It is an element of Australian elections that takes some people by surprise.

Many reach for their wallet or purse as they approach the polling booth, assuming they will have to prove who they are as they head in to vote.

But in federal elections at least, it isn't necessary. You don't need to produce ID to vote.

It is a longstanding rule in Australia, but it may soon change.

And it is already prompting a heated debate — with accusations of disenfranchisement, voter suppression, discrimination and racism.

Here's what's going on.

What are the current rules, and what might change?

Anyone who has voted in a federal election before will know it is generally (and thankfully) a simple process.

When you turn up to a polling booth, an official will ask for your name and address, and check you off a long list.

You will also be asked if you have voted before in the current election. Assuming the answer is no, you will be handed your ballot papers, and cast your ballot.

For years an argument has been mounted that the process is too open to abuse, and that a person can easily pretend to be someone else and cast multiple ballots.

Liberal Senator James McGrath, who chairs Parliament's Joint Committee on Electoral Matters, has argued more safeguards are needed.

"If I want to go to my local surf club or bowls club I have to show a form of photographic ID," he said.

"If I want to have a lemon, lime and bitters in Brisbane on a Friday night after 10pm, I must show photographic ID and it is scanned in.

"Yet when I undertake my most important duty as a citizen — that is, voting — no ID is required."

The government argues ID is needed to drive a car, open a bank account or collect a parcel from the post office.

Under the changes it wants introduced, voters would have to produce an acceptable form of ID at the polling place.

That could include a drivers licence, passport, medicare card, power bill, debit or credit card, or an enrolment letter from the electoral commission.

If ID cannot be produced, a voter could have someone else who does have ID fill out a form saying the voter is who they claim to be.

Or a 'declaration vote' could be completed, where a voter signs a declaration with their ballot.

The government says those measures will mean no one misses out on voting, even if they don't have ID.

Is multiple voting a problem?

In short, not really.

The Australian Electoral Commission estimates that during the 2019 election, the rate of multiple voting was 0.03 percent.

It told an inquiry into the election that multiple voting is "by and large a very small problem", and usually involves mental health issues rather than deliberate fraud.

And at least since the last major revision of electoral laws in Australia (in 1983), multiple voting has never disrupted any element of a federal election.

Labor's Tony Burke told parliament the government has found a solution, but is still looking for a problem.

"After the last election, after millions of Australians voted, the AEC then did a check to work out if there was a problem with the integrity," he said.

"Guess how many people ended up being prosecuted? Zero.

"So for the sake of fixing a problem involving no Australians, they want to stand in the way of thousands of Australians voting."

But the government argues the change is required regardless.

Senator McGrath said the rules would add confidence to the system.

"Electoral matters must not only be fair, open and transparent, they must be seen to be so," he said.

"And asking for a form of ID is a pretty sensible, non-controversial reform."

Why is this so controversial?

Labor, the Greens and others argue not only is multiple voting not a problem that needs solving, it risks doing harm to the electoral system.

The concern is it may prevent people voting — particularly some of society's most vulnerable voters.

The opposition argues there should be as few barriers to Australians casting a vote as possible, and the laws would do little more than put barriers in place.

Labor's Warren Snowdon, who represents Lingiari in the Northern Territory (an electorate with many remote Indigenous communities) was scathing in his assessment of the idea.

"It's racist, it's discriminatory, and it's all about suppression," he said.

"This is a farce, an absolute assault on our democracy."

Labor suggests those most likely to turn up at a polling place without valid ID, and perhaps be put off voting altogether, are the homeless, the elderly and those living in remote communities.

As such, it suggests the solution to multiple voting risks disenfranchising many within the system that it seeks to protect.

Has this been done elsewhere?

In making its case, the federal government has pointed to plenty of similar countries abroad with voter ID laws in place.

Canada, France, Sweden and Belgium are some examples it lists, along with many parts of the United States.

But to suggest this is a heated issue in the United States would be underselling it.

