Bipartisan push comes as both leaders concede the voting system needs to be sped up, and PM calls for regulations to cover political texts and robocalls

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

The eight-day wait for the federal election result Australia has just endured may be a thing of the past, as Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten backed electronic voting in their victory and concession speeches on Sunday.

But Turnbull has gone further, calling for extension of regulation requiring authorisation of political ads to text messages and robocalls, after the Coalition was blindsided by Labor’s campaign on Medicare delivered through electronic media.

In his concession speech, the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, said he would write to Turnbull to suggest that bipartisan cooperation to lay the groundwork for electronic voting. He said consideration of electronic voting was “long overdue”.

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Shorten said that, without taking away from the professionalism of the Australian Electoral Commission, the voting system needed to be sped up: “We can’t afford to have our nation drift for eight days after an election.

“In the 21st century, we’re a leading democracy, we should be able to find out who won and who lost in a quicker time than we’ve seen.”

In his victory speech, Turnbull backed the call. “Yes this is something we must look at ... that’s been a passion or interest of mine for a long time,” he said.

Turnbull noted the New South Wales Electoral Commission had considered and been more open to electronic voting than the Australian Electoral Commission.

The AEC has noted numerous issues with electronic voting, including the lack of paper ballots to verify results, the risk of hacking, and perceived lack of transparency in the voting system.

Turnbull also called for regulation of robocalls, which he said were “basically existing in a legal vacuum” because they did not require authorisation, unlike political ads on TV or print.

“There were many, many of these, some people were getting six, seven, eight, [or] nine [calls] a night,” Turnbull said.

He also cited text messages, which he said “basically operate below the radar of the mainstream media”.

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Turnbull criticised text messages purporting to be from Medicare in his speech on election night, prompting the Australian federal police to begin an investigation of the messages, believed to be from the Queensland branch of the Labor party.

But Labor are not the only party accused of dirty tricks, with reports that Chinese social media site WeChat users were bombarded with controversial messages about the Safe Schools controversy, same-sex marriage and economic management.

Turnbull said: “I’d simply say if a television or newspaper advertisement has to say, by law, ‘authorised by XYZ on behalf of the Liberal party or Labor party’, then so should a text message, so should a robocall.

“Some of these calls and messages have been extremely deceptive and were targeted to people most likely to be misled,” he said.

“There’s a lot of learnings about this, and a number of crossbenchers including senator [Nick] Xenophon, for example, have got a strong interest [in it].

“We need be have a careful look at the way in which some new methods of political communication are basically operating, effectively, outside the traditional legal requirements.”

On 3 July, Xenophon called for truth in political advertising laws due to what he called a “a very misleading, deceitful scare campaign from the ALP in relation to penalty rates”.

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“It was a lie. I had to put up corrective advertising, nowhere near to the extent of their misleading advertising,” he said.

“There’s a real argument for some truth in political advertising laws. Why should politicians be exempt from the sort of laws that apply to misleading and deceptive advertising that apply to corporations and individuals?”

Independent MP Cathy McGowan has also lent support for the idea of truth in political advertising laws.