Voter suppression in Australia

Turns out voter fraud is a HUGE problem in Australia so huge in fact that the Liberal Coalition government have come in to save the day by forcing you to have identification for voting. Except its not a big problem, after the 2016 federal election 18,343 people were asked to explain why their names had been ticked off more than once, there were just 7743 reports of voter fraud and just 65 cases were worth being investigated. Of the 14 million votes cast in that very same election just 65 cases of voter fraud were deemed worth investigating, not exactly enough to swing election and in my opinion not enough to draft legislation that will vastly disenfranchise Indigenous Australians, family violence victims, young, homeless people and itinerant people. If it doesn’t happen often and it will disenfranchise Australians why do the Libs want to legislate this? Because a lot of the communities who vote against the Liberals are those who are being disenfranchised by this legislation, funny that.

At a time where large groups of Australians aren’t voting, we need more democracy and less government interference. In the 2016 election more than 1.4 million people didn’t vote – the lowest turn-out since 1925, as far as I can see the results point to a few key stats about voter disillusionment and voter distrust in the government:
• A discussion paper released on Tuesday by the Centre for Policy Development concludes that 73% of Australians think politics is fixated on short-term gains and not on addressing long-term challenges.
• Only 34% thought politicians were good at making difficult decisions when representing their communities, and just 39% thought that parliaments were effective at tackling the major challenges facing their communities.
• The survey also paints a picture of a sceptical public. Two-thirds responded that politicians did not seem to be serving their interests, and 65% said they thought lobbyists had too much influence.

These horrible stats give you the whole picture about why voter turnout is on a downward trend, the Australian people think the government are only doing things in the short term to get elected, they see the government as disconnected from their community and are sick of lobbyists corrupting influence on our leaders, with stats like these it’s a wonder why we don’t have riots in the streets. But why am I mentioning this you may ask, what has this got to do with voter id laws? Its simple. A state in Australia has already got voter id laws in place, now which state would this be? Think conservative, cool aid drinking bogans… QUEENSLAND! Yes they have voter id laws and they work great people can’t vote without registered identification (drivers licence, medicare card, utility bill etc.), no they don’t have 65 people investigated for possible voter fraud and yes there was a 1.1% drop in votes cast. At a time where voting on a federal level is dropping the last thing we need is less people voting, because voting is a vital part of any strong democracy - people not being heard due to arbitrary obstacles, put in place by a government that just wants to keep its stranglehold on power, all under the guise of voter fraud, sounds more authoritarian than democratic.

With voting for me its pretty clear cut, any attempt to quell voting is an attack on someone’s freedom, for you to tell me that to stop 65 or so people from voting twice, we will have to also stop hundreds of thousands of poor, disabled and native Australians from taking part in democracy. If you want to win how about you give the people something to vote for. Just something to think about.

References

Coalition pushes for voter identification laws and launches attack on GetUp
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/dec/05/coalition-pushes-for-voter-identification-laws-and-launches-attack-on-getup
Government MPs call for mandatory voter identification at federal elections
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/government-mps-call-for-mandatory-voter-identification-at-federal-elections-20181205-p50kfb.html
Election 2016: Voter turnout lowest since compulsory voting began in 1925
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/election-2016-voter-turnout-lowest-since-compulsory-voting-began-in-1925-20160808-gqnij2.html
Australians' faith in system of government waning, survey finds
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/dec/12/australians-faith-in-system-of-government-waning-survey-finds