Page 1100 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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I ask us all to put ourselves in the shoes of a person who might have used how-to-vote cards throughout their life and is now in a retired persons home. They receive what they think is their Labor how-to-vote card, they walk into the polling booth, and they are confused and dismayed by the inconsistency between the how-to-vote card and the ballot-paper. They are confused, and they do not know what to do. This will lead, undoubtedly, Madam Speaker, to a high informal vote in those institutions. It seems to me that that follows as surely as night follows day.
These people will find it particularly difficult to work out what is going on. This is in an environment where we do not allow canvassing anyway. People are not allowed to go in, for the very reason that party workers have been considered an intrusion in the past. Their presence has led perhaps to some sense of confusion or duress, or the perception of those things, on the part of old people in these places. It is particularly unfortunate that, instead of party workers, we provide some piece of paper which will cause enormous confusion. I am not suggesting that people who are in retirement homes have lost their marbles and are not able to make basic decisions about these things. Unfortunately, however, many of these people will not be in a position, because of their age, to decipher what this new system means and, in particular, to reconcile it with these confusing how-to-vote cards.
I appeal particularly to Mr Stevenson to consider whether it would not be appropriate, even if he is prepared to vote against my amendments to proposed new section 296, nonetheless to support the amendment here and to make these special polling stations - mobile polling stations, as it were - in a sense an environment where there will not be any kind of material or people who will confuse the process and make it difficult for those people to cast formal votes.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (5.32): Madam Speaker, I will be opposing these amendments moved by Mr Humphries. We are now at the beginning of the debate on how-to-vote cards. We will have an extensive debate a little bit further on. At this early stage it is worth noting that these provisions of the Bill allow for the visiting officer to provide how-to-vote cards to voters in aged persons homes, remand centres and so on. The Bill does not require that those people, those voters, have to accept such information. It merely allows the officer in charge of a polling place to take that stuff with him or her, should it be made available. It does not require anybody to accept it. It has been my experience, Madam Speaker, over many, many elections of all descriptions, that the people who run these institutions are often looking for information to assist their residents on polling day. I believe that, if we were, at this point in the Bill, to oppose the capacity to hand out how-to-vote cards, we would be very much disadvantaging a particular group of voters when, in fact, it may not be the will of the Assembly to disadvantage all voters in that way. I will be opposing these amendments proposed by Mr Humphries, and I urge other members to do the same.
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