This Saturday, two days from now at schools and other designated
polling stations around the country about fourteen million Australians will
exercise their right (and their obligation under our compulsory system) to cast
their vote for the next Australian Government.
For nearly thirty years, my wife and I (and later our adult
children) turned up at our local primary school in suburban Sydney – the same school
that our children had attended a few years earlier, and where we had been involved
with the Parents Association for those years – negotiated our way through the
obstacle course of party faithful proffering their “How to Vote” leaflets (they
are called cards for some inexplicable reason) and joined the queue waiting in
line to vote. We would always plan to vote early and thus avoid the congestion,
but somehow we never did, so there was always the same frustration of looking
for a place to park and realising we would have been better off walking from
our home. Many of those handing out the leaflets were our friends – Tom, the ALP
stalwart, John and Liz the Liberals and Keith from the Greens. We never wanted to offend anyone so we accepted all the leaflets even though our minds were made up. After voting
we dutifully handed them back on the way out.
Naturally, there was always a sausage sizzle run by the local guides or
scouting group, a cake stall from the P&C and various other charities
offering assorted bric-a-brac. Later that evening we met with friends for dinner and drinks while watching the outcome on TV and some of us celebrated and others did not.
This year we’re living in a different town, in a different
state – not quite strangers in a strange land. But the local school where we
will vote for the first time in our new electorate will still have the sausage
sandwiches and there will no doubt be a few orange-clad Emergency Service
workers, or the local Fire Brigade to distract us for a few minutes as we
join line of voters. This year we are definitely going to get there early and
we will walk.
Sadly there will be no election night get-together with friends, but I dare say my wife and I will open a bottle of red, and sit in front of the TV. It shouldn't take too long this year for if the polls are anything to be believed and unless there is a dramatic
change in public opinion, Australia will lurch to the right and enter into
several years of conservative Federal Government. I use the term conservative, rather than
Liberal so as not to confuse those non-Australian members of my occasional
reading audience.
Depending on how substantial this lurch is, we may well have
a conservative majority in both houses of assembly (The House of
Representatives and The Senate) and an opposition party so reduced in its ranks
and the quality of its parliamentarians that even its leader may have lost his
seat and even if that does not happen I’ll be surprised if he hangs around.
So what does this all mean for the Australian people?
Well to put it into perspective, our planet will continue (as
it has done for the past four and half billion years) to travel about 150
million kilometres every 365¼ days in its orbit around the main-sequence dwarf
star at the centre of the Solar System and as it does, it will also continue to
rotate on its tilted axis once every 86,400 seconds. During this time its only natural satellite
will synchronously rotate about it every 27.3 days as the two bodies exert
gravitational influences over one another.
As a result of this, the sun will
rise the morning after the election and it will set again on Sunday evening. At some time during the day the tide will
come in, and later that same day, it will go out again. The axis, being tilted such that the amount
of sunlight reaching the surface varies over the course of the year means that our
seasons will continue to change from Spring to Summer, from Autumn to Winter and back again to Spring and
in twelve months’ time, those of us fortunate
enough to survive this sidereal cycle will be a year older, and perhaps even a
little wiser – or not, who can say?
Most of us will breathe a sigh of relief that the torture
associated with what has seemed a lifetime of electioneering and campaigning,
pork-barrelling and fear-mongering will be over. Our next government will get on with its job
of separating intoxicating pre-election commitments into core and non-core
promises and the rest of the population – those fortunate enough – will go to work on Monday morning and get on with
their job of trying to make a living.
I grew up in North Queensland in the 1950s and 1960s at a
time when the ordinary worker was required to join a trade union. Occupational health and safety was practically
never mentioned or considered. There was
no such thing as superannuation and when a working woman married, she was obliged
to leave her job and make way for a frequently less skilled single woman. From 1964, young men on reaching their twentieth
birthday took part in a sortition which required those whose birth date was selected
to spend the next two years in full time National Service as part of the
Menzies Government’s support of the US involvement in the Vietnam War and the ever
present threat of the Domino Theory.
I mention this because even now over forty years later, I
can remember the elation that many felt as 23 years of conservative Australian
government under the stewardship of increasingly less charismatic leaders came
abruptly to a halt with the “It’s Time”
victory of Gough Whitlam. A Labor
Government was in power in Australia. Conscription
ended and Australian forces were withdrawn from Viet Nam. A national health insurance scheme (Medibank
as it was then known) was introduced and the voting age was reduced from 21 to
18. China was officially recognised (it
had after all been there quite a long time), and an Australian embassy opened
in Beijing while at home focus was for the first time given to Aboriginal
affairs and the environment.
Three years later, it all came crashing down. Whitlam was dismissed and in the subsequent
election Malcolm Fraser won in a landslide which provided eight more
years of conservative government until he was beaten by Bob Hawke in the
election that ousted Labor leader, and later Governor-General, Bob Hayden said a
“drover’s dog” could have won.
Six years ago in 2007 the Labor party under Kevin Rudd,
defeated John Howard (who also lost his seat) with as much enthusiasm and triumph (for many of the true
believers at least) as those celebrated victories of 1972 and 1983. Since that time the country has survived the
Global Financial Crisis without entering into recession and has an employment
rate and a debt level that most of the western world can only dream about. The country has been slowly reducing its
carbon footprint, caring and providing more for its disabled than it has ever
have done, improving its education standards and supporting increased
superannuation levels which will protect its aging population into the future.
So why is it then, that more than half of our voters will by
all projections, remove this government from office?
Is it because the overwhelmingly powerful media moguls (one
in particular) want no part of a government which threatens their control of
national networks? Is it because
Australia is a man’s country and the idea of a women at the very top was such
an outrage that her performance as a prime minister was continually
overshadowed by how she became leader? Has the sometimes hubristic performance of
our current prime minister reached a point where voters just want to see the
back of him now that we no longer emotionally subscribe to the concept of a
“Westminster System” preferring to make our choice based on the presidential
style of the party leaders? There is no
doubt that Labor did itself no favours at all and Mr Abbott has clearly gone
from being the least likely Prime Minister in most people’s eyes a few years
ago, to appearing to have a lay down
misere which despite the fact that such a hand means it is so poor that the
holder is certain of losing every trick played, in Australian gambling parlance
is otherwise an “absolute certain” winner.
So much for the rhetorical questioning, cringeworthy as it all is – it won’t matter
after Saturday, at least until the next election.
From a personal perspective, I hope most people will vote
“below the line” in our complicated Senate election and in so doing will thus exercise
their own preferences, not those of the political parties (minor parties
included). Control of both houses of
parliament is not in my view a healthy situation for any government and a strong house of review may at least stall some of the more xenophobic and divisive changes which we may otherwise see over the next term of office.
And on Sunday and every day after that for the foreseeable
future, the sun will come up and the sun will go down; the tide will come in
and the tide will go out and if the theory of plate tectonics is all I believe
it to be, Australia will continue to drift northwards at the breathtaking rate
of somewhere between 10 and 15 cm every year.
Life here and in the rest of the world will go on and I will
continue to remind myself of the comforting privilege of living in a democracy
and not somewhere where corruption and violence determine who leads (or
misleads) our country.
