Taking on electoral litigation was never going to be easy. In Australia, the courts have not historically played a big role in shaping Australia's electoral process -- but in the last two weeks GetUp has changed that. Having campaigned for the last 3 years to modernise Australia's enrolment system, this past fortnight has been the most successful period ever in the electoral reform campaigning efforts of GetUp members, who voted in record numbers to pursue this latest online enrolment case.

In 1902 Australia's electoral democracy took its first steps in creating an electoral roll and 15 years later compulsory enrolment was legislated. These days technology plays an enormous role in how people enrol to vote and how the Australian Election Commission manages elections.

Already the AEC accepts enrolments submitted by fax, and even enrolments submitted by people who download a form, sign it, scan it and email it in (a cumbersome process!). GetUp's counsel, Jeremy Kirk and Aditi Rao together with the legal team from Marque Lawyers, argued in the Federal Court on Thursday that the process of faxing or emailing a scanned signature creates a digital signature and that signing with a digital pen would therefore be acceptable -- indeed extremely comparable in terms of the end result.

The OzEnrol website represented a proof of concept. The website enabled members to send to the AEC's fax machine an enrolment form that is comparable to one received directly from another fax machine. It essentially combined an online forum with an online fax system that GetUp members already use to send faxes to their politicians. The website also used a specially built signature tool which GetUp purchased from Europe and built into the OzEnrol website. The need for this ingenious tool was due to the fact that the Commonwealth Electoral Act (and most state acts) requires a person enrolling to sign using their "personal signature". 

The legislature foresaw the direction technology was taking when in 1999 that implemented the Electronic Transactions Act, a piece of legislation designed to remove legal impediments that may prevent a person using electronic communications to satisfy obligations under Commonwealth law. A key principle in the Act is 'technology neutrality' - that is that there should be no discrimination between transactions conducted using for example between a fax machine and a computer -- both forms of 'electronic' communication. It suggests that transactions conducted using paper documents and transactions conducted using electronic communications should be treated equally by the law and not given an advantage or disadvantage against each other and established the basic rule that a transaction is not invalid  because it took place by means of an electronic communication.

When seen in the light of enrollment this provided an opportunity for GetUp to launch a test case. From the start the key was whether a court would accept that a personal signature, whether applied by an ink pen or a digital pen, was all that was required and that the AEC was not entitled to discriminate simply on the basis of the means of signing.

To bring a test case you need two things. The first is a client and 19 year old Sophie Trevitt who had never enrolled kindly agreed to step up to the plate. The second is a law firm. Marque became involved following a chance meeting that I had with Simon Shiekh at a taxi rank in Canberra. From that meeting both Marque and GetUp could see an opportunity to challenge the manner in which enrollment  was being conducted. Added to that was an alignment in the way that both GetUp and Marque like to challenge the status quo.

With the overwhelming support of the GetUp members a test case was launched following the rejection by the AEC of the online enrollment of Sophie. From there things moved really quickly. A team of leading  counsel were assembled, evidence was prepared and the matter heard before the Federal Court, all in the space of three weeks.

The Federal Court found overwhelmingly in favor of GetUp. A key finding was that the AEC was not entitled to discriminate between faxed forms and those that had been generated via the OzEnrol site. The immediate outcome is that Sophie can now exercise her right to vote. In the area of electoral reform it should encourage Federal and State governments to introduce much needed changes to ensure that the 1.2 million Australians who are not on the Roll are given every opportunity to enroll in a manner that reflects the 21st century.  

The principles outlined in the decision extend beyond the somewhat arcane field of electoral law to all areas of government  and commerce. The decision could hasten the adoption of cutting edge technology and facilitate a move away from the need for hard copy forms to be signed by traditional means.     

Damian Sturzaker

Partner , Marque Lawyers

Then he felt compelled to argue point-for-point with a 22 year old campaigner (ie me) over the deeply flawed design of the internet filter policy.

At every opportunity, the Senator has felt compelled to defend his ideology-driven policy against immense opposition.

This week he was given another reason to get on the back-foot with the announcement that the legislation will be shelved before the election.  This is a small and subtle way of Rudd expressing his lack of confidence in his communications minister.

The internet filter is on life support but we need Kevin Rudd to pull the plug.

Just by speaking up, Rudd could save over $40 million a year- money which could be spent on methods which work- education, parental empowerment and resourcing the Federal Police to help keep kids safe online.

While we can't quite say the filter policy is dead, we can say it's dying. And for that we have to thank the 120,000 people who have signed our petition, the 10,000 who flooded Q & A, the thousands who donated and the countless other GetUp members who have shown their support for internet freedom. The campaign is an excellent example of why we need to keep the internet a free and open space for expression. Without keeping the internet free from censorship a movement of this kind would not be possible.

