If you've ever had to pull together bank statements, electricity or phone bills for yourself or someone else who doesn't have a drivers' licence or passport and needs to prove their identity, you would know how frustrating and time consuming it can be.
It is precisely this sort of difficulty and frustration that our prime minister hopes his new voter suppression laws illicit; to drive marginalised and vulnerable voters away from the polls by requiring everyone to prove their identity in order to vote.
People from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, refugees, those with lower levels of literacy and Indigenous Australians will be among those who may be turned away or less likely to even show up in the first place.
... the prime minister is seeking to rig the system in his favour by making it harder for certain types of people to vote.
Because, like Donald Trump before him, Mr Morrison knows that this cohort of voters is much more likely to vote against him than the population as a whole.
In other words, the prime minister is seeking to rig the system in his favour by making it harder for certain types of people to vote.
In the United States, voter ID laws have been increasingly used as the thin edge of the wedge in an effort by the Republican Party to suppress voter participation at elections.
Such laws have long been championed in Australia by conservative members of the Liberal Party, Pauline Hanson and others who seek to emulate the voter suppression tactics of Donald Trump's Republicans to better game the system in their favour.
This is despite the reality that the easier we make it to participate at the ballot box, and the more people who vote, the more robust the results of our elections.
This is a system we must protect. Not chip away at.
These laws, requiring every Australian to prove their identity despite already being enrolled to vote, are completely unnecessary with absolutely no evidence of voter fraud in Australia. Our independent electoral commissioner has described the issue of multiple voting as "vanishingly small", and not a single person was prosecuted for voter fraud at the 2019 election.
Despite there being no demonstrated need for these laws - they pretend to seek a solution to a problem that does not exist - Scott Morrison has decided to pursue rushing them through before the end of the year instead of legislating for a National Anti-Corruption Commission.
- Carol Brown, Labor Senator for Tasmania
