Senate voting proposal avoids telling voters they will be disenfranchised

Another Greens initiative

· The proposed new Senate voting method will ‘wipe out’ minor parties

· but ALP points out cheating re donations to political parties is untouched

· but cheating to get false enrolments onto the Electoral Roll is untouched

· but cheating by multiple voting (18,770 at last election) is untouched

· but Electoral Rolls still in a shambles, as stated by the National Audit Office

Yesterday’s “Matter of Public Importance” (MPI) debate on the government’s new Senate voting method proposal yielded the truth about it and some quotable quotes, according to elections-monitoring group, Australians for Honest Election (AFHE), which warns that all of the big problems in our electoral systems have been ignored while this minor side-issue of Senate voting methods is being pushed forwards.

Senator Bob Day, Family First Party – voting changes a “…death warrant….”

The topic of the MPI was “The rushed changes to voting laws that will extinguish Senate diversity”

ALP Senator Dastyari said, “This is an electoral gerrymander masquerading as reform. Let’s be honest about the result – only 3 parties in the Senate and Xenophon. This is the behaviour of a bunch of schoolyard bullies … Hypocrisy of the Greens … The government wants a more compliant Senate. It’s not about openness and transparency. The introduction of optional preferential voting will result in massive exhaustion of votes.”

Senator Leyonhjelm pointed out the unfairness, “Many Australians feel not represented by major parties. One quarter voted for non-major parties, which led to us having only 11% of the Senate seats … [in future] all of these people who vote for minor parties will see their votes exhaust [over a quarter of votes won’t be counted].”

ALP Senator Conroy said, “This is a deal that will exclude 25% of the voters who don’t want to vote Lib/ALP/Xenophon/Greens. Let’s be clear, the Government and the Greens want to wipe out the cross-benchers; that is the purpose of this Bill.”

Senator Lazarus said, “This dirty deal … wipes out the cross-bench”

Senator Lambie said, “This proposal is a distraction from the important business of the Senate. In all my time, I have never had anybody come into my office wanting changes to the Senate voting method; they talk about jobs, health, medicare etc”

Senator Day said, “The unholy Liberal/ Greens/ National/ Xenophon cartel … has issued the cross-bench with a death warrant”

“Democracy suffers. This organisation’s pleas to the government to fix up the vote frauds, about which we have provided abundant evidence, have been ignored. Instead we get this narrow proposal,” said Lex Stewart, President of AFHE.

“For example, the Audit Office has pointed to huge deficiencies in the AEC and the Integrity of the Electoral Roll (which AFHE has found contains thousands of false enrolments), but there is no proposal to fix these deficiencies,”

Contact: Lex Stewart, President, Australians for Honest Elections Inc. http://www.afhe.org.au