Wednesday, 14 August 2024

Electoral Matters Committee

Inquiry into the Conduct of the 2022 Victorian State Election

Wayne FARNHAM (Narracan) (10:26): I am pleased to rise today on the Electoral Matters Committee inquiry into the conduct of the 2022 state election. I will be referring to the dissenting report today, but before I start I would like to thank all my colleagues on the committee, the chair and all the other committee members, and the secretariat for the enormous amount of work that they put into producing this report and in fact for their advice and knowledge throughout the committee.

I was lucky enough to come onto this committee a little bit late, but I was pleased I actually got on there. I got in there right at the time when the Angry Victorians Party came in and gave their public testimony about their experiences with the state election in 2022. I am going to be referring to this today and a lot of their comments. I think we can all remember when the angry party were on A Current Affair and the dealings with Mr Glenn Druery or, as they like to call him, the preference whisperer. I think most Victorians were probably shocked to hear on A Current Affair that our voting system can be manipulated in such a way where you can get less than 2 per cent of the vote but you can end up as a member of Parliament. The Angry Victorians Party, the two gentlemen who came in there, gave us a very good insight into the background of how Mr Druery works. I will not go through the whole testimony, but basically you had to pay a $5000 deposit to engage with his services and then, if you got into Parliament, you had to pay him an extra $50,000.

At no point in time do I think any person in the Victorian public thinks that passes the pub test – it really does not. I cannot see your average person out on the street – no, actually, I will go further than that and say most people in here would not think that passes the pub test. Hence there is a second push now to abolish group voting tickets. It was recommended in 2018 and it has been recommended again in this report that we need to change the system of the upper house and the voting in the upper house.

What got me curious in their testimony before us is that it got me thinking. How can you engage with someone, how can you promise someone $50,000, if you are not elected yet? That is one thing. But how can you pay that out of your office budget? That is the question that really came to mind for me. Our office budgets are used for our electorates – our communication, all those things that we know they are meant to be for. So how, legally or morally, could someone pay $50,000 out of their office budget to a consultant that has not done consultancy? But that is a promise you are making before you are elected.

None of this, not one part of this, passes the pub test, and that is why we need to get rid of group voting tickets – so the Victorian public have faith in our electoral system. At the moment, you do not blame them for thinking all politicians stink when reports like this come out. It should go further than this. There should be an inquiry into any upper house member that has used Glenn Druery, and if their office budgets have been used to pay him then that should go to IBAC, and that is what this dissenting report says. I think everybody would agree. Everyone out in the general public would agree that none of that is aboveboard. You cannot use your electorate office budget to pay a consultant that does not produce a report or does not do any consultancy work. It is fraud. As far as I am concerned, it is fraudulent to do that.

The government really has to take notice of this committee this time, and we have to reform the upper house voting. There has been a referral today into the make-up of what the upper house will be, and that needs to be looked at as well. That has been brought up in the report. But in the referral, it actually goes on a bit and says ‘and for voting systems’. We do not need to look at the voting systems. The committee has just said to get rid of group voting tickets; the dissenting report says to get rid of group voting tickets. So we do not need to look at the second part of that referral. We need to look at how the upper house is made up. But this time in the 2026 election let us have upper house reform and get rid of group voting.