How To: How To Vote.

Normally I enter the gauntlet at the polling booth with a dramatic announcement:  “I vote from a no paper platform.”  I abhor the mounds of paper handed out to voters on election day.  I know who is who, I know how to preference and I don’t need a piece of paper to show me what to do.  So I felt like a hypocrite when the Greens asked me to hand out How To Vote cards and I said yes.

The good news was that the Greens actually had to recycle their HTV, not just out of the goodness of their hearts, but because in my electorate, funding didn’t cover the amount of cards that would be needed to begin with.  So we had recycling boxes set up specifically for greens HTV, and we implored people to bring them back to us directly, which probably 1/3 people did.  What was most entertaining about this was that those who did bring them back to us also brought back Liberal and Labor HTV at the same time – to the somewhat baffled amusement of their representatives.

I learnt a lot of things about voters by doing HTV.  Some of them like to make a big show of taking one parties cards, and not the others.  A lot of people refuse to take any cards, and those that do take them will most often take all of them.  Some come back and tell you that they “want you to win” and some come back and tell you to “fuck off and hug a tree.”  Some are downright rude to certain parties HTVers.  Which, in general, is just plain funny, because as soon as they’re gone, the opposition HTVers will come over and check you’re okay.  Because at the end of the day, the HTVers are probably closer than most people can imagine – handing out cards and being involved in democracy is a very unifying process.

At one booth I worked at, the three of us had it down to a system.  The Labor lady stopped the punters and asked if they were going to vote.  If they said yes, she’d say “Well look, we have a variety of info you might be interested in.  I have info for Julia…” then the Lib chick would say “and I have info on Tony…” and I’d follow up with “and I have the info on Bob, and our handout is smaller.”  It’s amazing the amount of appeal a smaller flyer had to some voters.  But the end point is that the three of us, the Lab, the Lib and the Green all got along like great mates.  They shared their party funded lunches, I confessed I’d never voted Green before.  The Lab admitted she only ever votes Green in the Senate.  The Lib confessed she hates Tony Abbott’s guts.  Doing HTV is about as committed as selling tickets in a chook raffle – you’re by no means the poster child for your party.

Not only that, but there is a lot of common ground on election day.  In fact, the young Lib I talked too and I had so much common ground that we were left a bit confused as to why we didn’t actually vote for the same parties – that bit was left unsaid, but we both knew it was out there.  It wasn’t just individuals with common ground, in my electorate, the Libs and the Greens both agreed that Labor was 2^nd preference on the HTV.  Naturally, we all wished our voters were smart enough not to actually need the cards. 

PS.

How To Vote cards - are they important? 

And a site that explains HTV although it's too late now.  The last mock HTV card is quite entertaining.

howtovote.com.au

Policies – no party is 100% perfect.

Do you agree with all of Labor's policies?  How about all of the Liberal's policies?

No?

Interesting, because roughly nine times out of ten people have voted for one of those two parties, despite not believing in every policy they have.

I bring this up because it’s the biggest reason I’m given not to vote Green.  “I could never vote Green – I don’t agree with their policy on free tooth extraction of rotten molars in the under 50s*…” you know, that sort of thing.  People are hung up on some small time policy that they’ve been scaremongered into believing will cause the downfall of all society as we know it.

The thing is that I doubt anyone believes in all the policies of any one party.  I’m pretty sure Penny Wong isn’t completely down with Labor’s stance on same-sex marriage, and I sure as hell know Malcolm Turnbull isn’t down with the Liberal’s lack of “real action” on climate change.  If even the party faithful aren’t true believers, then it’s going to be pretty rare for the average punter to find a party with a 100% policy match.  That is of course, if you could figure out exactly what each party’s policies actually are – and if you could find points of difference between the Lib-Labs.

I repeat what I’ve said before – I saw more policy on The Age’s “vote-a-matic” than in any other piece of campaign paraphernalia.  The Age didn’t oversimplify, and it let us play “three party preferred” games.  Instead of giving a red or blue answer, it showed us a breakdown of how our ideals matched those of the three major parties.

