The Howard Government has developed the Hawke-Keating tricks of taking advantage of incumbency into an art form. However, its latest effort — in electoral law — might well backfire, just as one of Labor’s did.
As soon as it got its hands on a Senate majority, the Howard Government moved with indecent haste to push through its electoral changes which it has mendaciously called “Electoral Integrity” Acts. They became law earlier this year.
This week former Electoral Commissioner Colin Hughes and academic Brian Costar launched their book, Limiting Democracy, (UNSW Press and Australian Policy Online), in which they show how the changes reverse the direction of a century of democratic improvement in Australia.
But first some history. Labor’s 1983 changes definitely favoured Labor, but mostly because they removed existing advantages for the Coalition, particularly unequal seats.
The slightly tricky change was above-the-line voting in the Senate. Sure, something had to be done about voting papers with up to hundred, or even more candidates, which had to be ordered by voters in order to cast a valid vote.
But Labor’s solution, on its face, was to give more power to the Labor Party. Voters only had to put a 1 next to a party above the line. Thereafter all the preferences were looked after by the backroom party boys who determined the preferences that such a vote would be deemed to have made, right down to the last candidate.
The theory that was Labor had a greater proportion of semi-literate and semi-numerate people who could not number all the squares. The simple 1 above the line would save those votes.
Alas for Labor, many voters thought they could do the same thing in the House of Representatives, and the informal vote shot up, to Labor’s cost.
Even later, at the 2004 election, the system bit the hand that invented it as the backroom boys were too smart by half and the preference deals resulted in the election to the Senate of Family First’s Steve Fielding whose party received less than 2 per cent of the vote, rather than a Labor candidate, Democrat or Green.
Fielding often has the balance of power in the Senate.
Perhaps the most significant of the Howard changes is the closing of the electoral roll on the day the writs for the election are issued, eliminating the seven-day grace period to get on the roll.
In the past as many as 300,000 voters – mainly first-time voters – enrolled in that week. The theory is that the vast majority of first-time voters are young people and young people are more likely to vote Labor, so Howard wants to disenfranchise them.
The Government argues that the late rush could result in vast fraud. But Hughes and Costar point out that there is simply no evidence for this. To the contrary, there is ample evidence from past elections that late enrolments are overwhelmingly regular and no more irregular than ordinary mid-term enrolments.
You see, the Electoral Commission checks enrolments and checks votes at elections. If in any electorate there are more instances of multiple voting or irregular voting than the difference between the winning and losing candidates, the losing candidate can take the matter to the Court of Disputed Returns and get an order for a new election. Despite the closeness of Australian elections such events are extremely rare, especially at Federal level.
In short, the Government’s assertion that upon the calling of an election, fraudsters see it as an opportunity to rig the result is a proven concoction.
Co-author Costar used the word “mendacity” at the launch. In short, lies.
But I think it might backfire. True, younger people are more likely to vote Labor, according to polling. And the newly disenfranchised are nearly all young people. But the newly disenfranchised are not a random sample of young people. It may well be that the sort of young people who are too lazy, indifferent, or ignorant to get on the rolls are more likely to vote Coalition.
They might be Howard battlers. They might be from the bush. They are not likely to be radical, politically passionate, leftie, active university students and others who are champing at the bit to vote.
It may well be that the 300,000 people off the roll are more likely to vote Coalition than Labor.
And who knows how the newly disenfranchised prisoners might have voted. The Government does not even argue this one. As Costar said, go into any pub and the punters will say prisoners should not have the right to vote. So much for rehabilitation.
The other backfire might come with the redistribution. The National Party made an enormous amount of noise about “rural representation” when it thought one of its NSW seats – Gwydir — might go. But after the major parties put in their objections and the boundaries were changed again we did not hear a squeak out of the Nats when the rural seat of Calare was hacked about – because it was held by Independent Peter Andren. “Rural representation” was of no matter.
The result is that Gwydir goes in name only. In fact it survives as the seat of Parkes without the city of Parkes. And the old seat of Parkes survives as the new seat of Calare. Leave aside names, it is most of the old seat of Calare that goes – partly to Mitchell — under the weight of major-party submissions to the Electoral Commission. Andren has to find a new home.
It would be highly entertaining if, far from eliminating Andren through dilution of his vote, they have managed to spread both his vote and influence and not only he, but a couple of other linked independents found a new homes and independents took all three of the new seats of Calare, Parkes and Mitchell.
The other backfire could be that the stated aim of eliminating electoral uncertainty by wiping out enrolments close to the election had the opposite effect because it spawned constitutional challenges – weak as our constitution is on spelling out rights such as the right to vote.
The Howard Government’s electoral tampering along with other diminution of human rights illustrates again the need for a constitutional bill of rights to guarantee a fair electoral system.
That would be the biggest backfire of all – that the flagrant tampering with people’s rights gives rise to moves to enshrine rights in the Constitution so that Governments (Coalition and Labor) cannot take them away.
I want to see the expression of the face of the first outraged Tory who is denied the vote because an election was called before he got around to changing his address on the electoral roll and John Howard removed the usual seven days’ grace period.