Ferocious campaigns have been fought for and against the laws, and according to the American Civil Liberties Union, 34 states now have some form of voter ID requirements in place.

It describes the laws as part of an "ongoing strategy to roll back decades of progress on voting rights."

"Voter ID laws deprive many voters of their right to vote, reduce participation, and stand in direct opposition to our country's trend of including more Americans in the democratic process," it argues.

"Many Americans do not have one of the forms of identification states consider acceptable for voting.

"These voters are disproportionately low-income, racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and people with disabilities."

Voter ID laws are also being pursued by the Conservative government in the UK, where they face similar arguments from the country's Labour opposition.

When will this happen?

Were the legislation to sail through the parliament, it could be in place before the next election.

That may not happen, as it could face hurdles in the Senate — with the government relying upon crossbench support to get the laws in place.

ABC election analyst Antony Green said if the government was serious about introducing voter ID laws, it might want to iron out any kinks first.

"Normally legislation of this sort would be sent off to an inquiry," he said.

"This is a major change to the way Australian elections are conducted — you would expect that it gets some sensible analysis before it is implemented.

"The way it is working at the moment - this could be passed by the end of the year, then we have no more [parliamentary] sittings and an election in March.

"They've got to get it right before they implement it."

Icac has heard Daryl Maguire told then premier Gladys Berejiklian to get a “private phone” and use the Chinese instant messaging app WeChat in the days after he was first summonsed to appear before the New South Wales anti-corruption watchdog because, he told her “they can read texts”.

But Berejiklian denied that the request made her suspect Maguire may have been involved in any corrupt conduct, telling the Independent Commission Against Corruption that it was “normal human nature” not to want “your private conversations being listened to”.

On the second day of Icac’s public hearings into her conduct, Berejiklian was grilled by counsel assisting the commission, Scott Robertson, on her actions in the days after Maguire first revealed to her that the watchdog had called him to appear as a witness in a separate investigation.

Icac previously heard that on 5 July 2018 Maguire told Berejiklian he had been summonsed to appear before Icac during a 52-minute conversation.

During the conversation, played before Icac on Friday, Berejiklian asked repeated questions about the nature of Maguire’s involvement in the probe, and described some developers involved in that separate investigation as “dodgy”.

When Maguire raised the prospect that their phone calls might be tapped, she asked: “is that going to be a problem?”

A key plank of Icac’s investigation is whether Berejiklian breached the state’s Icac Act by failing to report conduct by Maguire she had reason to suspect on “reasonable grounds” may have been corrupt.

She has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, and on Friday told Icac the phone call did not raise suspicions because “he told me he’d done nothing wrong and I believed him”.

On Monday, Robertson took Berejiklian to the days between the 5 July phone call and Maguire’s appearance before Icac eight days later.

He revealed that four days later, on 9 July, Maguire sent a text to Berejiklian instructing her to download the Chinese messaging app WeChat, telling her: “you need to get a private phone”.

“They can read texts but not the little green man, leaves no trace,” he wrote, in an apparent reference to the green WeChat icon.

In another message, Maguire told the then premier that he had “got more info and data than them”, using an emoji that Robertson described as a “beaming face with smiling eyes”.

Berejiklian again denied that the text messages raised concerns with her, saying it was common for MPs to have “two phones” and that she believed Maguire was concerned about “privacy”.

Questioned on whether she thought it was “curious” that in the days after telling her he had been summonsed to appear before Icac, Maguire wanted her to get a private phone, Berejiklian said that was “certainly not my recollection”.

“I wouldn’t have taken it as any more than privacy issues,” she told Robertson.

“I was very confident that he didn’t do anything wrong. And I was certainly confident that I hadn’t done anything wrong.”

After Maguire appeared before Icac on 13 July 2018, he was forced to move to the crossbench, eventually resigning after the watchdog revealed he had discussed the possibility of earning commissions on the sale of development sites which he wanted to help broker. Icac made no corruption findings in relation to Maguire but recommended he face charges for allegedly giving false evidence.

