Parliamentary Committees (Electoral Laws and Practices Committee) Amendment Bill
18/09/2014
The Hon. K.L. VINCENT: I will speak just briefly today to say that I support the second reading of the Parliamentary Committees (Electoral Laws and Practices Committee) Amendment Bill, and I start by saying that I indeed echo the words and the sentiments of a number of my parliamentary colleagues who have raised the idea that it is absurd that this should be a paid committee or indeed that any committee of the parliament should be paid.
Imagine going into a deli to order a sandwich only to find that you have paid not only extra for the extra ingredients you wanted in the sandwich but also a fee for the person to put those ingredients in place. That might sound like a ludicrous example, and perhaps that is because it is, but I am sure that it sounds just as ridiculous to everyone out there that we are paid extra to do what should be a run-of-the-mill part of our job. So, I certainly agree with those comments.
There are many features of our electoral system that need to be investigated and reviewed following each election. The areas needing review relate not just to the endless diatribe we hear debated by the major parties—that is, which party received which percentage of the two-party preferred vote. It is a very narrow view from which to decide whether or not an election is fair. What Dignity for Disability is more concerned about is not who gets the spoils of office necessarily, as the Liberal or Labor party in this state seem to be very much focused on, but instead the impact our state elections every four years have on the people of South Australia.
Will the election of this MP or that party result in the most vulnerable members of our society having their voice heard in our democracy? Will people with a disability be able even to vote equitably? We need to remember that at this point only two-thirds of our polling booths are accessible to people with physical disabilities, and in South Australia the requirement to mark the ballot paper with a pencil means that blind and vision-impaired voters cannot have a secret vote, such as might be achieved if they were able to vote over the phone.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that people with borderline and mild intellectual disability are either discouraged from voting or no-one ever supports them to enrol to vote if that support is what they need; therefore, they are further disenfranchised. All these issues need to be investigated very seriously, and I hope that this committee will examine these matters with the attention they deserve. It is also a consideration that 30 per cent of the electors choose to vote for someone in other than the old parties. Non-major parties do not get 30 per cent of the seats in parliament. Is this a fair operation of democracy, you might ask? When might we get proportional representation, particularly in the House of Assembly?
We also need to look at other issues of representation within our parliaments. Why do we have fewer women in parliament than we did in 2013 and, indeed, fewer women in parliament than countries such as South Sudan—a country where you are more likely to die in childbirth than to complete your education? The ratio now stands at women comprising less than 25 per cent of the parliament, despite the fact that we make up 51 per cent of the South Australian population.
What about young people; people with disabilities; Indigenous South Australians; people born outside Europe, Australia or New Zealand; people who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, or otherwise queer; or people from low socioeconomic backgrounds? People in any or all of these categories are a rarity in our parliaments. There are very few from all these categories.
We need to look at how accessible our electoral system is to all South Australians in terms of the running of parliament for all South Australians of voting age. On the matter of amendments, I currently indicate that I support the Hon. Mark Parnell’s amendment, as I have said, but I need to consider those that have been filed by the Hon. Stephen Wade a little further.
