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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (28 November) . . Page.. 3260 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

For some of those questions, we need only go as far as a speech delivered by the Electoral Commissioner to the Australian Political Science Association's politics of the future seminar at the ANU on 5 October this year. The commissioner acknowledged that Internet voting is perhaps technologically feasible now, but went on to say, "It is another thing to say that it would be transparent, secure, accurate, secret, timely, accountable and equitable." The biggest hurdle to Internet voting that the commissioner has identified is security.

As I said earlier, Mr Speaker, we have all heard of the breaches of supposedly secure systems. What would be the consequence of a breach of the voting system? If we became aware of a breach, how would we respond? The commissioner suggests that the response may have to be a new election.

The commissioner addressed, too, the difficulty of ensuring that Internet voters are whom they say they are. Then there is the question of the integrity of the individual vote. How are people voting over the Internet from home going to be protected from coercion by others in their household? What would be the consequences for our community and the democratic process of a shift to Internet voting? Those are important and interesting questions for the future; but they are not questions for debate today on this bill, except to make it clear that this bill is not about Internet voting.

Mr Speaker, this bill is about allowing electronic voting at polling booths, the data entry of paper ballots and electronic counting of votes in elections for the Assembly and in referendums on a trial basis. It is on that basis that the Labor Party will support the bill. I wish the commissioner the best of luck in the development of appropriate systems in relation to which we can all have faith and trust.

MR KAINE (11.29): Mr Speaker, this bill is in many ways groundbreaking. It reaches into the very core of those processes by which all of us have been elected to this place in the past and will change significantly the way that that process operates in the future. I think that we have an obligation to look very carefully at this proposal. I do not know that we should be taking it so readily at face value.

There is so much about this proposal that I do not yet understand from a technical viewpoint and I do not think anybody else in this place does, either; yet we are being asked today to give in-principle support. We were being asked to endorse it fully, but I understand now that consideration of the bill will be deferred after the in-principle stage to allow some amendments to be made to it. We do not know yet how many amendments or how significant those amendments will be, but I think that that indicates that we do need to be very careful.

Events in another part of the world over the last few months have indicated just how careful you need to be. I do not know that we are any smarter than some of the people who have developed and designed systems in the United States, in Florida in particular.

Mr Humphries, in his presentation speech on behalf of the Attorney-General, really said very little. He told us that the government had accepted a recommendation from the Electoral Commissioner to introduce such a system at the next election. There was not a great deal of justification for it. The Electoral Commissioner, for reasons of his own,

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