Following his evidence, Berejiklian released a statement saying the MP had “let down” his constituents and urging him to consider stepping down from the parliament. She told Icac that she was “mortified” after he gave evidence, saying the “shock of what happened made me question everything” including whether Maguire might have lied to her.

But under questioning from Robertson, Berejiklian again denied his evidence meant that she suspected he may have engaged in corrupt conduct, saying only that there was a “cloud” around him and that she did not “join the dots” with information he had previously given her about hoping to make $1.5m from a Badgerys Creek land deal.

“The question I asked myself was did I know anything [and] the answer very strongly in my mind is that I didn’t know anything about what this commission was looking at,” she said.

Pressed on why she did not at least report the 5 July phone call she said: “I had nothing to report. There was nothing that I knew, nothing that I remembered, nothing that I thought was of any relevance.”

Burning embers were likely to be blown around homes under threat from a bushfire that was raging on Monday morning amid searing temperatures in Western Australia.

Authorities warned that an ember attack was likely from a fire in the Perth hills, where firefighters were battling to save homes in Warrigal Estate.

Residents were told it was too late to leave but the blaze was now contained and controlled.

“Homes in Warrigal Estate may be under threat by embers and you should leave if it is safe to do so,” the Department of Fire and Emergency Services said in its latest warning just after 8am AWST.

The warning covers people and homes in the area bounded by Government Road, Old Northam Road, Forge Farm Riding School, Liberton Road and Jason Street in parts of Wooroloo, Chidlow and Gidgegannup.

An evacuation centre is open at Mundaring Arena on Mundaring Weir Road in Mundaring.

There were 100 firefighters monitoring and mopping up the blaze, which was reported at 3.41pm on Boxing Day and burnt 164.5 hectares.

An emergency warning was also in place for a fierce bushfire threatening homes in the Augusta-Margaret River shire, about 300km south of Perth.

Winds were strengthening in the area and, while the fire was contained, it was not yet controlled.

People have been urged to leave Treeton and Osmington if the way was clear, or to shelter in their homes if they cannot leave.

The warning was increased from the watch-and-act level on Sunday afternoon due to weather conditions and the fire growing on heavy fuel loads.

There is an evacuation centre at the Margaret River recreation centre.

The warnings came as the state endures a spell of hot weather, with Perth recording maximum temperatures of 42C and 43C on Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

For the Aboriginal Tent Embassy on the banks of Lake Burley Griffin in the national capital, this is a milestone year. Celebrations will begin later this month to mark the 50th continuous year of occupation of a site originally set up to demand land rights, the protection of sacred sites, and proper compensation for land not returned.

The “embassy” is heritage listed and the world’s longest-standing protest.

But before it can celebrate, its current occupiers must endure what amounts to an attempted hostile takeover by a coalition of alt-right “freedom” groups riffing on notions of “sovereignty” markedly different to the Sovereignty sought by most Aboriginal people.

Over the past two weeks, tensions have exploded into action and public consciousness, after a group of people purporting to be conducting a traditional “smoking ceremony” under the historic portico of the Old Parliament House set fire to its doors.

The fire, which Victorian Greens MP Lidia Thorpe initially appeared to celebrate before reversing herself, caused damage that Museum of Australian Democracy director Daryl Karp says may be unfixable. Soot covered many parts of the building and caused the building’s sprinkler system to go off, damaging original flooring. Five people are facing charges over the incident.

A statement issued by the Embassy Council on December 30 condemning the “smoking ceremony,” said it was done “without the knowledge, consent or mandate of the Embassy Council and Traditional Owners responsible for the regulation of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy”.

Earlier this week, the “freedom” protest group formed a campsite on the grounds outside the National Portrait Museum – the same area containing the cafe-restaurant where protesters trapped then Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott after Abbott said it was time to move the embassy on. On Thursday, a heavy police presence forcibly evicted them, pushing them back towards the embassy.

