Electoral (Electronic Documents and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

Mr BOYER (Wright) (17:09): I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise this afternoon to speak and make some brief remarks on the Electoral (Electronic Documents and Other Matters) Bill 2021. Could I please offer my acknowledgment of my colleagues who have spoken before me from this side and who have made many very salient points on the changes being attempted in this bill.

It is a very significant undertaking I think whenever members of parliament or the parliament as a whole seek to make changes to how South Australians, or Australians more broadly, vote, the access they have to pre-poll voting and the access they have to enrolling themselves to vote. We need to be very careful indeed because the ramifications can be very serious.

From the outset, can I reiterate and echo the words of the member for Lee about the very proud history of our state in terms of suffrage and giving different people the right to vote and different people the right to stand for election. I certainly do not think that anyone would like to see us in any way walk back those magnificent achievements we have made by making changes to electoral rules that will in some way make it harder for people to enrol to vote and be a part of our democratic process, thereby disenfranchising them from our system altogether.

We all know what an important role voting obviously plays in terms of the basic function of democracy, but I also think it plays an incredibly important role in terms of just keeping people engaged. Suffrage and the right to vote are important for lots of reasons, but if we expect people to pay any kind of attention whatsoever to the business of a house like this or to the business of parliament, then we need to make sure that they have at least some modicum of control or influence over, if not what happens in here, at the very least the people who sit in here and represent them.

Some of these proposals in this bill we have before us now, in terms of narrowing or limiting the period in which people can enrol to vote, run the risk of disenfranchising people generally if they do not get their registration and enrolment done in time. But, probably more specifically, they will have a more acute impact on people who are vulnerable, may not be in a position where they can go through that process all by themselves and need assistance from other people or organisations to make sure they are enrolled to vote. They are most likely the people who will bear the brunt of any change like this.

I may say that of course everyone's vote should be equal, but surely we pride ourselves in this state and in this nation on making sure that some of our most vulnerable people have a voice as well. I think that is something we have done very well in the past, and I would be hugely disappointed, as I know everyone on this side of the house would be, if we in some way agreed to changes in this bill that made it harder for some of those marginalised and disadvantaged South Australians to become enrolled, have a voice and in some way influence and impact our electoral process. That would be a huge disappointment and something that I and of course the opposition would not support.

Without going across covered territory too greatly here, I would like to focus my remarks on changes proposed in this bill to amend section 113 of the original act regarding misleading advertising.

Currently, part 4 of section 113 allows for an application to the Electoral Commissioner to deal with potentially misleading advertisements. This is an issue at the moment that is very close to my heart, having recently been, I think it is fair to say, the victim of some very misleading advertising in the seat of Wright, which I will happily go into in great detail in the time afforded to me. I have to say that the process I had to go through there, and that the Leader of the Opposition had to go through, in terms of getting some kind of satisfaction about a retraction of those hugely misleading comments was laborious, to say the least.

However, with the proposal in this bill to look at, I guess, in some way outsourcing the role of adjudicating on those kinds of misleading advertisements or misleading electoral material to SACAT runs the very real risk of elongating the time period between potentially misleading material being disseminated into a letterbox or a seat (in whatever form that might take), a complaint being made to whatever the complaint body might be (at the moment it is the Electoral Commissioner, but this government is proposing that it will become the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal) and some kind of satisfaction being provided to the wronged party at the end.

No-one likes to be slandered or have words put in their mouth or have their position on any kind of issue misrepresented, but it is true to say that the stakes are very high when it comes to state elections or any kind of election, and if we do have a robust and responsive system to deal with complaints of a nature that could potentially be a determining factor in the result of an election, or at the very least a major influencing factor in the result of an election, we run the very real risk of encouraging parties—and I will say honestly parties of all colours and persuasions—to disseminate material out into the community that is most likely knowingly misleading.

