E-petitions

Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) — I am very pleased to speak on behalf of the Greens today in support of the motion brought forward by Ms Patten today with regard to initiating the use of e-petitions in the Parliament and certainly in the Legislative Council. Her motion refers to the Victorian government failing to keep up to speed with technology, particularly with e-petitions, which are common throughout Australia. She mentions the — —

Mr Herbert interjected.

Ms PENNICUIK — Pardon?

Mr Herbert — You said it was a government failure not to keep up to speed.

Ms PENNICUIK — Well, parliamentary failure. Thank you, Mr Herbert. But either government could have brought this forward — this government, the previous government or the one before that — and I will talk about that a little bit as we go through the contribution that I have to make today.

Ms Patten's motion notes the record of the Legislative Assembly Standing Orders Committee in 2009 recommending that the Assembly adopt e-petitions, which it has not done so far, refers the issue to the Procedure Committee to report on by the 25 October this year and moves that the implementation of e-petitions in the Council be no later than 31 January 2017. I think all of that is doable, and I particularly say that as a member of the Procedure Committee.

Before I go to some of the specific things about e-petitions, I would just like to say generally that the Greens have been great champions of modernising the Legislative Council since we arrived here in late 2006 and 2007. If I recall, at that time — and I am sure Mrs Peulich will correct me if I am wrong — I do not think there was even any audiostreaming of Parliament at that stage. There may have been audio — —

Mrs Peulich interjected.

Ms PENNICUIK — Thank you; it was taped. So we came in and we went then to audiostreaming with a picture of the Council up on the website. From there we went to audiostreaming with a still picture of the speaker, so if Mrs Peulich was speaking, there was her parliamentary picture from the members guide on the website while she spoke, and if someone else spoke, then their picture came up. Now we actually have live streaming, so in leaps and bounds we are heading into the 21st century in 2016 in that regard. Certainly the Greens would like to see us go a little bit further in that regard with being able to broadcast after the event of Parliament.

So we have instituted a lot of those and other modernisations. For example, I was amazed when I came into Parliament to find out that adjournment matters were raised in the adjournment, at some stage the minister wrote back to the member and that was it; it did not appear in Hansard. It was in fact an amendment I made to the standing orders, or through the Standing Orders Committee, in not the last session of Parliament but the one before, because answers to questions on notice appeared in Hansard, so why did adjournment responses not appear? Now it is just accepted that they appear in Hansard, but they did not before, which I thought was not very democratic for the community group or persons on whose behalf the member was raising the issues with the minister. Most adjournment issues, as members would know, really concern local issues that are raised by members of the community, so in fact you had to copy the letter, send it to those groups or take it around to see them, but now they can see that in Hansard.

The other issue that I would raise that the Greens pushed very hard for was the establishment of the upper house committee system that we now have operating in the Legislative Council, and that was a motion that I moved in the Council. Well, it is still a work in progress with regard to our Legislative Council committees, but you have to say that they have certainly undertaken some very important inquiries even in the last Parliament, but particularly in this Parliament. So the Greens are always looking to modernise the Legislative Council and the Parliament of Victoria.

Ms Patten's motion talks about the other parts of Australia where e-petitions are used, and that includes Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory, the federal Senate and also in Tasmania in fact. That is where they are used. Mrs Peulich and Ms Symes raised some issues that need to be taken into consideration. I think they all do need to be taken into consideration by the Procedure Committee when it looks at all the issues that were raised by both Ms Symes and Mrs Peulich, and I am sure when the Procedure Committee looks at it it will take note of all those issues that have been raised.

But when you look at the standing orders for the ACT, for example, they talk about the petition of course being in the correct form and having to be sponsored by a member, so in fact it is not the same as with a paper petition, where a group of citizens may take it upon themselves to have paper petitions, get people to sign them in places and then find a sponsor. This way with the e-petition a member sponsors it first. Of course you have still got paper petitions going at the same time.

The petition has a sort of time limit. It has to be up for at least a week and for a maximum of six months under the ACT standing orders. Once it is published it cannot be altered. Once the petition's time has lapsed at six months, a paper copy is printed and is presented into the ACT Assembly. So these are the sorts of practical considerations of how they work that we would take into account as well. The federal Senate operates in a very similar way, and I presume that the ACT probably followed the Senate practice in that regard. It does not happen in the House of Representatives yet, so we might be the same in terms of the Council leading the Assembly.

Other Westminster parliaments — the United Kingdom, Scotland and Canada — also have electronic petitions.

I was interested to look at the United States and petitions to the White House. People are sponsored and they can sign onto the petitions. Some of the popular petitions there at the moment are headed 'Establish justice and prevent a great catastrophe' and 'Help the Vietnamese people to prevent environmental disaster in Ha Tinh province, central Vietnam' as well as one recognising legitimate sports so certain players can go to the US on visas. But the one I thought was very interesting was put up on 15 May and has already had 50 000 signatures against a goal of 100 000 signatures — and I am pretty sure the 100 000 goal is because if they get 100 000 signatures the White House has to respond to the issue. That is something also to take into account. If you can get so many signatures, then a response is needed and that goes to the question that Mrs Peulich raised about who knows what happens to petitions.