There, in a place that has hosted generations of Aboriginal activists, the protest has effectively split into two divisions: one camp containing the Tent Embassy and an increasingly larger group behind and to the side of it in what is called the rose garden area.

The newcomers are an iteration of a growing, US-influenced protest movement in Australia that is trying to legitimise its various agendas by co-opting Indigenous people and issues through a process activists and academics have termed “Blackfishing”.

They first turned up at the Tent Embassy in early December and, according to Ngunnawal elder Matilda House-Williams, speaking to The Canberra Times, “there’s a whole tonne of them”.

Video posts by some of the group’s adherents and influencers as well as its alt-right supporters reveal how gaining control of the Tent Embassy is only a stepping stone in a more ambitious scheme. They want to “take the chair” of Old Parliament House itself.

And despite a number of arrests after the disastrous smoking ceremony, it appears they are there to stay.

Daily call outs are now being made for “freedom” supporters to converge on the nation’s capital to join them.

‘Original Sovereigns’

At the head of the new protest group is Murrawiri and Budjiti environmental activist Bruce Shillingsworth, whose prominent activism around water shortages and related issues in the Murray Darling Basin have been nationally lauded. Around him are several Indigenous men and women already prominently involved in the alt-right “freedom” movement rallies in Sydney and Melbourne. None would speak to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Shillingsworth was closely associated with respected Yuin elder and cultural lore man Uncle Max Harrison, who was allied with the vaccine-sceptical Informed Medical Options Party and the broader “freedom” movement, before his sudden COVID-related death in early December. Uncle Max addressed the “millions march” rally in Sydney two weeks before he died in a COVID ward at the Sutherland Hospital.

Shillingsworth and his group, black and white, have called via social media videos for the broader “sovereign citizens” movement as well as Indigenous “Original Sovereigns” groups around the country to converge on Canberra in convoys.

When police moved them away from the portrait gallery on Thursday, they responded with QAnon-style phrases, such as “you’re non-player characters” and “paedophile protectors”. Indigenous members of the group demanded the police prove their jurisdiction over the area with “deeds and titles”, and Shillingsworth repeatedly demanded that $100 trillion in taxpayer gold be transferred to his personal bank account for breaches of a pseudo-legal contract he attempted to serve on senior officers.

A series of virtual meetings between prominent Indigenous group members and non-Indigenous alt-right activists suggest a plot to effectively copy the US Capitol Hill insurrection. For the Australian version, the target is Old Parliament House.

They believe the quasi-mystical locus of power in Australia is vested in the “seat” of the Old Parliament because that is the address listed on the ABN registrations of the Commonwealth’s economy and trade departments.

The new Parliament House, the seat of federal government since 1988, is “pretend,” they say, and the government’s jurisdiction “fiction”.

Over the past fortnight, Shillingsworth has identified himself as an Original Sovereign – a local variation of the international Freemen of the Land movement.

Many of the planning meetings tied to the new protest group involved Indigenous man David Cole, also known as Lurnpa, a leading figure in the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation (OSTF) which was established by non-indigenous man Mark McMurtrie aka Gunham Badi Jakamara after he was impressed in 2009 by the pseudo-legal counsel of David Wynn Millar, an American retired tool and die welder and self-appointed “king of Hawaii”.

Last year The Age and Herald revealed the collaboration between the Original Sovereign Tribal Federation and former One Nation senator Rod Culleton who, at the time, was trying to establish a right-wing political party in a formal alliance with the Indigenous sovereign citizen movement.

In the United States, sovereign citizens are regarded by the Justice Department as a domestic terrorism threat after several armed actions in which law enforcement officers and civilian men, women and children have been killed. They do not have the same label in Australia.

‘Moses’ and the pandemic law

On December 30, video posted to social media accounts run by members of a Sovereign Citizens group showed demonstrators banging on the doors of Old Parliament House, which is now run as a museum. Shillingsworth’s son, known as Buddy, and Bundjalung woman Cindy Roberts (aka Widjabul Dubay) were among them.

