Parliamentary Electorates And Elections Amendment (Registration Of Parties) Bill

Bill introduced and read a first time.

The Hon. J. S. TINGLE [4.39 p.m.]: I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

There can be no doubt that there is urgent need for reform of the system of electing persons and parties to the Legislative Council. In saying that, I know I
Page 1160
have the unstinted support of the Leader of the Government, whose zeal for reform of this House knows no bounds, and who has recently shown great inventiveness in a move to reform this Chamber. But it has been obvious to me since at least 1996, when I first gave notice of this bill, that the time is at hand when we need to make some changes.

One of the great weaknesses of the electoral system as I see it at present is that there is no barrier to how many parties one person, or one group of people, can set up. The Act requires inter alia, that, to be registered for a periodic election for this House, a party must convince the Electoral Commissioner that it has 200 bona fide members. But the problem is that any one group of 200 people can set up party after party - as many parties as they like - and it is quite clear to many of us that this is to a large degree precisely what happened in the election on 27 March this year; and to a lesser extent in the election in March 1995.

It seems very likely that what we saw in the last election was a massive campaign to "harvest" preferences through a network of interrelated small parties - at least some of those parties being "front"parties - all exchanging preferences, and ultimately reposing them in one or two parties that were behind the whole procedure. Without exhaustive investigations I am certainly not able to say exactly who set up what; but a brief study of the preference flows certainly suggests some likely directions.

On top of that, the unequal result - which saw parties with a handful of votes harvest preferences and succeed in having a candidate elected ahead of parties with many times their primary vote - shows that this intricate network of preference running has, in many cases, effectively disfranchised voters who supported the higher-scoring parties. There were parties with misleading titles, and parties that sounded like other major parties. This, together with an absurd and quite unmanageable ballot paper, led to huge confusion among voters. An example in case is my own party. Many of our supporters were confused by the sudden appearance, just before the election, of something called the Gunowners and Sporting Hunters Party. Nobody had ever heard of it, or knew what it was about, or who was behind it, or where it fitted into the shooting movement. And the fact is that it did not fit in at all.

At the Electoral Commission function to draw positions on the ballot paper, representatives of this front party openly boasted that it had been set up only to divert votes from the Shooters Party. Because it drew position "J" near the top of the ballot paper and the Shooters Party drew position "BZ" right down at the bottom of the ballot paper, many of our intending supporters scanned the paper, saw that party first, and voted for it in the belief, as they told us afterwards, that they were voting for us.

Approximately 25,000 people voted for the Gunowners Party - almost certainly by mistake - and their votes were consequently diverted away from us, and to other parties with which the Gunowners Party exchanged preferences. But I do not intend to dwell on past ambushes - except to point out that the same absurd situation applied in the recent local government elections. As an example, a candidate in Byron Bay who did not even vote for himself and received only one vote was elected to the council on preferences. The preferences came from his running mate. It was coolly explained afterwards that the two planned it that way by running a group ticket designed to do just that.

There are numerous similar examples in both the State and local government elections, and there is no point in tut-tutting about them now. Rather, I believe we have to look forward and bring some balance, proportion and common sense back into the electoral system as it affects this House. I do not believe that the type of change originally proposed by the Treasurer is the right way to go. The problem that arose last March is not related to how this House functions and is constituted. It stems from a loophole in the system of registering parties and the determination of some groups to quite destructively exploit that loophole, create confusion, mislead voters, and distort the outcome of the election.

The creation of a rash of microscopic parties that had no possibility or expectation of election was undertaken deliberately to fragment the vote of the major and non-major parties, in the clear knowledge that fewer people than ever were likely to vote for the major parties. That is precisely what happened. Because many people felt misled and because there was general and understandable anger at the size and unwieldiness of the ballot paper, there was a great excuse for some people and some media - who have no concept of the importance of this Chamber - to call for the Chamber itself to be emasculated. As I said earlier, it is not the make-up of this Chamber that needs reform: rather, the system of registration of parties - or, more particularly, the system of validating the bona fides of parties seeking registration - needs reform.

Although, as I say, I foresaw the possibility of the March 1999 debacle when I first gave notice of this bill in 1996, I certainly could not have foreseen the magnitude of the problem which developed, nor
Page 1161
its catastrophic consequences for electoral democracy. I now believe we need one major and cathartic action to get the system of registration back into skew and to frustrate those who seek to unfairly exploit the system to suit their own ends.

