Labor members do not support the recommendation of the Committee in this current inquiry.
In its report from the inquiry into the conduct of the 2019 federal election, the Committee recommended:
…that the Candidate Qualification Checklist be revised before the next election to make mandatory the provision of information about the date and country of birth for candidate, their parents and grandparents. Where any of this is not known, a candidate should be required to make a categorical statement that the information is not known. Where exact date is not known for the birth of the candidate, their parent, or a grandparent, an option should be allowed to state the year instead. The AEC should also be required to identify the day on which checklists will be published, when publishing the timeline for an election.
Labor members of the Committee support that recommendation.
The Government’s proposed new checklist goes much further than simply making mandatory the provision of information about the date and country of birth for the candidate, their parents and grandparents.
For example, the proposed new checklist would require candidates to provide information on the periods over which their grandparents and spouse or former spouse held foreign citizenship. This information will often be difficult to ascertain and – in and of itself – irrelevant to whether the candidate is a foreign citizen.
In addition, as the Australian Labor Party has pointed out in its submission, there may be good reasons as to why a candidate may not wish to contact a former spouse to ascertain the required information, including where there has been a history of family violence. Given that the citizenship status of a former spouse will – in and of itself – almost invariably be irrelevant to a candidate’s own citizenship status, requiring candidates to provide this information is not reasonable.
Information provided on the Candidate Qualification Checklist is published on the Australian Electoral Commission’s website. The need to provide assurance to the public about a candidate’s eligibility to nominate for election must be balanced with the need to maintain privacy of candidates and their family members. We also note the privacy concerns raised by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights following its examination of the Government’s Electoral Legislation Amendment (Candidate Eligibility) Bill 2021.
Ascertaining the additional information required by the Government’s proposed new checklist would be unduly onerous for candidates, in particular for independent candidates or those from minor parties. There may also be unintended consequences of discouraging candidates from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds from nominating for election, even where they have no entitlement to foreign citizenship or have renounced it.
It is unclear why the Government is pushing to make these unnecessary changes to the checklist and it is disappointing that Government members of this Committee are departing from the Committee’s previous recommendation on this issue. This is particularly so when the Committee noted that the checklist worked generally well at the 2019 federal election.
Electoral reform should be done in a consultative and considered manner, not rushed through on the eve of an election with an inquiry which was only open for submissions for seven days. The Government should be supporting Australians to participate in our electoral system, not creating barriers to voting and nominating for election.
Senator Carol Brown
Senator Marielle Smith
Mr Milton Dick MP
Ms Kate Thwaites MP