The information that I refer to, which I will go into in a bit more detail in a second, was certainly knowingly misleading. This would in some way encourage parties to do that because they would know that, if it was dropped at the right time in the lead-up to an election campaign, whatever body was reviewing or making a decision about whether or not it was misleading would not have time enough to deal with it and ask for some kind of retraction in time so that whatever damage was done could be undone before people went to cast their vote.

In the case I am about to detail, it was in about September of last year that the matter was brought to my attention by a resident of, at that time, Wynn Vale, a suburb that is holus-bolus in the seat of Wright, always has been and long may it remain. They had received a flyer in their letterbox which said on the front, emblazoned in big type, with a couple of dubious-looking black and white photos of me and the Leader of the Opposition (you do not need to go too far to find photos like that of me; it would not have taken many Google searches), 'Peter Malinauskas, Blair Boyer and the Labor Party have a plan to demolish dozens of homes in your area.' On the other side it spoke about plans that, apparently unbeknownst to the Labor Party, to extend the O-Bahn, I presume from its current point of termination, which is the Tea Tree Plaza Interchange, to the Golden Grove Interchange or Golden Grove Village.

I was, to say the very least, perplexed at the time to learn of this because not only did we not have any plans to extend the O-Bahn and nor had we said so—and in a moment I will get to the source material that the government actually used for these misleading claims—but I was not aware that there was any plan that existed on a potential extension of the O-Bahn that would necessitate the demolition of homes.

One of the most remarkable things about this whole process was that running parallel with the Leader of the Opposition and me trying to get some kind of satisfaction from the Electoral Commission about this misleading statement, we were simultaneously trying to get access to the much lauded—it used to be lauded but it is not spoken about anymore; it is like it never happened—North East Public Transport Study, which I think kicked off not long after this government came to office. It was going to be the panacea for all our public transport woes. In fact, in 2019, when the first iteration of the study hit the then transport minister's desk, he did a very interesting interview with The Advertiser in which he said that the report recommended the extension of the O-Bahn.

Of course, we were very interested to get a copy of this study. At this time, the minister said that it was on his desk and hoped that it would be released soon. That did not happen. We put in an FOI application to get a copy of it. We were denied. We put in an internal review to get a copy of the North East Public Transport Study and we were denied again. We asked for an external review, which, of course, was to the Ombudsman.

I can tell you, having been a part of that process, that those on this side—I am not sure if at that point it was still the former Minister for Transport, the member for Schubert, or whether it was the new Minister for Transport—fought tooth and nail to make sure that that document never saw the light of day. Of course, ultimately they were unsuccessful.

As fate would have it, both the decision from the Electoral Commission about whether or not these documents were misleading and the decision from the Ombudsman to release the North East Public Transport Study to the opposition happened to land on roughly 30 March, which was my birthday, which I thought was fitting and the best birthday present that one could hope to get.

I had a very good read of this enormous document, which outlined a plan to extend the O-Bahn from its current point of termination at Tea Tree Plaza Interchange to the interchange at Golden Grove. It listed the preferred route which was, according to the government's own North East Public Transport Study, to basically follow Dry Creek, which goes up and through a few suburbs, including Wynn Vale and others, to terminate at the Golden Grove Interchange. If this plan was to be pursued it listed that there would be a number of homes that would have to be demolished.

After all that, it became very clear to us that what the Liberal Party of South Australia—to be clear, because that was who authorised the DL-size material that went into letterboxes—accused the opposition, the Labor Party, of, that is, having a plan in terms of extending the O-Bahn and demolishing homes in the area, was not actually our plan at all. We had no plan to do such a thing. The government did. It is in their North East Public Transport Study, which we had to fight tooth and nail to get.

I provide this as an example of an extremely underhanded way of operating, where the government knowingly put in this material falsehoods designed to damage both the Labor Party generally and the Leader of the Opposition and me particularly and disseminated it into thousands of letterboxes across the north-east. I know for certain this material went into letterboxes in the seat of King. I know for certain that this material went into letterboxes in the seat of Wright. The member for Newland would have to tell us whether or not this material went into letterboxes in his seat. I am sure he would know; I just cannot get his attention at the moment. Candy Crush is at a very important stage.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr Cowdrey): Let's continue to address your remarks through the Chair.