Police made five arrests in the days after the fire. One who was arrested, released on bail, arrested again and released again was Nicholas Reed, who is accused of carrying numerous armfuls of kindling and several coolamon loads of “hot coals” to the front of Old Parliament House. An ACT court was told he had been shown in posts on social media stoking the fire.

Reed, a white man who also goes by a “tribal” name, allegedly has a separate pending legal matter in Victoria, and is crowdfunding online for the Djab Wurrung Sovereign Tribal Government Fund, a campaign purportedly to benefit the Djab Wurrung people located in Victoria’s Western District. The most recent campaign has raised $3759.

The Australian has reported that Reed’s bail rules included that he live at an address which, according to property records, is owned by Business Council of Australia president Tim Reed and his wife, Karola Brent, a former Lane Cove councillor on Sydney’s north shore. Tim Reed declined to comment.

Among others in attendance at the fire, though not arrested, was Roberts, who in a video interview with Tartaria Australia on December 10 said she saw herself as Moses on the forecourt of Old Parliament House before revealing that she intended to knock the locks off the doors, enter and reclaim what was rightfully hers.

This week police made two more arrests in the area known as the parliamentary triangle. One was of Buddy Shillingsworth for outstanding warrants related to past driving offences. The other was a white man named Dylan “Didge” Wilson from the NSW Northern Rivers, a self-described “land lore marshal” recognised by a “circle of Elders across this continent”. Both were later released.

But the arrests and charges are not the end of it.

On Sunday, a strong cohort is expected to arrive from Victoria, many motivated by ongoing opposition to Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, whose government succeeded in changing the state’s pandemic response legislation late in the year after weeks of protest by anti-vax and anti-lockdown groups on the steps of Spring Street. Among the props taken to protests were an apparently operational gallows.

Several posts to social media among this group have expressed anger at a decision by a court in Myrtleford, Victoria, in which the protesters had invested high hopes that Andrews would be found guilty of treason. These posts encourage supporters to head to Canberra.

‘No place’

When Senator Thorpe tweeted on the day of the fire: “Seems like the colonial system is burning down. Happy New Year everyone,” it seemed like the action might have broader significance in the Aboriginal protest community than it did. Thorpe later removed the tweet and this week told The Age and Herald: “I stand in solidarity with the Tent Embassy. The people responsible for the fire have disrespected Ngunnawal Traditional Owners. There is no place for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists in the struggle for First Nations sovereignty.”

Back at the Tent Embassy, some key representatives are too nervous of the newcomers to speak on the record. But Ngunnawal and Ngambi traditional owners and senior figures from the earliest Tent Embassy protest cohorts of 1972 -73 have spoken out about the failure of the new group of protesters to observe cultural protocol and obtain consent to conduct their ceremonies on the site.

Meanwhile, as the federal government announced it would establish a $316.5 million Indigenous cultural centre within the parliamentary triangle nearby the area where the embassy stands, they are trying to prepare for the demonstrations and cultural ceremonies which will mark the golden anniversary. The work, they told The Age and Herald, was an assertion of commitment to the legacy of the embassy.

Prominent First Nations activist group Warriors of Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) is clear, though, on the question of sovereignty, and the attempt by the Original Sovereign movement to “co-opt the First Nations Sovereignty rights movement,” according to a spokesperson, Gamilaraay and Kooma woman Ruby Wharton.

The biggest difference between First Nations’ sovereignty and that being claimed by the sovereign citizen movement was simple, she said: “Sovereignty is our birthright.

“It’s our birthright to occupy our traditional homelands, it’s our birthright to speak language, it’s our birthright to practise our traditional laws and protect our Country. The sovereignty these other people talk of is sovereignty away from the Crown, which is totally delusional because the only way these white people have sovereignty in this country is through the Crown.

“It’s delusional for any kind of comparison to be drawn here. It’s absolutely not the same and never will be.”