This petition is headed in part 'Stop shielding Dow Chemical from accountability for corporate crimes in Bhopal, India'. As I said, it was created on 15 May and has more than 54 000 signatures. It reads:

In 1984 a factory majority owned by Union Carbide … leaked toxic gas in Bhopal, India, killing 8000-10 000 people … maiming 500 000 more. India charged UCC with manslaughter, but UCC refused to show for trial. Dow Chemical bought UCC in 2001 but has not made UCC available to face charges. Under a mutual legal assistance treaty, India sent four notices to the US Department. of Justice to summon Dow to explain UCC's whereabouts. The DoJ has ignored or obstructed every notice. The same DoJ made BP pay $4 billion in criminal fines and penalties for Deepwater Horizon. 31 years of US protection of UCC and Dow must end. We insist that the US government meet its obligations under treaty and international law by immediately serving notice upon Dow to attend court in Bhopal on 13 July 2016.

It is an interesting petition. It has received 54 000 signatures in less than a month, so I assume it will probably get its 100 000 signatures.

Having presented a number of petitions to the Council in the time I have been here, for most of them, particularly the ones that I have taken a great interest in, I made a point of taking note of the petition. We see petitions tabled every day in here. Basically they are tabled, listed on the blue paper and then they are put into storage somewhere. So I think it is a great idea to take note of petitions.

I want to refer to two instances where the issue of needing online petitions has become very obvious. One was in April 2010. I tabled a live music petition on 13 April, which was a Tuesday, and took note of it during the general business day, 14 April. The petition bears 8837 signatures and requests that:

… the Victorian government institute a proper investigation into the causes of violence and drunkenness;

… until such investigation is undertaken and concluded, the government remove all references to 'live and amplified music' from the licence and amenity clause on liquor licences;

… the government formulate a cultural policy that promotes and maintains Melbourne as Australia's capital for live music.

I had received the petitions physically on the steps of state Parliament a week before I tabled them. When the people who collected those petitions — the Save Live Australia's Music group — at various venues around Melbourne counted the signatures there were 21 826 signatures in the pile. Obviously it took the papers office a week to go through them, because they had to verify the signatures and verify that the people were citizens of Victoria. After they had done that the unofficial count was 21 826 signatures. That included 11 124 online signatures that had been printed out and 10 505 signatures on the hard copies signed by people in venues. At the time the papers office advised me that of the almost 22 000 signatures, approximately 12 000 were not counted as they were online petitions. Approximately 1100 were not counted due to the fact that they did not contain full details. People may not have signed it or provided their full names or addresses or, for example, they may not have been Victorian addresses and were therefore ineligible.

Many that were not counted were not counted because, according to standing orders, the details of a petition have to be on every page that is presented and attached pages of signatures cannot be counted. That was a mistake that was made in the venues — not having the wording of the petition at the top of each page. The point is that only 8837 signatures were formally listed when it was tabled in Parliament as the size of the petition. But if all the signatures had been able to be counted, including the 11 000-odd online petitions, it would have been the second largest petition tabled in that session of Parliament.

If you look at the petitions that we see every day, some only have 20 signatures or a couple of hundred signatures. That would have been a 22 000-signature petition, but it is formally registered in Hansard as only having 8837 signatures. Part of that is because half of them were online petitions and could not be counted. and I went to some length to point this out in my contribution with regard to that issue. I said at the time that 12 000 petitions could not be counted or accepted because they were online and that we needed to catapult ourselves into the 21st century and accept online petitions. I said that the Standing Orders Committee of the Legislative Assembly had almost 12 months before, referring to the 2009 report, recommended that the Assembly did it. I made the point that we have out-of-date rules with regard to petitions.

Just a couple of months later, in July 2010, I moved a motion in the Parliament to establish an independent body to investigate police deaths in custody. I also referred to a petition that had been drawn up by the community legal sector. It wanted the petition to be tabled in Parliament but as it was also an online petition it could not be tabled. I made the point again that really it should have been able to make an online petition to Parliament.

We have been calling for this for some time, and I point out those two examples. I have made the point with other petitions that I have taken note of in the Parliament that many people miss out because their petitions cannot be counted. Some of them cannot be counted because people's handwriting cannot be read or the people cannot be verified. That would be overcome with online petitions. It would probably be easier to verify people online than in paper petitions. But that is not to say that we should not still have paper petitions if people want to have them at markets or wherever they are running their petitions.

With those words, I indicate that we are very happy to support the motion. I believe we should have it operating by early next year, if possible.