By Michael Duffy
Today I undergo a rite of passage a little later than most Australians. I will be voting for the first time. I've always found the idea of compulsory voting repugnant, so when the electoral commission told me to go on the electoral roll when I turned 18, I wrote back explaining why I'd rather not. My letter must have been received by an enlightened bureaucrat, because I heard nothing more until last year, when I expressed my views on radio and received a flurry of official letters.
Most democracies don't have compulsory voting. Of those that do, most treat it in a token manner and don't enforce the law. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Australia is the only Western nation of any size to enforce compulsion seriously.
Curiously, there's a widespread belief that voting is actually not compulsory, and that all you have to do is turn up on polling day and have your name marked off. This is wrong.
In a speech last year, Tim Evans, the Australian Electoral Commission's director of elections systems and policy, noted that a number of legal decisions had indicated the voter must do more than this.
A look at the relevant federal and state electoral laws shows that voters must vote, and voting entails marking the ballot paper to indicate whom you wish to elect. Of course, no one checks, but that is quite different from saying that not voting is legal. If you drive down a suburban street at 120kmh and no one sees you, you're still speeding.
Most of us are fond of forcing people to vote: several polls in the past decade have indicated more than 70 per cent support for the present system. The main argument used in favour of it is that the higher voter turnout produced by compulsion leads to a healthier civic life. People, so the argument runs, are forced to pay attention to politics and the vote reflects the wishes of everyone. The result is a more unified state.
Some point to Australia's alleged egalitarianism and success in assimilating immigrants as proofs of the benefits of a political system where everyone feels involved.
The fundamental problem with this line of argument is that no one else can see it. The apparently unique benefits provided to Australia, the claimed superiority of our democracy, are invisible to foreigners.
Of course, Australia is a pretty good place. But if compulsory voting had half the benefits claimed for it, Australia ought to be clearly superior to other democracies in the eyes of the world. Other nations ought to have adopted it, or be seriously considering doing so. But they're not.
The truth is, our political life is not obviously superior to that of, say, New Zealand or Canada or Germany.
Another argument in favour of compulsory voting is that Labor would do less well without it. That might have been the case years ago, but according to Evans: "There appears to be a consensus that there would have been the same result at each of the last four [federal] elections if they had been held under a voluntary regime … On balance, there is no empirical evidence that a move to voluntary voting would advantage one major party over another."
So why do almost all members of the political class (which includes the media) support compulsion? Self-interest might be one reason. If lots of people are forced to pay more attention to politics than they would otherwise, this raises the status of those involved in it. There's also the money. If more people are forced to follow politics, they're more likely to buy a newspaper to find out about it. And a high turnout of voters is in the financial interests of politicians and their staff. Evans noted: "If a candidate secures 4 per cent of the formal vote cast in the electorate for which they are a candidate, they are funded $1.95 for each formal vote. At the October 2004 [federal] election, the total amount of public funding paid was $41,926,158.91."
One of the pleasures of going on the electoral roll has been to discover how this money is used by candidates to lie to voters. Just this week I received a letter from my local Labor member assuring me "the Liberals would bankrupt our state".
Our taxes at work.
Actually, I'm looking forward to voting today. Often there was no one I would have wanted to vote for anyway, but now there is. Developer donations to political parties are corrupting and distorting our democracy, and I intend to vote for the Greens because they oppose this and have put so much effort into exposing it, not least through their excellent website democracy4sale.org.
It's true the Greens also have some deplorable policies on the environment, but none of us is perfect.
For the same reason I'll be voting for Save Our Suburbs in the upper house. The group's president, Tony Recsei, has done more than anyone to alert us to the horrors and intellectual shoddiness of urban consolidation.
On a different note, this election sees the resignation from state politics of Peta Seaton, the Opposition spokeswoman on finance. She is leaving to spend more time with her daughter, who was born in the year Seaton came into Parliament, 1996. Seaton has been the major source of good policy for the Opposition in recent years, and will be sorely missed.