Parliamentary committee calls for urgent crackdown on campaign intimidation
A parliamentary committee investigating the last federal election wants to impose strict new rules on behavior around the polls after a campaign that “felt like an attack on our democracy”.
Behavior at the polls was so bad that 550 people complained to the Australian Electoral Commission about “harassment and intimidation”, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters report said on Tuesday. Police recorded a 17 percent increase in threats against candidates.
“Something happened in the 2025 federal election; something that feels like an attack on our democracy,” committee chairman and ALP MP Jerome Laxale said in presenting the report.
“Many have described this attack by third parties identified in the submissions, such as the Plymouth Brothers and the Advance, as a fundamental degradation of the foundations of our free and fair voting process.”
Citing a wide range of submissions from politicians and members of the public, the committee found in an interim report that record numbers of third-party campaigners had converged on polling booths, posing an “effective and intimidating challenge” in contested seats where people had to run to try to vote.
One attendee at the committee’s Ipswich hearing noted that the experience was “absolutely mind-bogglingly different from any I’ve ever had” and “more like a war zone than a voting booth.”
The committee’s deputy chair, independent MP Monique Ryan, agreed that there was a “clear increase in the risk to personal safety”.
“If we don’t take action, it’s only a matter of time before someone gets seriously injured at a polling place.”
The report recommended a serious crackdown on the behavior of campaigners, an expansion of the exclusion zone outside voting booths and a new definition of “domestic interference” in elections.
The committee did not say how big the new “campaign zone” outside the polls should be, but noted that the Australian Electoral Commission’s six-metre zone helped create a glove effect.
The committee said the government should create a legal definition or criminal offense of “domestic interference” in elections to ensure that no actor resorts to coordinated harassment to deter citizens from voting or participating.
A new code of conduct and registration scheme for campaigners around polling booths should also be developed so they can be identified and regulated, and stronger rules should be placed on the way campaign materials are approved.
The interim report insisted many of the third-party campaigners were running significant campaigns “without sufficient transparency about who they were”. The election commission should introduce new rules to catch “significant third parties” so that “wide-scale coordinated participation in the electoral process is adequately reflected”, the report said.
The Brethren has denied registering as a third party because it insists its thousands of members are individually motivated to campaign, organized in small groups and have no influence or involvement from the church.
The committee also recommended limiting campaign signs after what independent MP Zali Steggall called “an insane amount of corflute and packaging” and what another attendee described as a “Hunger Games”, with different campaigners vying for space around the stands.
Some of the findings were rejected by Coalition members of the committee, who specifically objected to the mention of members of the Plymouth Brethren.
“It is particularly concerning that the conduct of one of Parliament’s most serious committees has been reduced to a partisan witch hunt based on the religious beliefs of Australians,” the coalition’s dissenting report said.
“Coalition members are deeply disturbed by any political party pursuing another group on the basis of religion, ethnicity, gender or belief.”
The coalition said other proposals would “expand the scope of state regulation and enforcement over ordinary political participation,” which would “aggravate grassroots participation and overlap uncomfortably with the constitutionally implied freedom of political communication.”
Michael Bachelard is The Age’s senior writer and former deputy editor and research editor. He has worked in Canberra, Melbourne and Jakarta, written two books and won several awards for journalism, including the Gold Walkley.Connect with: X or email.
