Morrison government's plan to introduce voter ID laws completely unnecessary

A major battleground is the requirement for voters to show identification at the ballot box. As former Republican Senator Jim DeMint once admitted, voter identification laws are: "Something we're working on all over the country, because in the states where they do have voter ID laws you've seen, actually, elections begin to change towards more conservative candidates."

Now, just months away from the federal election, the Morrison government has decided it wants to photocopy the Republican playbook by introducing into parliament a bill that would require people to present identification in order to vote.

As in America, the bill is about voter suppression, not voter fraud. Australian Electoral Commissioner Tom Rogers recently told Senate estimates "evidence of multiple voting to date is vanishingly small". Multiple voting appears to be largely accidental, as shown by the fact no one was prosecuted for multiple voting in the 2019 federal election.

Yet while multiple voting is rare, the damage to voter turnout from an identification law is not vanishingly small. Impose an identification requirement, and people who carry a driving licence with them at all times will be unaffected. But that's not everyone. The poor, the homeless, Indigenous people, and older people who've given up their driving licences will be especially affected, along with young people in the habit of just carrying a mobile phone, and no wallet. If identification requirements increase waiting times, weekend workers may be disenfranchised, too.

It's not just Labor parliamentarians who have raised concerns. As Homelessness Australia chair Jenny Smith has observed: "If you flee your home without your papers to escape violence, or have your documents stolen while sleeping on the street, you shouldn't lose your ability to vote."

There are particular reasons to be concerned about the impact of this proposal on Indigenous people. Australia has a shamefully long history of Indigenous people being denied the right to vote. In 1961, the House of Representatives Select Committee on Voting Rights of Aborigines estimated 30,000 Indigenous people had been denied the vote. The next year, the Commonwealth Electoral Act granted all Indigenous people the option to enrol and vote in federal elections. But it wasn't until 1984 that enrolling to vote in federal elections was made compulsory for Indigenous Australians.

Even today, Indigenous voting rates may be as low as 50 per cent, yet the government's bill threatens to make this worse. As the Australian Human Rights Commission points out: "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples often do not possess a birth certificate and face difficulties obtaining subsequent formal identification." Making it harder for Indigenous people to vote is nothing short of racist.

Even someone who supports voter identification laws should be sceptical about the Coalition's motives for introducing this bill at this time. When a team tries to change the rules just before kick-off, it's usually because they don't feel they can win with the regular rules.

The unoriginality of these proposed changes are almost as depressing as their pernicious effect. With Trump trying to whip up fear about voter fraud, his allies have been working to pass voter identification laws, as well as restricting early voting and mail-in voting. Mr Morrison spoke at a Trump rally and was one of the few world leaders not to condemn the January 6 Capitol riots. All these voter identification proposals need is a "Stop the Steal" badge and a "Make America Great Again" cap, and they'd happily walk into any Trump rally.

This isn't the first time the Liberals have attempted to reduce the number of people who vote. In recent decades, the strongest political advocate of abolishing compulsory voting was former Liberal senator Nick Minchin. A more recent tactic is to slow down the processing of citizenship applications. At the time of the last election, there were more than 200,000 people denied the chance to vote because their citizenship applications hadn't been processed.

I wish I could say I'm surprised by the Morrison government's attempt to rig the rules. But it's not surprising from a government that has presided over sports rorts, which pork-barrelled funding to projects judged unsuitable while denying it to higher-ranked projects. It's not surprising from a government that ran car park rorts, which gave money to 47 projects, mostly in Coalition electorates, none of which were proposed by the infrastructure department. It's not surprising from a government that ran a regional grants program that gave 90 per cent of the money to Coalition and marginal seats, or from a government that stacked the Administrative Appeals Tribunal with Liberal mates and gave $20 billion of JobKeeper to firms with rising revenue.

It's not surprising from a government that's trying to get rid of charities involved in public activism, pushing through new deregistration powers Tim Costello has compared to Vladimir Putin's Russia. And it's not surprising from a government that promised a national integrity commission over three years ago and has yet to deliver, because they know a robust integrity commission would be after their dodgy ministers quicker than Eliud Kipchoge running for the finishing line.

The extreme wing of the Liberal Party don't like public education. They don't like public health. They don't like public services. And now we've learned they just don't like the public.