81.3% - on most tests that would be an "A."

This was a little revolutionary – choosing a party based on policies!  I had friends emailing me to reveal their results and their resulting confusion.  People who’d always voted Labor who now found they were actually in more agreement with the Libs.  Liberals who were actually Green at heart.  People who were split in perfect thirds.  Just like politics, voters are complicated.

All relationships, even those between voters and political parties, come with deal breakers.  Dr Phil and Oprah would be proud of me for internalising this.  You have to decide what your deal breakers are first, and if your party isn’t giving you what you need, you have to “kick them to the kerb.”  Maybe you don’t agree 100% with the exact boundaries of the Green’s marine parks, but as a lesbian fisherwoman in Bob Katter’s electorate, can you really vote for the man who doesn’t believe there are any homosexuals in North Queensland?  Maybe you’re a unionised teacher from inner Sydney who doesn’t agree with the Greens acceptance of refugees who come by boat, but did you really agree with Labor’s myschool website?  Maybe you’re a selfish merchant banker who’s rich uncle is about to die, and the Green’s death duty tax might shave a bit off your preposterously large inheritance, but you’re making your own fortune trading renewable energy and carbon offsetting shares… so do you really want to keep voting for the Liberal’s lack of action?

Find your dealbreakers.  Analyse the policies.  Kick someone to the kerb.  I thought I was a Labor voter, but it turned out 80% of me wanted the Greens – how red or blue were you?

*As far as I’m aware, not an actual or specific Green policy.  But it does sound like a good idea to me.

Illiterati – call the reading and writing not-line.

How would you feel if you were a football coach and half your players didn’t understand the rules?  Not only that, but half of them fail at tackling, kicking and receiving the ball.  Would your games seem like a lost cause?

Welcome to the playing field of Australian literacy.

We live in a “lucky” country where 46% of Australians DO NOT have the level of literacy required to cope with everyday life.  46%!  Nearly half of our countrymen cannot read and comprehend at the level necessary to successfully navigate everyday work requirements.  That’s before we look at numeracy, where 53% of people are failing to make the grade.

I am appalled and shocked beyond belief.  Despite the fact that Australia is supposed to value a fair go and give everyone a chance at making something of their life, it’s pretty clear this isn’t the case.  An education system (or systems) that fails to close the literacy gap is directly contributing to keeping a large slice of Australians downtrodden, poor and unemployable.  The ABS found that scores in prose literacy alone were reflected in a large gap in median weekly income:

            Highest Levels of prose literacy = $890/week

            Lowest Levels of prose literacy = $298/week

If you told kids at school that excellent reading was valued at $592/week for the rest of their lives, would you see an improvement?  How about if you told their parents, carers and families?  By these calculations, failure to achieve literacy costs the individual $1.2million in a working lifetime of just 40 years.  (That’s $592/wk x 52wk/yr x 40yrs = $ 1 231 360 for those numerate types playing at home.)

If illiteracy costs that much to individuals, consider what it costs companies and businesses struggling to find employees.  The Australian had a great article on this topic earlier this year  – Forging New Strategies to tackle Workplace Illiteracy

In brief, what Heather reports is that:

-       75% employers report being affected by low literacy/numeracy

-       4 million workforce members can’t confidently use typical workplace documents

-       no improvement in workforce literacy in 10 years

-       poor spelling and grammar wastes time and money

-       jobs where low literacy/numeracy levels can get by are disappearing

I for one can’t comprehend why students are allowed to leave school without the basics.  Repeating until you achieve seems to have become a thing of the past and no-one knows why.  We all hear “they need to stay with their friends – it’s bad for self esteem to be kept down” but I’m pretty sure being illiterate isn’t great for your self-esteem either.  Some fingers are pointed at governments, claiming that students are moved on to keep costs down – a student who repeats costs more.  I’m pretty sure that if you looked at it long term, the cost comparisons between literate and illiterate students would come out in favour of repeating.  A year or two extra at school vs many years on unemployment benefits?  I don’t think you have to be super-numerate to figure that one out.

