coalition opposes the former by virtue of opposing the latter.
• Specifically with a view to improving Indigenous enrolment, it is recommended that voters be allowed to enrol at polling booths on election day, as can be done at state level in New South Wales and Victoria. The Coalition dissenting report opposes the idea without troubling to point out any problems with it.
• It is recommended that telephone voting, which is currently provided for blind and low-vision voters, be expanded to encompass those with disabilities or who are located overseas or in remote communities. The Coalition dissenting report seems surprisingly animated in its opposition, arguing the system is insecure and expanding it would impose undue burdens on the AEC.
• In revisiting the recommendations of the interim report, it is recommended that registered charities be exempt from a proposal for caps on donations to anyone involving themselves in the election campaign process. The Coalition protests that this would create “an uneven regulatory playing field” and “a partisan approach to electoral reform”, which I take as an acknowledgement that charities’ campaigns tend to be unhelpful to it.
• The Coalition’s dissenting report says the redistribution process that starts with the determination of state and territory seat entitlements should start three months rather than a year into the parliamentary term, which sounds like a good idea to me but apparently did not find further support.