DOCUMENTS

Senator BROCKMAN (Western Australia—Deputy President and Chair of Committees) (19:09): I've been in this place for coming on nine years, and I spent 7½ years before that as a political staffer involved in helping to write many, many reports, and I have never seen—and I use that word again to those opposite—such an egregious use of the committee process as this one.

The attack upon Australians who are seeking to exercise their legitimate rights is an absolute disgrace. Let me give you a couple of examples of why. I've been around for a while.

Sadly, I can remember sitting on a polling booth as a five-year-old with my dad handing out how to vote cards, and I hate to think of the hundreds and hundreds of polling booths I have attended since that time. Australians are generally very good. They're very well behaved.

There have been a few incidents over those years, and I'll tell you what: the incidents that have stuck with me and the ones that that made me feel uncomfortable were engendered either by the microparties—the fringe parties who, quite frankly, sit at that end of the chamber—or by union thugs. They are the only times that I have felt threatened or disrespected at a polling place in 50 years of sitting on polling booths.

The other point I want to make is this: part of the recommendations of this report—which Senator Colbeck went through in more detail; I won't go through it all, and I didn't sit on the inquiry itself—is that you have to register to be a polling booth worker, a volunteer. Let's think about that for a moment. I'll take you back a couple of years to the Voice referendum.

I was at a small Western Australian primary school handing out proudly for the 'No' campaign, and a Noongar man, a father at that school, came up to me and said, 'Give me some of those; I want to hand those out as well.' He stood there with me for an hour, handing out. Do you think there is any reason why perhaps he would feel uncomfortable about registering that position before he decided to take that stance?

Of course there would be. People should not have to register their position to exercise their democratic freedoms in this country. This is a despicable, disgraceful report.