We need a one-off change which will create a new approach to the registration of parties and make it much more difficult for people to create frivolous or mischievous "front parties". I believe that the bill I am now proposing will go a long way towards doing that. The main thrust of the bill is to prevent a group of people forming unlimited numbers of parties for the purpose of aggregating preferences. It also seeks to increase the number of members that a party must have to seek registration, and to make sure that that party retains at least that minimum number of members - to prove it is a viable party.

This bill is designed to raise the bar slightly; not in the dramatic way envisaged by the Treasurer, but just high enough so that bona fide small parties will still have every opportunity of accessing the Parliament, whereas the phoney "front" parties, which merely seek to exploit the electoral law, will be exposed and held back. My proposal is that this legislation will create a one-off change to the system of registration in time for the periodic election in 2003 and will apply to all upper House elections from then on.

The bill proposes that the Act will come into force on 1 January 2001 and require all parties now registered to apply to re-register under the new criteria by 31 January 2001 and set a new qualifying requirement for that one re-registration. The bill will amend the Parliamentary Electorates and Elections Act 1912 to increase, from 200 to 1,000, the number of members a party must have before it can apply for registration.

But there is an important rider to that figure. The Act will require that when a party seeks registration and provides the required 1,000 names, addresses and signatures of electors who are members of the party, the commissioner will have to satisfy himself that at least 75 per cent of the persons on that application have not appeared on any other successful application to register a political party in New South Wales in the past five years.

The purpose of this latter provision is to end the practice of multiple registration applications by one group of people. It allows that a small proportion - 25 per cent of those people - may have been involved with some other previous application. This recognises that some people might have supported the registration of a previous party but later became disillusioned or dissatisfied with that party.

This provision of the bill insists that 75 per cent of those names must be of party members who have not been involved in this process for the past five years. The purpose of specifying five years is to take the exclusive effect of this provision back beyond the four-year span between elections - that is, well beyond the last election. Let me make it clear that this provision does not prevent a person from being a member of more than one party, as some people have claimed. It applies only to people who lend their names to an application to register a party - and provides that they do not do that more than once every five years, if the application is successful.

Obviously, the specific purpose of this bill is to stop the one group of people - 200 under the old Act and 1,000 under my proposed Act - from setting up several parties at the one time, for the one election. The bill also provides that within one year after a periodic election, or at any other time the Electoral Commissioner may decide, a registered party must provide the names, addresses and signatures of at least 1,000 members to prove that it is still a viable and a bona fide party. If it cannot satisfy the commissioner as to this it will be liable to deregistration.

In another proposed and significant change the bill proposes that at the time of this mass reregistration a party already represented in Parliament would still have to produce the required number of names, as well as relying on its parliamentary representation, to ensure reregistration. This is to ensure that members of Parliament do, in fact, genuinely represent a viable party. The bill contains provisions that will make it apply to multiple applications for registration received before the commencement of the Act.

I will now deal with the bill in some detail. Items [1] to [3] of schedule 1 change the definition of "eligible party" in sections 66A, 66D and 66DA of the Parliamentary Electorates and Elections Act 1912. The number of members needed to secure registration of a party is altered from 200 to 1,000 - that is, a party must have at least 1,000 members to qualify for registration. Item [4] inserts new section 66DB, which contains two new subsections. In brief, the new section provides that the Electoral Commissioner shall investigate the application by, in part, checking to see whether any of the electors whose names appear on the application for registration have, in the past five years, had their
Page 1162
names included on another application as a member of a party that was subsequently registered and that, immediately before this new application was made, were still registered. That is the core of the bill.

The thought behind that is that if a person is listed as supporting registration of a new party, while a party whose application they previously supported is still registered, then the possibility of party stacking might arise. This is the whole point of the bill. Item [5] of schedule 1 inserts after section 66G (1) new section 66G (1A). The new section provides that the commissioner, if he finds names on the new application which also appeared on another, must refuse to register the new party if, on counting those names, he finds that more than one-quarter of the members of the party appearing on the new application also had their names on another application any time in the past five years where that party was registered and remains registered.

Item [6] of schedule 1 inserts after section 66H new section 66HA. The new section requires that within one year after a periodic Legislative Council election, or at any other time the commissioner may require, the registered officer of a party must provide the names and addresses of at least 1,000 electors who are members of the party. Under the existing Act the registered officer could, alternately, provide the name and address of any member of Parliament who is a member of the party.

