Tuesday, 8 September 2026

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (13:57): Pursuant to section 35 of the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003, I table a report on the inquiry into voting centre accessibility, including appendices, from the Electoral Matters Committee, and I present the transcripts of evidence. I move:

That the transcripts of evidence be tabled and the report be published.

Motion agreed to.

Sarah MANSFIELD: I move:

That the Council take note of the report.

I am not going to speak for long on this inquiry, but I would just like to say that I think this was a really important inquiry undertaken by the Electoral Matters Committee. We were looking into the accessibility of voting, particularly for people who may have different impairments and people with disabilities. We identified that although a lot of improvements have been made over time, there is still a long way to go. It is feedback that we have had even throughout this term. We have had a number of by-elections, and following the 2022 state election there are still significant barriers for many people in our community to exercising what is a fundamental right in a democracy. I think it is one of the most important things we do – to go and vote – and we should all be able to do that. I think it is assumed that it is something that we all have ready access to, but what this inquiry uncovered was that that is not always the case.

It can be to do with the physical accessibility of a venue and the ability to find parking and to navigate the actual site and location, and we know that it is an increasing challenge for the Victorian Electoral Commission to identify lots of different polling places, particularly with the rise in early voting, and for those venues to be properly accessible for people of all different abilities and potentially with different mobility aids and accessibility requirements. But then there were also things around the written information and how it is conveyed and other supports around the election itself that are really important for accessibility that were identified. I think that it is really heartening that the VEC has already taken a lot of the feedback on board, and I am quite confident that they will do their very best to implement some of those changes. But this inquiry I think has made recommendations that indicate that there are still further improvements that need to be made. I would really like to thank all of the different witnesses who provided evidence to this inquiry, and I would also like to thank the secretariat and my fellow committee members.

One of the things that I think was interesting about this inquiry was that even in the way we conducted it we were more mindful of the accessibility needs of different witnesses, and what it made me question is how we conduct inquiries more generally and how this is not perhaps a default stance that we have. There are lessons to be learned I think for the Parliament around that for future inquiries on other matters where maybe accessibility is not the question we are looking at, because I think what it showed is that potentially there are barriers to participation in things like inquiries because of the way that we set them up and the assumptions that we make.

Another point that I think is worth noting is that the final report will actually be made available in different versions to make it more accessible for people. There will be an HTML version, a plain-language and easy-to-read summary and also an Auslan summary. Again, this is not something that is standard practice, and I found it quite interesting that we do not automatically make the reports from these inquiries accessible to more people. I think it is something that we should make standard practice. Hopefully what we learn from this inquiry and actually going ahead with doing this and publishing accessible versions of the report is something that can be rolled out across all of the work that we do. There are real lessons for us I think as an institution about how we make the work that we do much more accessible to all members of our community. Being able to participate in democratic processes is absolutely fundamental to them working properly, and if we systematically exclude people from that participation because of the way those systems are designed, then I think our democracy is much poorer for it.

I commend the work of this inquiry and commend the report, and I really hope that in the upcoming state election we will see a much more accessible election for more people in the community.

 Jacinta ERMACORA (Western Victoria) (14:02): I do want to acknowledge all of the members of the committee who worked on this report. Importantly, it was about all-abilities access to voting centres in this state. There were a number of staff that worked very hard on the report, which was fantastic, and I thank those people as well. There were three main principled identifications coming out of the report, and those were whole-of-journey accessibility, the diversity and intersectionality of disability and making sure that the entire building is accessible as well. It ranged from physical accessibility through to mental and neurologically diverse accessibility, and it was fantastic to hear from all of the witnesses who came in and made a huge effort to tell their experiences and give us their advice. That was an extremely positive experience. Some of those witnesses were very personally and emotionally impacted by retelling their stories. On behalf of the rest of the committee and the staff, I want to thank those witnesses for their contributions.

Motion agreed to.