Page 1239 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 30 May 2007
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have held for long periods of time. It is almost as though they want to hark back to those days in the future. You have to own property; you have to have property entitlement. Why should you have to have property entitlement? Why should you have to own a vehicle? All of these things are incredibly bad.
I commend Ms MacDonald on bringing this motion to the attention of the Assembly. I draw to the attention of those members opposite significant concerns raised with these proposals.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.45): Mr Speaker, yet again we have before us a motion from Ms MacDonald that really lacks intellectual substance. The whole case is predicated on the words “may”, “could”, “potential” and “likely”. This place has placed a great deal of store over a great deal of time in early intervention: get in early, get people to do things correctly, make sure you get it right, give people time. That is what the federal government have done. They have come up with a system. They have said, “Yes, we are going to tighten up the time frames at the end of the process, but we are going to be ahead of the game.”
The irony is that we are discussing this motion in Enrol to Vote Week. Yes, in the federally funded, federally advertised and federally rolled out Enrol to Vote Week, we are discussing a motion saying that it is going to be hard to vote. We had Mr Corbell saying, “Why should these people be denied the right to vote?” Nobody is being denied the right to vote. We are asking them to get on the roll through a different process, and processes change all the time. The stench of electoral corruption is often attached to the Labor Party. I think of Mike Kaiser and the report recently in Queensland and of the things Peter Beattie said after the 2000 election. Perhaps we should be tightening things up.
For those who can vote and are eligible, the process is not onerous. That you have to produce some ID as to who you are to get on the electoral roll does not seem to be a great hurdle. If you want to get a passport, it is much harder than that. If you want to get a Medicare card, it is much harder than that. All we are simply asking is that you show some ID so that we can get the roll right. That, Mr Speaker, is not an unreasonable process.
The great fear that is trotted out is that there is the potential to disenfranchise young people. I understand that members of this place will be going to schools—I think I am lined up to go to a school in Brindabella—to encourage young people to vote. So there we are doing our civic duty as MLAs. Federal members, no doubt, will be out there in their schools with the forms and saying, “Sign up now so that we can put you on the roll so that when you become 18 you will be activated.” We are getting out in front of the game, and what do we get from the Labor Party? Again, we get the climate of fear and talk about the importance of a strong electoral system. We have still got a strong electoral system.
As to the direct impact these changes will have on the ACT electoral roll, I waited for a case to be made by Mr Corbell. As he said, we have a fixed date, we know what that fixed date is next year and people have now got until 19 September to enrol. What is the difficulty with that, Mr Corbell? I am sure you will be out there spruiking hard and encouraging people to get on the electoral roll because you agree with the process of
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