If Australia wants to be a world leader in the economic game then we’d better start teaching our students to read and write properly.  Or else, like so many European soccer clubs, we’ll have to start importing star players from overseas.

PS.

Australian Bureau of Statics – Australia’s Literacy and Life Skills 2006

ABS - Australia's Literacy and Life Skills 2006

PPS.

Act Now – the who, what, when and where of illiteracy

Act Now - Illiteracy

Green Vote Is Up. Wall Street is Down.

There has been a lot of talk of historic third party highs and the potential for the Greens vote to crash out before the next election.  It seems to me they’ve been around for 20 years federally and pretty much only gone from strength to strength.  Nothing represents this better than a graph.

Green Votes on the Up.  (data from Wiki)

Unless this years Green vote can be considered as their third party peak, having already exceeded the best results of both the Democrats and the mysterious DLP, then it looks pretty certain that their vote will continue to grow.  Since 1996 the Green vote has only increased – in net terms they have never lost a voter.  So for all the Liberal nay-sayers trying to rain on the parade, I have to pull you up.  If you saw a graph for the economy looking like this, you’d be stoked.  In fact, if you were an astute investor, you’d probably be rushing out to buy shares.

PS.

Read the Greens blurbs on the Greenslide.  In brief, in three seats the Greens have beaten the Liberals to become the two party preferred vote with Labor.  Also worth noting that rural and regional seats had an average Green swing of 3%.

Greens election results.

Preaching to the Converted.

The problem with environmentalists is that, for the most part, they preach* to a receptive audience.  In many ways it is similar to a religious minister preaching hellfire and damnation from within the safe confines of his own church.  Presumably only religious people attend church, which would suggest they already know and understand the theology.  That is not to say that such Sunday morning gatherings are not useful in maintaining the flock – by all means environmentalists need to keep networking with other like-minded folk.  If it helps to keep the faith, then so be it.

Environmental Bogan - a rare breed.

What interests me more is the need for “environmental missionaries” to get out there and create converts.  We need to see the hardcore faithful taking extended leave to doorknock bogan** heartlands, to attend schoolies week and hand out green lolly frogs in the name of the planet, to hold stalls at V8 car races and get the climate change elephant on the scene of any Cronulla-style race riots as they unfold.  The “save the planet” message needs to move beyond the pseudo-educated masses and head on down to drop out land.  Because that is where the real change needs to happen.

The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC – UK) has had a look at who says what when it comes to the environment – I’m assuming Australian studies would say the same thing.  They found “people fall into four categories of environmentalist  - committed, mainstream, occasional or non-committed.”  If we consider it as an environmental continuum, we can assume that the first three groups are somewhere along the way to doing the right things already.  The last group, also called the “non-environmentalists” are the ones who really need a kick in the pants to get started.  In brief, what did the ESRC find out about these environmental heathens?

Non – Environmentalists:

·      younger (lower mean ages than other groups)

·      male (more-so than other groups which were roughly sex balanced)

·      renters, either private or housing commission equivalent

·      low income earners

·      uneducated (large proportion with no qualifications)

·      non-voting (in the UK –  so probably our donkey kings)

The gist of it is that these aren’t the people out there buying books on “green living” or borrowing them from local libraries.  These are the edge of society that many of us prefer not to think about.  While committed environmentalists are already acting and voting Green, these non-environmentalists could really benefit.  The policies of the Greens that relate to taxing the rich and providing more extensive free health and dental-care would appeal to these bogans, if they could be interested in politics.  I’m sure that “affordable housing is a human right” would also interest them – if they could ever afford their own small piece of land to care for, maybe it would give them an insight into caring for the earth as a whole.

I don’t know how big the bogan voting population is.  But I do know they are currently the perfect fodder for the fear mongering of both major parties on a variety of irrelevant issues.  What the Green movement needs is dedicated missionaries heading into deepest darkest bogan-land to convert the natives.  Because preaching to the converted can only ever maintain the status quo. 

*I’m not saying that environmentalism is a spurious belief or a “church” of any kind.  But a church is a common social construct representative of a group of people, and as such, an appropriate analogy.