Mr BOYER: This material was knowingly put into all those letterboxes, not only in areas which, hypothetically, might be affected by the government's plan to extend the O-Bahn and knock down homes but also in areas that were absolutely nowhere near the route at all that the extension of the O-Bahn would potentially take.

This was really scaremongering at its absolute best. It is one thing to suggest to people whose property might back onto Dry Creek that there is a plan to extend the O-Bahn—which there is; it is the government's plan—and that if it proceeds homes would need to be knocked down and it could be their home by virtue of the fact that they are living beside Dry Creek. It is another thing altogether, I think, to put an inflammatory, incendiary piece of material like that into people's letterboxes to scare them in areas where they are nowhere near a proposed route of the O-Bahn.

Thankfully, finally, we did receive a determination from the Electoral Commissioner. It was, of course, in my opinion the right one, and you would expect me to say that, but I do not think it was a huge surprise. Mind you, the Liberal Party of South Australia fought it for months and months and used as their source material for their claim that 'Peter Malinauskas and Blair Boyer and Labor had a plan to demolish homes in your area to extend the O-Bahn' an interview I did on Pilko's program on FIVEaa months before the material arrived.

I had talked about what would happen in an ideal world, where I am sure people would like to see the O-Bahn extended. I said explicitly in the interview that we were not proposing to do that, and we did not know what the cost would be because we were trying to get hold of the North East Public Transport Study.

The commissioner made a determination and asked the Liberal Party of South Australia to put a retraction into people's letterboxes. They are coming out now in dribs and drabs. Thankfully, I have some very alert people in my electorate, some who were just incensed, to be honest, that they were basically tricked into fearing that their home might be knocked down, only to find that there was no such plan.

We now have the retraction, of course, which is nothing at all like the DL-size material that went into letterboxes in the first place, with the black-and-white graphics of the Leader of the Opposition and me and the huge type exclaiming that we were going to knock down people's homes. This was an A4 piece of paper in about size 10 font with a lot of words on it, where right down the bottom, if you got out the magnifying glass, you might see it was issued by Sascha Meldrum.

The Liberal Party of South Australia might think that this is a clever way to try to get them out of a sticky situation, but I can tell you that the people who have paid attention to this have only become angrier at the fact that not only were they lied to with misleading information but then the retraction came in a way that was clearly designed not to be seen or noticed or read by anyone.

I have a real concern that if the changes that are proposed in this bill come to fruition and complaints like the one that the Leader of the Opposition and I made to the Electoral Commissioner were instead directed to SACAT and potentially languished for an even longer period of time as the parties fought it out, and if this was closer to a state election, the wronged party, whoever that may be, would stand absolutely no realistic chance of receiving any kind of satisfaction from SACAT or the Electoral Commissioner or whoever it might be in time for voters to understand that the piece of material that was released was in fact inaccurate.

The Hon. V.A. Chapman interjecting:

Mr BOYER: The Attorney has awoken from her slumber and has engaged in the debate now.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr Cowdrey): Member for Wright, you will not respond to interjections; the Attorney will not interject.

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN: I do take objection to that and offence, and I would like an apology.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr Cowdrey): Pursuant to standing orders, the Attorney has taken offence at comments made by the member for Wright. Member for Wright, are you happy to withdraw and apologise?

Mr BOYER: I apologise and withdraw, Mr Acting Speaker.

The ACTING SPEAKER (Mr Cowdrey): Thank you. We have 30 seconds left.

Mr BOYER: There are a number of problems with this, but I would say to the voters of South Australia: be very careful about allowing a Marshall Liberal government, which has overseen dirty tactics like the one we have just seen in the north-eastern suburbs, change your electoral rules. It will not result in anything good.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. A. Koutsantonis.