This bill provides that for the purpose of reregistering parties under the new Act, a party would not be able to rely only on the presence of a representative in Parliament but would also have to provide at least the required number of membership details. This would apply only for the purpose of reregistration when the new Act comes into force. Obviously parties which do not have a member in Parliament are not affected by this - it affects only parties that already have representation in Parliament.

If a party already registered and represented in Parliament fails to meet both requirements the Electoral Commissioner may cancel its registration. This is, obviously, to ensure that a party continues to have a reasonably substantial membership, which demonstrates that it is still representative. This bill is silent about the position of Independents, who do not, ostensibly at least, claim to represent a political party. I believe it is outside the scope of the purposes of this bill to try to deal with Independents, but I believe that their position needs to be examined. Item [7] of schedule 1 changes the required number of members from 200 to 1,000.

Item [8] of schedule 1 includes savings and transitional provisions that allow the impediments to registration provided by this bill to apply to persons with multiple party membership between the passing of the bill but before the commencement of the Act. It also allows the commissioner to refuse registration to a party that applied before the commencement of this Act, but whose registration was not finalised before the Act commenced, if that party could not meet the requirements of the bill. However, the commissioner could not cancel registration of a party that was registered immediately before the commencement of the amending Act until a period of 12 months after the commencing of the Act.

Schedule 2 to the bill breaks the nexus between the Parliamentary Electorates and Elections Act 1912 and the Local Government Act 1993. Breaking this nexus means that parties seeking to register for local government elections will still be required to provide the names, addresses and signatures of 100 members - they will not have to provide 1,000 names, as is required for Legislative Council elections. The simple purpose of the bill is to end the rorting of the registration and electoral system that we have seen in the last two elections for this Chamber, and which I believe has brought this Chamber and the system of registration into disrepute and contempt in the community.

The bill is designed to stop the creation of multiple parties by one small group of people and to ensure that only genuine, representative, substantive parties are able to have members elected to this House. I am aware that there is a great deal of discussion going on at present about the need for reform, but I repeat that it has got out of scope and is wrongly targeting the House, not the system of registration for election to the House.

There may very well be a large number of amendments to this bill. But bear in mind that the bill seeks to affect only the methods of registering a political party for elections to this House and does not attempt to change the system of electing candidates to the House in periodic elections. How members are elected is a separate question, and if that system needs to be changed it should be the subject of a separate bill. How parties are registered and how persons are elected to this House are two separate questions, and they need to be dealt with separately.

There are many possibilities. For instance, I know the Greens are advocating a new system of above-the-line preferences, which has merit. If this new system could be introduced without the referendum that would be necessary if a change to the Constitution were required I would probably support it. However, I believe that is a separate issue, outside the scope or intention of this bill.

Page 1163

I believe this relatively simple change, which the Shooters Party is proposing, to the system of qualifying for registration as a party for an election will address and correct the great anomalies which produced the ludicrous position in the March election. We owe it to the electors of New South Wales to reduce the confusion they obviously faced on 27 March, which meant that many of them were unwittingly disenfranchised and directed their vote to places they did not want it to go. I do not pretend that this bill is perfect but, at the very least, it is a start.

I put it on the table, as a framework, a basis for reconstruction of the system, and I invite honourable members to consider whether they believe it is enough or whether it needs adjustment. It is a beginning for something we need to have in place well before the next election in 2003, and I hope it will get things moving. I stress that I have absolutely no idea of the level of support for the bill. I have not sought to canvass support. I hope the Government will support the bill because it does not argue with some of the proposals put forward originally by the Treasurer. I hope the Opposition will support the bill because it certainly does not in any way disadvantage either Coalition party.

I hope the crossbenchers will support the bill because it protects the access to Parliament of bona fide small parties without leaving in place the open slather for the so-called "minnows" - the unrepresentative, knee-jerk parties that infested the last election, blew the ballot paper out of all commonsense size, and angered and confused the electorate. We need to go back to the drawing board to create a system of registration of parties for election to this House that will overcome the tremendous disapproval expressed by the community during the last election. We owe it not just to the community but to ourselves to maintain the status and dignity of the House. This bill will go a long way to producing that result. I commend the bill to the House.

Debate adjourned on motion by Reverend the Hon. F. J. Nile.

Pursuant to sessional orders business interrupted. The House continued to sit.