Preliminary Pages

Chair’s foreword

The Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008 seeks to make a number of changes to the method of voting at Senate elections.  Group voting tickets would be abolished and electors would be required to number at least four preferences when voting above the line in a half Senate election and at least seven preferences in a full Senate election. Ballot papers would exhaust once the last preference expressed by the elector was reached, unlike the current system which requires electors to indicate a single preference above the line with preferences directed to all other candidates in the order indicated on the group voting ticket.

The changes proposed by Senator Bob Brown would potentially affect the nature of Senate representation by reducing the pool of available votes through exhaustion. Other significant repercussions flowing from the amendment include restricting the ability of political parties and candidates to choose the order in which preferences would flow, and impinge on the ability of  voters to both express a valid vote and ‘control’ the flow of their preferences.

The current system, introduced after the 1983 election when almost 10 per cent of ballot papers nationwide were ruled informal, has many advantages —allowing voters to express a single preference (‘1’) with preferences distributed in a sequence established in advance by candidates and political parties and made available in the public domain, whilst still giving those electors who choose to do so the opportunity to mark all candidates in order of preference if they vote below the line.

The relative simplicity of current arrangements needs to be carefully balanced against any change that makes it more difficult for voters to cast a valid vote. With informality at Senate elections declining to an all time low of 2.5 per cent at the 2007 election, the proposed changes risk disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of electors, including the elderly, first-time voters, those with lower levels of education, Indigenous Australians and Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds. For every one percentage point increase in the Senate informality rate, around 130,000 electors are disenfranchised because they have not recorded a valid vote.

The committee has not made any recommendations on the Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008. There are a number of alternate options that require further and continuing discussion.

I would like to thank the Members and Senators of the committee for their contribution to the report and those that participated in the inquiry by making submissions or appearing at the public hearings. I would also like to thank the committee secretariat for their work in preparing this report.

Daryl Melham MP

Chair

Membership of the Committee

Committee Secretariat

Terms of reference

On 14 May 2008 the Senate agreed to the following resolution:

That the Commonwealth Electoral (Above-the-Line Voting) Amendment Bill 2008 be referred to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters as a particular part of its inquiry into all aspects of the 2007 Federal Election for inquiry and report not before June 2009.