Politics with Michelle Grattan: Tom Rogers calls for national digital literacy campaign and more civics teaching

We see the political parties’ frantic election campaigns, but behind the scenes the Australian Electoral Commisison is working just as hard.

An often overlooked part of Australia’s democracy, the AEC is vital in ensuring our elections are both efficient and fair, a task full of challenges.

We’re joined today by Tom Rogers, recently retired as Electoral Commissioner. As commissioner, Rogers oversaw three federal elections and the Voice referendum. He is now a member of the advisory board of the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance and provides his expertise on elections globally.

Rogers describes running a modern Australian election as

the largest peacetime logistic exercise in the life of Australia […] it’s so complex administratively to run these events.

It’s a bit like setting up a fortune 500 company in four weeks, running it, then dismantling it a couple of weeks after the event. It is just phenomenally complex. And the amazing thing is that because we’ve got good systems in place, it works pretty well.

The agency goes from, I’ll use very rough figures here, about a thousand people all over Australia during the non-electoral period up to about 105,000 people during that very short period.

There are a lot of calls for truth in advertising laws and some calls for it to be managed by the AEC. Rogers insists the AEC should not be involved,

I was a firm believer that that would be very inappropriate for the AEC. It’s one of those rare things where we were very, very proactive in talking to people about that. And one of the reasons is because I think it would ruin the AEC’s reputation for neutrality. It’s as simple as that.

It will impact on the AEC’s level of trust with the community.[…] given trust is so important, that people trust electoral outcomes, I think it’s incredibly dangerous.

While not wanting to be involved with truth in advertising, Rogers does see the importance in the AEC countering misinformation on Australia’s electoral process,

We’ve established a ‘defending democracy unit’. We ran a national campaign called Stop and Consider to get people to think about the source of information.

But I think the bit that we can do and that’s still missing is we really need a national digital literacy campaign for our citizens. When you correct disinformation about electoral matters, there’s a whole body of research that shows that it’s kind of effective. What is more effective rather than debunking is ‘prebunking’ and what is more effective again, is giving citizens the skills they need to make up their own mind about the accuracy of information.

The Stop and Consider campaign, I might be wrong, but is still the only national campaign focussed on giving citizens skills. We need to run something like that all the time. I think there’s a real need for this in the modern era and that’s what we should be doing.

Rogers also highlights the importance of civics education

It’s critical. The AEC is already doing good work in this space. Up until I left at the end of last year, generally speaking the AEC was getting about 100,000 kids a year through the Electoral Education Centre in Canberra, which is excellent. They are in the process of digitising much of the materials so that that could be spread to schools that are unable to visit Canberra.

I do think we need to do more.