The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) will test the use of mailbags to enrol First Nations people from remote communities in response to a complaint lodged with the Human Rights Commission about limited voting access.
Indigenous voters last year said a Commonwealth Electoral Act (CEA) policy that automatically enrolled people using data from government agencies like Centrelink and the Australian Taxation Office was "discriminatory" because it was not applied evenly across the country.
This is because the AEC since 2012 has required citizens to have a street number and a post box to be automatically listed on the electoral role.
The complainants alleged the criteria led to people in remote communities being "suppressed or inhibited" in both federal and Northern Territory elections.
But as the country gears up for a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, the AEC rule could be shredded.
Mailbag trial to lift enrolment
AEC deputy electoral commissioner Jeff Pope said it would be trialling the use of mail bags in about 60 communities that did not have gazetted street names and numbers.
This includes Gunbalanya, Yirrkala and Ngukurr in the NT, Cable Beach in Western Australia and Thursday Island in Queensland.
"We've listened to that complaint … [and] I've been out talking to communities now for the best part of 18 months," Mr Pope said.
"This has got to be carefully undertaken. We've always got to preserve the integrity and the accuracy of the electoral roll."
Mr Pope said the AEC had to work within the "operations of our legislation".
"Through some legal advice, some policy adjustments, through extra data, and through some really careful analysis … we'll be sending letters to those community mailbags, where our data indicates that there are eligible, but unenrolled Indigenous Australians," he said.
The trial is expected to result in about 1,000 letters being posted.
In a separate trial, the AEC has sent out nearly 17,000 letters to unenrolled Indigenous Australians around the country using a new data set from Services Australia, Mr Pope said.
An uneven policy
The policy decision to change the act, known as the Federal Direct Enrolment and Update, saw enrolments rise sharply from about 91 per cent of eligible voters in 2009 to 97 per cent for the 2019 federal election in most urban jurisdictions.
But those numbers flatlined in Indigenous communities, where the policy was not applied.
Federal Member for Lingiari Marion Scrymgour earlier this month told the ABC there was evidence that showed "there's around 20,000 young people that aren't on the roll, or older people who have been taken off the roll".
Maritime Union Australia National Indigenous officer Thomas Mayor, who is also a prominent NT Labor party member, has labelled the move to repeal the rule around street numbers and post boxes a "positive".
He said it exposed "how quickly" the AEC has been allowed to make changes since the election of a new government.
"I still think that it doesn't go far enough, though," Mr Mayor said.
Letters 'chucked in the rubbish'
West Arnhem Regional Council Mayor Matthew Ryan was one of the applicants in the discrimination complaint against the AEC.
He said the trial, while a positive step forward, was not reason enough to withdraw the complaint, and he did not believe it would work.
"I've seen back in the day where there was mail sent to [mailbags] stacked up in a pile … most of them returned or just chucked in the rubbish," Mr Ryan said.
He questioned why the AEC was "trying to reinvent the wheel", and believed automatic enrolment was the clear solution using data from Centrelink, local health clinics, and births, deaths and marriages records.
"A lot of people go for the daily health check-up, or monthly … the data is there," Mr Ryan said.
Gurindji Aboriginal Corporation coordinator Rob Roy said mail was delivered by plane to the council building in his community of Kalkarindji once a week.
In the remote pocket of Australia where "everybody knows everybody", he said letters were easily distributed.
But Mr Roy believed there was a major flaw in the AEC's plan: a lack of translators and interpreters.
"We don't have one person who is a point of contact to translate the form clearly, to [help] the old people that only speak Gurindji and not English," he said.
