Mon 19 Nov 2007

Random Political Entry

Walked over the railway line to "the other side of town" (no, seriously) to vote just now. Australia has a federal election on Saturday, voting is compulsory here and I'm going to be Los Angeles at the time. So it was off to pre-poll. Always a much more pleasant experience than voting on the day, since it took about three minutes, as opposed to 20 or more after waiting in queues.

Because of the way we vote, the voting process does have its lighter moments. For the lower house (where the majority party or coalition forms "the government" and the leader of that party is the Prime Minister), it's a vote to pick the guy in your electoral district. So numbering 1 through N where, in my case, there were 6 candidates. You have to fill in every box or it's invalid, so there are advantages to being above your main opponent for those people who lose patience at some point and just finish their selections 4, 5, 6, ... working down the page.

For the Senate (upper house), it's a vote for the state representatives, elected proportionally based on the number of votes the party gets. This is the legendary "tablecloth voting paper", since there are so many parties! Today, the instruction from the guy checking me in and giving me the paper was "fill in one number above the line, or 79 below" (cue laughter at the prospect). The deal is that if you number one box "above the line" (the party box), your 79 votes are spread out according to that party's pre-registered preferences. Or you can do it by hand and stand there for 15 minutes trying to fill in 79 boxes on something that is too wide to fully unfurled inside the voting booth. Yeah, right! One number for me, thank you very much.

Generally, as an accommodation to the compulsory voting law, voting in Australia is a relatively painless ordeal. The AEC website is well set out and generally fairly informative. I was a little horrified to read this report that was a summary of an audit performed on the electronic machines that are going to be used in very limited circumstances. What is worrying here is not the report itself, but what it doesn't say. Who provides the equipment? What are the standards that they claim it is in compliance with? How was the audit conducted? Why is the whole report confidential apart from the executive summary? So many questions. Since they're only going to be used for low-vision or blind voters, plus some overseas Defence Forces personnel (ironic question for the day: why do we call soldiers who attack other people on their home turf "Defence Forces"?), the damage caused by mistakes this time around should be reasonably limited. There's a thin edge of the wedge problem here, though.

Unfortunately, this election cycle has been even more disappointing than previous ones and has often made me really angry at the apathy shown by the candidates towards anything resembling the country's future. The incumbent government (the Liberal Party, who are actually the conservatives, for overseas viewers) have been in office for so long they have moss growing on them. They aren't doing a particularly good job in so many areas of importance. Unfortunately, the only credible opposition party (Labor) are also not particularly impressive. Since the whole campaign has been an exercise in seeing which party can look more like the other one, there's not a lot to choose, except that the people currently doing the damage should probably sit out for a bit to reflect on their sins. We really, desperately need strong, unselfish, globally aware leadership in this country and it's not going to happen this time around because those candidates aren't up for election. The promises that won't be delivered upon (particularly by the current government; almost nothing they've promised couldn't have been done two years ago when it wasn't an election year), the money being wasted, the manipulation of the system, with neither main party announced their "official campaign launch" until a month after the election was announced, since, until they officially launch, the taxpayer picks up the tab, even though campaigning was all that was happening... :-( It's just a drawback of the democratic republic form of government.

And thus endeth my only local political commentary for hopefully another year or so.

Topics: politics