Wednesday, 30 October 2024

 Nick STAIKOS (Bentleigh) (10:32): I rise to make a few brief remarks on the Electoral Matters Committee report on the conduct of the 2022 Victorian state election. I particularly want to focus on pre-poll, and I think back to what pre-poll started as. I remember the first time I ever heard of pre-poll was 20 years ago during the 2004 federal election, in the electorate of Hotham, which was held by Simon Crean. I got a call from the member for Oakleigh, who at the time was Simon Crean’s campaign manager, and he said, ‘Can you staff the pre-poll booth tomorrow?’ My response was ‘What’s pre-poll?’ Anyway, he gave me the address and said, ‘Be there at 9 am. Bring your own deckchair.’ I turned up at this church hall in Cheltenham. I was there from 9 am to 5 pm with a lovely lady from the Liberal Party, who I still bump into from time to time. We spoke for the entire day, and I reckon we saw 20 voters over the entire day – and certainly not a candidate. That is what pre-poll was back then. It has since evolved into something very, very different.

While I think we need to make voting as accessible as possible, because we have seen the sort of voter suppression in the United States which is very alarming, I also think that it is time to think about how we could possibly make pre-poll work a bit better. I am of the view that 12 days of in-person voting is just too much. I think it is unnecessary. We can make the postal voting system work better. We conduct the local government elections entirely by post, and in my view that has worked pretty well and has made local government elections very accessible. But I think the fact that on day one of pre-poll at the 2022 election, when we turned up that morning and, at least in Bentleigh’s case, there were no ballot papers yet so we could not actually start pre-poll, just goes to show that we are probably starting the early voting period a bit too early. So I actually support the recommendation in this report to shorten the pre-poll voting period to a period of seven days.

The other thing that I wish to touch on is poor behaviour at the pre-poll centres. I am really, really pleased to see some recommendations in the report about addressing poor behaviour. In my case it was poor behaviour by supporters of far-right candidates, but in other parts of Melbourne it was poor behaviour by supporters of far-left candidates as well. There are both extremities, and I have heard from members about both extremities. In my case at the pre-poll centre in East Bentleigh there was a man on one occasion wearing a T-shirt advertising a far-right independent candidate from a neighbouring seat, who just spent 2 hours not even handing out any how-to-vote cards, just hurling abuse at me and my supporters. He was not moved on by Victorian Electoral Commission (VEC) staff. That is not on, regardless of which candidate or which volunteers it is directed at. I am glad that there is a heavy emphasis in this report on how we might address that behaviour.

The only other thing that I would mention is the locations of the pre-poll centres. My electorate has eight suburbs, and both pre-poll centres were in the one suburb. My electorate starts at North Road, Ormond, and it ends in the south at Centre Dandenong Road, Cheltenham, yet both of the pre-poll centres were in East Bentleigh, which is in the north of my electorate. I think that just speaks to the haste with which the VEC has to get these things together and make arrangements for elections, and I would like to see a little bit more effort go into ensuring that pre-poll centres are located in the best possible way to make them as accessible as possible for our local communities. I commend the committee on this report, particularly the chair, the member for Kororoit.