So thanks, GetUp members, for helping to keep the internet amazing!

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[For the media]

[For the media]

Teaching is the only profession where everyone is an expert because we have all been to school and had experiences that impact upon our current opinion(s). Rupert Murdoch - a major hegemonist and contributor to the perpetuation of conservative public opinion - has weighed in saying that Australian schools are stuck in the pre-industrial age. I would like to ask him when was the last time he was in a classroom to see what is actually going on with Information Technologies.

Don't parrot ill-informed conservative public opinion about education. Support teachers - support our schools and in so doing, support our future cultural and intellectual prosperity and integrity.

 

This crisis was not caused by capitalism being fatally flawed. It was caused by politicians forcing the banks to give out bad loans, monetary authorities flooding the West with cheap credit and regulators being asleep at the wheel. Indeed, one can date its origin precisely, to October 12, 1977, when US president Jimmy Carter signed the anti-redlining law. Before then, lenders generally denied loans to people in poor neighbourhoods, believing that the local mix of low incomes and a weak housing market would lead to many people defaulting. But the politicians - with good intent - wanted to make home ownership available to all Americans. So lenders were forced into giving out risky mortgages, what we call sub-prime loans.

The notion that lenders were forced to make sub-prime loans is simply not correct. US based media monitoring website Media Matters has done a thorough debunking of those arguments. I mention this not because I’m in interested in how partisan US talking points spill over into the Australian media. Rather, I am concerned that the long overdue debate we have finally started to have about how to sustainably address structural housing affordability problems in Australia does not get derailed by the same sort of shallow rhetoric. Last Friday I attended a meeting in Canberra of housing organisations who have been working together on housing affordability issues for many years. It is largely due to the work of these wide-ranging groups that the federal government pledged to develop a national affordable housing strategy and has already started to implement measures such as the National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS). State and federal governments are meant to be on the cusp of signing off on a National Affordable Housing Agreement, with a CoAG meeting planned next month. Whether it will all be ready by then is debatable, particularly given the current economic and budgetry uncertainty. It won’t be the last word in housing affordability measures, but it will certainly set the framework for the next few years. While we’re come a long way in a short time, given the previous federal government wouldn’t even put forward a comprehensive housing policy at all, the recent misguided expansion of the First Home Owners Grant (FHOG) under the guise of stimulating economic activity in the housing sector and maintaining artificially inflated housing prices makes me concerned that there still isn’t the political will to really tackle the structural underpinnings of the housing affordability problems in Australia. The fact that many of the people who led the policy debate on the issue for so many years in Australia while there was zero political interest are not more closely involved in determining what happens now there is some policy action doesn’t fill me with confidence. But as with any policy issue, people have to keep putting the arguments out there and looking for every opportunity – the current review of the tax system is one – to keep making their point. Andrew Bartlett is a former Senator and one of Australia's foremost political bloggers. This is cross-posted from Bartlett's Blog.

The dominance of the (deposit caps) issue in Estimates was particularly wasteful. Given the crisis besetting the world economy, untrammelled access to Treasury officials for eight hours should have been used by senators of all persuasions to tease out the consequences for Australia. Instead we had senior officials beingcalled liars and threatened for refusing to cooperate

At a time when the future of the ABC as a national broadcasting institution is not clear, in Estimates, Senator Abetz has been on the ABC's case about alleged bias - including, if you can believe it, in the selection of audience for it's Q&A programme. He requested figures about the voting intention of audience members, and found the audience was 32 per cent Labor supporters, 24 per cent Coalition supporters, and 17 per cent Greens. He was concerned:

The test surely is that the ABC provide a balanced audience, because the cheering, the support, the commentary out of the audience can potentially be off-putting for some people that are part of the panel.

ABC Director Mark Scott said the problem was that Liberal supporters just wouldn't come along - Scott said he had invited

politicians and political parties including the Liberal Party of New South Wales, the Young Liberals and every state Liberal MP within one hour's drive of the ABC studios

That's that, then. But again, why can't Estimates be thinking about the ABC's present and future in a much broader and more considered way? On a whole range of these and other issues (like Internet filtering), Estimates hasn't brought us the level of debate we might have hoped for in these serious times. If you expect more from your Senators, let them know by contacting them through our site. You can find them by State or from our interactive map of the Senate floor. The Senate is now on a sitting break until the 10th of November - but remember, they should still be working for you. Keep up with their media appearances and have your say here at Project Democracy.