Wednesday, 9 September 2026

 Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (10:33): You will be shocked and blown over to hear that I am not talking on one of the reports related to gambling, but I am indeed this time talking about voting centre accessibility – an inquiry that was delivered just yesterday to this Parliament by the Electoral Matters Committee. It speaks to a foundational need for our community and our democratic institutions of being able to access having a vote – probably the most important thing that we can do here and certainly the most important thing that the Victorian Electoral Commission can do. Their guiding principle needs to be the accessibility of people who turn up to vote or find another way to vote, which they should be entitled to. I say very firmly that people with disability should have access to the vote, just like everybody else across our community. I call on the VEC to take this report very seriously. I know they have started to implement some of the things that have been recommended here and deal with some of the findings here, but I would like to see as much of that incorporated into this election cycle.

Certainly we know exactly when the election will be in 2030 and we know exactly when the next 10 ‍elections will be in Victoria, so the VEC has ample opportunity to get on with the job, to listen to the findings and the recommendations from this report and to deliver those recommendations and findings, because fundamentally this goes to the heart of our democracy.

I want to talk a little bit about what is set out in the executive summary first:

To better support people with disability, the VEC needs to take a new approach. This should involve:

•   changing how the VEC thinks about accessibility –

it is not just having wheelchair ramps into a voting centre, although, as we found, there are precious few of those –

•   improving planning with specific actions and targets

•   properly evaluating new initiatives and ongoing practices

•   publicly reporting on its efforts and their effectiveness.

I am going to come back, in a few moments, to some of the guiding principles that we set out in this report, but I do want to say that I feel a little like I stole somebody’s homework and just put my name on it as the new chair of the Electoral Matters Committee, because I got to this committee when this report and the public hearings had already been completed. I want to thank, firstly, Dylan Wight, the member for Tarneit, who brought forward this report and guided these public hearings through their processes, and secondly, the deputy chair, the member for Mornington, not only for a wonderful effort around the international aspects of this report but also for his extraordinary effort on grammar and spelling. He did a deep dive on that and really helped out our committee in that regard, so I do want to thank the member for Mornington in a genuine, appreciative way. I also thank, from the other place, member for Western Victoria Jacinta Ermacora, David Ettershank from Western Metropolitan, Dr Sarah Mansfield from Western Victoria, Evan Mulholland from Northern Metropolitan Region and Lee Tarlamis OAM from South-Eastern Metropolitan Region for their contributions but also members from this place the member for Lowan and the member for Preston. Each member of this committee, I could tell straightaway, has made a deep contribution.

It was interesting, as I sat down with some of the team from the Electoral Matters Committee afterwards, how they talked about this being actually one of the reports that they really loved being involved in and said that it opened their eyes to some of the challenges for people accessing the vote. From the secretariat I want to thank Dr Christopher Gribbin, Aileen Clarke, Dr Chiara De Lazzari, Sarah Catherall and Nathan Chan Yam. This report, as everybody who has been on a committee knows, would not have happened without their efforts. I want to thank them for those efforts in bringing this report together.

In the 45 seconds I have left, a new approach should incorporate three new guiding principles. The first is an accessibility-first approach, where systems are designed to be accessible by default wherever possible. Accessibility should not be an add-on to a system that was designed without accessibility in mind. The second is a whole-of-journey approach. Accessibility should be considered across the whole voting experience. This includes finding information about an election, travelling to a venue, waiting in line, voting and leaving a voting centre. Finally, understanding the diversity of disability, planning must consider the many types of disability and lived experiences. We should listen to people with lived experiences. That is the first recommendation of this report. I encourage people to read this report.