Wednesday, 14 August 2024

 Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (10:31): I too rise to speak on the Electoral Matters Committee’s report on the inquiry into the conduct of the 2022 Victorian state election. I will not tell a lie in this place: I have been looking forward to this report for quite a while, as it is always fun to revisit an election, especially an election where our government was actually voted back in by the Victorian people, overwhelmingly so. Despite everything that was thrown at us by those opposite – I would say doing their job during the election – our government once again prevailed.

A member interjected.

Sarah CONNOLLY: You are very welcome. We prevailed, and our vision for the future of this wonderful state was again given the thumbs up by Victorians. As everyone in this place knows, after every election our Electoral Matters Committee go ahead and they hold an inquiry into how our elections are run and managed, and they take on feedback and, most importantly, recommendations about how we can improve these laws to ensure that when we go to the next election, our laws and by extension our democracy are as strong as ever. That is really important.

There is a lot in this report, and I imagine in the other place they will be talking about the recommendations that discuss the upper house voting system, but for me today I want to focus my contribution on the report’s discussion of campaigners, of candidates and, really importantly, our volunteers. I will not mince my words when I say that compared to the 2018 election when I was first elected the 2022 election was a little bit different. To put it bluntly, it was pretty nasty out there on the ground, and this report reflects that. The majority of this nastiness, I am very sad to say, came from campaigners and volunteers on the voting booths, especially during pre-poll. Some of the behaviour that I witnessed during those two weeks was really, really disappointing. In past elections, both state and federal, I found that when you were out on the hustings during pre-poll the environment between volunteers from all parties was mostly quite amicable. In 2018 the Liberal candidate who ran against me was a great fellow, and we spent quite a bit of time listening to music together – we had a boom box there going on. But I do have to say that in the 2022 election things were quite different. Unfortunately not everyone agreed with the sentiment of being amicable that time around.

The report makes a number of suggestions around registering volunteers with the Victorian Electoral Commission and, in addition to this, a potential cap on the number of volunteers at any polling station to a maximum of three. It also recommends that there be an enforceable code of conduct for how volunteers and campaigners conduct themselves at these polling stations, with it suggested that the VEC have the power to remove these volunteers from the stations if absolutely necessary. We like to think that does not actually happen, but I think in the 2022 election we did see that indeed it happens and far more often than we would like. It is really sad that this even has to be considered, quite frankly, but from what I experienced during pre-poll in 2022, these recommendations have been considered for a very good reason.

From my own experience there was one day at one of my electorate’s pre-poll stations in Sunshine, which was located at a little scout hall on normally a really quiet suburban backstreet, and I recall that there were two candidates that had more than a dozen volunteers onsite at any one time. I am sure that any reasonable person would agree this was absolute overkill. There was one party in particular which indulged in this kind of behaviour, and I will not do them the honour of naming them here today; they would probably wear it as a badge of honour. But we all know on this side of the house who they are.

I remember there was this one elderly voter who was walking to the polling station from across the road. Their campaigners did what they had been doing at other polling stations across the west; they swarmed around him as he proceeded to try and walk to the polling booth, and he fell over. He broke his leg. An ambulance had to be called. He was screaming in the middle of the road. He was actually lying in the middle of the road for quite a while because he could not be moved he was in such pain. Luckily, our wonderful paramedics turned up and took good care of him. That should never have happened to him, and if some of the recommendations in this report are accepted and implemented, that will not happen to anyone the future. Remember, not everyone is able to just easily walk to the polling booth. There are elderly and there are disabled people. This man was those two things, and he deserved better. I commend the report to the house.