Post Election Blues

Voting is obligatory in Australia, which is just as well. Because the policies offered by the two main parties are so weak and illogical that I’d wager that most people wouldn’t bother voting if they didn’t have to.

I’ve heard the parties here being described as being similar to two big department stores (Myer and David Jones in the Australian context). The both sell the same things and constantly have a sale on. To labour a simile, I’d say they both package things up that are a disappointment when you get them home.

On one side you have the Liberals who aren’t really liberal at all. They are somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun and the rantings of their lug eared leader make Margaret Thatcher look like Mother Theresa. The highlight of their campaign was to “Stop the Boats” as though a Spanish Armada was en route to the Australian coast rather than the occasional rickety fishing boat filled with desperate Afghanis. Australia is willing to spend billions on an unwinnable war in Afghanistan but is not willing to spend a fraction of this amount helping the unfortunate victims of that conflict.

However, their opponents in the Labor Party are not able to make capital out of this issue as the only difference between them and the Liberals is that Labor wants to send the boat people to East Timor, whereas the Liberals chosen destination is Nauru. East Timor is an expert on refugees of course, although mainly in the export of them. The Liberals have chosen Nauru because it’s one of the few countries in the world that has not signed the United Nations convention on refugees. Thus Australia, which is a signatory, would be able to sidestep its legal and moral responsibilities.

And the very fact that hardly anyone has mentioned this moral bankruptcy in the course of the election campaign is as good an indication as any of the hollowness of current Australian politics.

Labor, as I mention above, don’t have the moral high ground. They have also betrayed their working class roots and are now a party focused on protecting powerful interest groups. They even spell their name in the American way and not the traditional British/Irish way of “Labour”. They say this is because of their roots in the Victorian mining boom of the 19th Century. Californian immigrants brought an American tradition of Trade Unionism and the Labor Party was born.

Yet I’m inclined to think that they owe their spelling to their devotion to American politics with its concentration on Presidential figures and policies aimed at their biggest donors. I have lived under a Labor/Labour government for the first time in my life these past three years, but I have to say it has been a disappointment. They kept the country out of the global recession and made some symbolic gestures rather than addressing endemic poverty of the indigenous people. But in getting rid of their leader three months ago, they showed that they are as power hungry as their opponents. Government for the sake of it, rather than Government for the people seems to be their motto.

As I can’t vote in elections here, I’ve taken it upon myself to question those who can about the intricacies of the Australian voting system. Sadly I haven’t found anyone who is up to this task. While voting is obligatory, understanding the process isn’t.

As a result, people stand outside election booths handing out “how to vote cards” which sounds like the sort of thing that Stalin used to do. The reason for this is that Australians are obliged to complete a preference for every candidate, even when 30 or so are standing. This adds nothing to the election result but allows election nerds (of which I confess to being a paid up member) to calculate a “two party preferred” vote. God help them if the Greens ever make the breakthrough and become a viable third party. Australia may have to come up with the world’s first three dimensional voting card.

The senate election is particularly strange, as people vote for it on the same day. It makes you wonder why they don’t just have one house. It should be said in their defence that at least they allow people to vote in this election, unlike in Britain where the practice is typically to inherit a seat in the House of Lords, passed down from your ancestor who acted as muscle for Oliver Cromwell. Alternatively, you are gifted a seat by the Prime Minister or you happen to be a Protestant Bishop. This in a country that pretends to be multi cultural and lectures Ireland on its Priest influenced culture.

We Irish aren’t much better mind you. We have an Upper House or Senate which performs a function that is about as clear to the public as the monthly management meetings at Al Qaeda. The election process to this house was determined in the 1930s when the world, it is fair to say, had a casual attitude towards democracy. The founding fathers wanted a virtuous assembly of artists and professors who would sit in patrician judgement over the foolish and uneducated laws passed by the lower house.

We Irish must be the only people in the world who elect artists to our parliament as a matter of constitutional law and allow University graduates to vote in Senate elections, but not factory workers. Democracy, as Winston Churchill said is the least bad form of Government.

After all the votes have been counted in Australia, the result is unclear. The two main parties have finished with exactly the same number of seats, which is sweetly ironic given their identical policies and campaign strategies. Thus, they are both now engaged in that strange courtship ritual peculiar to hung parliaments. Both parties are busy trying to charm the same Greens and Independents that they spent the last six weeks attacking in the campaign.
Soon it will all be settled and we can return to having the civil servants run the country. Nauru or East Timor will get richer but pretty much everything else will stay the same.