LOCAL GOVERNMENT EDUCATION PROGRAM

Ms PORTOLESI (Hartley) (15:52): Today I rise to discuss the issue of local government voter education, particularly for non-English speaking communities. It is an issue we are facing at the moment in Campbelltown because there is a by-election for the Campbelltown City Council. During the last round of local government elections in 2006, my office was inundated with confused voters requiring assistance to vote (which I was happy to provide), but it is fair to say that these voters were predominantly from a non-English speaking background. They were particularly confounded by the postal voting system which we deal with in local government elections. Of course, many of these voters have grown up overseas under another voting system. They do vary from country to country, but also from state to state and from tier to tier.

For example, a vote in a South Australian state election with only one box numbered with a '1' will count as a valid ticket vote. South Australian local government elections will count the same vote as a valid vote, although it will exhaust once the candidate is excluded or elected during the count. At a federal election, the vote will simply be informal. Thus, it is very understandable that voters can be confused about how to cast a valid vote, even more so when there is a language barrier. Currently, when voters receive their postal ballots for local government elections, information is provided in multiple languages, outlining how they can access material from their local council office in their own language. It also gives them the option of contacting a translation service. I commend this level of support; however, I think it is limited because the onus is on the voter to follow-up that information.

Of course, in state or federal marginal seats (as we would all know in this place) that deficit of information is often rectified by political parties seeking to campaign for each and every vote. Of course, at the last election, I sent out a number of pieces of material in different languages. This has become an expected part of marginal seat campaigning.

However, voter education and access to information should not be determined, in my view, by how safe or marginal an electorate is. Recent studies have clearly shown that the information rate of non-English-speaking voters can be significantly reduced if an extra, tiny effort is made to educate these voters in their own language.

In the 2004 election, the AEC conducted a study in the federal electorate of Port Adelaide, where non-English-speaking voters were identified and sent voting information in their own language. While the overall informal voting rate in the seat of Port Adelaide increased slightly, the booths where these voters were sent voting assistance information in their own language showed a decrease in informal voting of up to 1½ per cent. For instance, the Ferryden Park booth showed a decrease in the informal rate of .29 per cent with 30 per cent of voters receiving an extra letter from the AEC.

Over 70 per cent of voters who voted at the Pennington booth received the information, and the informal rate dropped by 1.48 per cent. This clearly shows that a little bit of information and assistance can be the difference between an informal vote and a valid one. Of course, none of this should be surprising: a well-informed voter is far more likely to be able to cast a valid vote. In this 2004 study, over half the informal ballots resulted from mistakes that can be attributed to a lack of knowledge of the voting system, such as only voting '1' or using a tick or a cross. It is simply not the case that every informal vote is a sign of a desire to cast a deliberately invalid vote.

While results varied from booth to booth, it is clear that the assistance provided by the AEC resulted in fewer voters casting an invalid vote due to insufficient or inaccurate information about the voting system. I believe this problem is magnified when voting is conducted via a postal ballot, as is the case for local government elections. While postal voting has increased the participation rate, I believe it has made it harder for non-English-speaking voters to cast a valid vote. Voters who cast their vote at polling booths are able to ask for assistance from polling booth workers and multilingual voting information is likely to be available.

Following the pilot project in Port Adelaide, at the 2007 federal election, the AEC targeted areas by placing multilingual staff at polling booths with high percentages of ethnic voters. Voting by post does not allow this level of assistance, and I believe that it opens the system to corruption of ballot papers.