It is a beautiful, cool, sunny, Saturday morning in Canberra, and my partner and I just walked the few hundred metres to the local school hall to vote in the federal election, both for the House of Representatives and for half of the Senate. Federal and state elections are always held on Saturdays in Australia and voting is compulsory. The House of Representatives is voted on in its entirety every 3 years while the Senate is voted on every 6 years, with half of them facing the voters at the same time as the House of Representatives does.
As we walked towards the queue inside the gates of the school, volunteers supporting the various parties and independent candidates were handing out their ‘How to vote’ (HTV) leaflets. I didn’t say anything this time around (unlike last time1) except ‘no thanks’ but my partner, when a Liberal Party volunteer proffered their HTV, replied with an emphatic “No way!”, and then wished most of the others ‘good luck’. Very pointed.
Once we got to the end of the queue, we stood behind what appeared to be three generations of a family: granny, mum and dad, and a little girl who, when asked by my partner how old she was, stated she was ‘two and a half’. At that age the ‘half’ is very important! Getting near the front of the queue we were asked if we were registered to vote in this electorate, and if not, to get out of the queue and, I presume, get the ballot papers for the appropriate electorate. As we were near the front of the queue, a couple of blokes behind us said they should have brought their American friend down with them to see how much better it is to vote here, and not in the “chaos of American elections”2.
As we got to the front of the queue, about 15 minutes after our arrival, we were directed to a table, gave our names and addresses and were marked off what appeared to be a huge ledger-like computer (machine readable) printout. Then we were handed a small paper for the House of Representatives containing a list of 6 names with adjacent boxes, and a much larger Senate paper with columns of candidates’ names below a line, above which is the party or independent affiliation of each column of names. You take these papers, and for the House of Representatives, you number each of the boxes in order of your preference for the particular candidate. So your first choice gets a ‘1’; your second choice gets a ‘2’ and so on, down to your last choice, which in my case was the Liberal candidate. To my knowledge, Pauline Hanson’s One Notion Party don’t run candidates in the Australian Capital Territory, probably because it is the most progressive jurisdiction in the nation, so the Liberal Party were last. With the Senate voting paper, you can put a number against each of the individual candidates (below the line voting), or vote above the line and accept the order of candidates that each of the parties or independents have below the line.
After numbering both bits of paper, you fold them, and put them in the respective ballot boxes, and walk out into the sunshine. All the above stuff was organised by the Australian Electoral Commission, an independent body that runs federal elections and decides on electoral boundaries. All the people directing proceedings were smiling, relaxed, mostly middle aged AEC staff, who are largely temporarily employed while the voting and vote counting are under way3.
After leaving the school building we saw a hand-drawn sign with an arrow and ‘BBQ’, which usually means you have to queue up again for your ‘democracy sausage’ (usually a sausage, caramelised onion and a sauce of your choice on a buttered slice of bread), but this one had egg and bacon rolls, for which we both opted ($10 in total). The BBQ and adjacent cake and pot plant stalls were put on by the Parents and Citizens Association (P&C) for the school in which we had just voted, so we bought a cake and a couple of lemon and ginger slices. The P&C will probably reap a few thousand dollars for the school from this effort. While we munched on our rolls we chatted to a few neighbours who were munching on their democracy sausages. After we had finished we headed over to a local café for a coffee, and then wandered back home.
Elections in Australia are such relaxed, straightforward and dare I say, enjoyable, events compared to those in other countries. In addition, the first past the post system under which so many of those countries (e.g. UK, US, Canada) operate, only allow you to vote for someone, but not against them. This is a major shortcoming where there are more than two candidates. If those countries say that preferential voting is too complex for their people, then they are admitting that their populace is thicker than that of Australia. Understandable.
Now we wait for the results to start coming in tonight.
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