The Prime Minister has accused the Coalition of deliberately restricting the rights of remote voters, after turnout in an electorate covering some of the most disadvantaged parts of Australia dropped to a new low.
Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) figures show just two in three people in the sprawling bush seat of Lingiari, which blankets all of the Northern Territory outside of Darwin, cast a ballot in the May poll.
Anthony Albanese today labelled the figure an "outrage" and blamed it directly on cuts to commission resources under the former Coalition government.
"The fact that 66 per cent of people voted means that one in three people in the electorate of Lingiari didn't get to vote," he said.
"That was part of the former government's design. It wasn't by accident.
"And they should be held to account for it."
The AEC said it was still unclear why thousands of Lingiari constituents did not vote, but speculated it could be related to the pandemic.
The seat was the subject of an enormous polling effort that saw hundreds of AEC staff navigating pandemic conditions to visit about 170 communities in the NT's most remote corners.
Despite that, turnout has continued to drop from 72.85 per cent in 2019, 73.70 per cent in 2016 and 75.42 per cent three years earlier.
At 66.79 per cent, the current 2022 turnout is both an all-time low in the seat and the lowest in the nation.
'We've got to review this'
The significant voting efforts delivered a narrow victory to Labor's Marion Scrymgour, a former land council CEO who replaces retiring Labor stalwart Warren Snowdon.
Ms Scrymgour said many constituents arrived at remote polling booths to find they were not enrolled, and said the 7 per cent rate of informal votes needed investigation.
"We've got to look at and review all of this. We can't blame one side or another," she told the ABC earlier this week.
"We've just got to have a look at why we had a low voter turnout."
The AEC says its remote polling services, which involve setting up mobile voting booths in communities for a period lasting days or hours, were widely advertised.
But there were some hiccups, including complaints of a lack of remote interpreters and an incident that stranded some polling staff after a helicopter ran out of fuel.
Some have also questioned if the brief voting windows inevitably clash with other commitments in communities.
"Does that coincide with a footy grand final that may be on in the next community, so you miss out," asked Michael Hartwig, who is completing a PhD about remote voter turnout with Charles Darwin University.
"How does that tie in with sorry business, with funerals and the like, and have people got other obligations during that window when voting can take place?"
The direct enrolment program or Federal Direct Enrolment Update — which allows the AEC to directly enrol eligible voters using data from other records — does not extend to remote areas, prompting a recent discrimination complaint.
"We aren't able to do that in the same way in remote communities because of the mail service there," the AEC's NT electoral officer, Geoff Bloom, said.
"We're reviewing our FDEU program, as we call it, and seeing what opportunities there might be to improve that into remote communities."
Mr Bloom said staff lost during the 2017 cuts had since been replaced and an Indigenous participation program had been reinstated.
Thousands of people are still missing from the electoral roll across the NT, which has the nation's lowest overall enrolment rate at 85.6 per cent.
Indigenous voters losing political faith
Both major parties had been circling Lingiari in the lead-up to polling day, making promises on housing, education and some of the other many issues the seat faces.
But Mr Hartwig said many Indigenous people had become disengaged after years of broken government promises across the political spectrum.
"They think, 'Why should we vote? They make promises but they just don't keep them.'"
Ms Scrymgour echoed his concerns.
"People are just not engaged in that system and we need to look at a different way in which we're governing," she said.
Mr Albanese has vowed to review the issue with the AEC.
"My government will look at what we can do to make sure that every Australian, every Australian no matter where they live, no matter who they are, has an equal right to be on the roll and equal right to vote," he said.
