Page 377 - Week 01 - Thursday, 16 February 2012
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One example is the proposal to update the list of electors available to Electoral Commission staff to include date of birth and gender. This is designed to assist staff on election day who mark off names as people vote, but in the interests of privacy this extra information will not be available to candidates. This amendment is an example of the relatively small but important efficiencies gained through the bill.
The bill was examined by the justice and community safety committee, who recommended that it be supported, subject to the removal of those clauses that were tied to the casual vacancies bill which will not be pursued by the government. The attorney will be seeking to remove the relevant clauses, and the Greens support their removal. The attorney has outlined the reasons in detail previously and I do not propose to go over the ground again. I would like to conclude by simply saying that the Greens support the removal of these clauses.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.47): The Liberal opposition will be supporting this bill which gives effect to a number of recommendations made by the ACT Electoral Commission in its report on the 2008 election. There are two elements of the bill which seek to restrict the number of candidates in a party to the number of seats available and to disqualify all candidates if a political party nominates more candidates than there are available seats. We would not have supported these elements and I note the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety, in its inquiry into this bill, recommended that the Assembly not support those elements.
I also note that the scrutiny of bills committee had concerns about these elements from a human rights viewpoint. Interestingly, the attorney did not accept the scrutiny committee’s arguments. He took the view that the onus should be on the parties to lodge accurate and timely nominations and that there are 24 hours between the time of nomination and the declaration of candidates to enable any corrections to be made.
Fortunately, the government will seek to omit these nonsense clauses from the bill so that it will not have to endure the embarrassment of having them voted down. It would have been yet another embarrassment for an attorney to add to his long and growing list of getting things wrong. I am told, though, that, far from recognising this nonsense, the government is claiming that it must omit the clauses because its casual vacancies bill will not be debated.
Apart from those matters, this bill does a number of other things. It lowers the age for provisional enrolment from 17 years to 16 years. I note the commonwealth made the same change in 2010. This means that young people can register two years before they reach voting age. This has two benefits. First, it provides a better process for a more up-to-date electoral roll by the time of elections; and, second, it raises the awareness among young people of a political process which we enjoy in our democracy.
The bill also enables the return of a candidate’s deposit to the person who paid it or to the person authorised by the person who paid it. The amendment brings us in line with commonwealth law, thus providing better consistency across jurisdictions.
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