**I use the term “bogan” in the most loving sense possible.  Coming from a bogan district myself, I understand that there are “bogan environmentalists,” but nothing sums up this stereotypical group of people better than the word “bogan.”

PS. 

Read the ESRC report into Environmental Action - Linking Attitudes and Behaviour

$2.6 million of votes for sale

Of course now that we can see the sheer size of the donkey vote, now we know that roughly one in twenty people don’t care at all.  Which makes me wonder what kind of commodity donkey voters will become.  Will the major parties try to buy these votes with actual money next time around? 

Maybe websites will spring up where disillusioned voters register their trip to the ballot for sale.   They could sell their [1] on ebay amidst furious bidding from J.Gill and T.Abb, and turn a tidy profit on their complete disinterest.  After all, if voters are already “being bought” by election promises, does it really matter if politicians switch to direct marketing?  I’d warrant $5 in the pocket would be more motivation for a lot of people than any of the millions of dollars of televised nonsense we’ve just been privy to.  

I’ve had a hard time tracking down the cost of the Lib-Labs campaigns, but I’d be really interested to see what they spent per head of the voting population.  For some people, voting is such a chore that if a Lib-Lab stepped up and volunteered to take the trip to the polling booth for them, I’m pretty sure they’d say yes.  We all know it’s not hard to front up at multiple booths and vote multiple times, either under the same name or different ones.  I’m actually wondering at what stage of our non-result election we’ll get around to uncovering the extent of this years rorting.

Rorting and ebay aside, we do know is how much each vote would have been worth.  The Australian Electoral Commission gives funding to parties based on their number of first preferences.  This year each [1] was worth close enough to $2.31.  So if you voted Greens, they got your $2.31 to help fund their campaign next time.  If you voted for them in the House of Reps and the Senate, they received $4.62 – essentially a gift from you to them.  So I headed over to the  AEC Virtual Tally Room to find out just how much all this donkeying was costing.

According to their results, 507 481 Senate votes and 654 981 House Of Reps votes were informal, bringing us to a grand total of 1 162 462 informal votes.  That's over one million votes that didn’t get across the line.  If we cost these at the $2.31 funding rate for a proper vote, we get the staggering figure of $2 685 287.22.  While I consider the 22c important, it’s the $2.6 million that really gets me.  So much money that should have been reinvested in the Lab-Libs, the Greens, the Socialist Alliance, the Hunters and Fishers or the Sex Party, and now it’s just sitting around earning interest for the AEC.  Do you reckon they’ll be having a donkey themed xmas party this year?

There is a price on everything, on everyone and every vote.  I know we all struggled finding interested buyers, but the real question is did we sell ourselves too cheaply this year?

PS.

People definitely tried to sell their 2007 votes. So why haven’t we hear about it this year?

Ebay - 2007 votes for sale

Will the real donkeys please stand up?

Originally I was angry about the donkey voting fever that swept the nation.  The only silver lining I could see in the indecisive chaos was that the bumper stickers were going to be really simple: 

“Don’t blame me, I VOTED!”  

Or for those of us keen to name and shame

 “Don’t blame me, blame Mark Latham.”  

I do find it interesting that a lacklustre politician has now put himself in a position where he will be remembered forever after as the “donkey king.”  If the only political voice these poor lost souls heard was Mark Latham, then Australia pretty much got what was coming to it.

Because it’s our fault too.  We, the dutiful voting public, have failed to convince our donkey voting friends and acquaintances that it was worth doing, and we should cop some of the blame.  We don’t like to talk politics in Australia.  I mean we do now, now that we’re stuck in this idiot position.  Now we’re keen to tell people how preferences worked and why they are a complete dickhead for voting Liberal.  Now we’re openly telling the Labor voters they missed the memo and the Green voters they’re a pack of pretentious wankers.  But before the election we were all deathly quiet and a real political discussion was hard to come by. 

At the end of the day it’s our own fault that so many donkeyed out.

Maybe not the most convincing reason...

PS.  

Please visit Compulsory Voting, NOT and see if you find them convincing...Compulsory Voting, Not