DON’T ENCOURAGE THEM

Nearly four years ago, in the lead-up to the last Federal Election, I wrote in this space:

“I won’t be voting for John Howard on Saturday. But if you are a Liberal supporter – keep reading. I won’t be voting for Kim Beazley either.”

I said: I won’t be voting for either of them. And I won’t be voting for the Democrats or the Greens or the Hansonites. I won’t be voting “informal” either. I just won’t be voting. Never do.

I have said, and written, many times in the past forty years, that there are two reasons. One, is that I believe (increasingly) that my job as a radio, television and newspaper commentator and columnist actually precludes me from the privilege. And, make no mistake, I do see it as a precious privilege. A democratic right that Diggers have fought and died for.

But, my stubborn stance, over the years, has meant that I can sit down (and have) with a Fraser or a Hawke or a Howard or a Peacock or a Keating or a Beazley or a Latham and ask the hard questions in the days before a federal poll. And it has also meant that I HAVE sat down with them across a couple of microphones the Monday after a win or a loss and they have known (and more importantly I know and my viewers/listeners have known) that I did not vote for them and I did not vote against them.

Even though one of them was best man at my wedding to Jacki Weaver.

I fervently believe that political commentators should NOT vote and I’ll concede that very few of my colleagues support that view.

But if they do vote shouldn’t they, at least, reveal their voting intentions? Aren’t viewers and listeners entitled to know how Laurie Oakes and Ray Martin and Kerry O’Brien and Michelle Grattan intend to vote?

Some powerful commentators pin their colours so firmly to, and so high up the mast, that it isn’t hard to guess where their allegiances lie.

Sydney’s king on breakfast radio, 2GB’s ultra-conservative Alan Jones, is a former speechwriter for Malcolm Fraser. He also, shamelessly, acts as MC at Liberal Party fundraising events.

Phillip Adams on the ABC -- and in his savagely anti-Howard column in The Review magazine for The Australian -- is Jones’s political equivalent as a PR man for the Labor Party.

In the United States you obviously know where Republican columnists like William Buckley Jr and Pat Buchanan are coming from. Buchanan even ran for President as a right-wing Republican!

It might even help radio stations if their on-air stars admitted to their political affiliations. For example, 3AW is erroneously regarded “out there” as a blinkered Liberal Party station. In an election letter a listener told me how surprised she was to hear some of my views on a couple of issues because she wrongly assumed that, because of my time at AW, I “had to be a Liberal”.

The other main reason why I do not vote is that I fervently believe that compulsory voting is undemocratic.

I don’t wish to demean or deride the truths that thousands of men (and women) died defending the democratic rights and the future of this country in two World Wars and many other bloody conflicts.

And right now an umbrella of nations, including this one, is fighting the evil of terrorism – an evil with the aim of destroying the peace and tranquillity and freedom of a lifestyle the Diggers fought for.

But that doesn’t make compulsory voting right. I’ll use the obligatory joke that I first wrote thirty years ago about the little old lady who said:

“I never vote. It only encourages them”.

I believe compulsory voting is an insult. In this country we carry it on as it trickles down through federal, state and local government elections.

People are forced by law to vote in local council elections where they don’t even know when the vote is on let alone who the candidates are or what they stand for.

I know of people fined for not voting in local elections and, when they pleaded ignorance of the event, were told that election dates and candidates were “prominently” displayed in local giveaway newspapers.

The ones you often toss out with the junk mail if you actually receive them.

Federally, with the preferential system, we have had candidates “elected” with less than 500 primary votes.

The most insulting thing as I see it, when I try to find out why this country is the only one in step, is the response that if it weren’t compulsory then “Aussies wouldn’t vote”.

Australians, alone in the western world, are treated like children. If we don’t force you to eat your beans nobody will. It’s for your own good.

Voting is NOT compulsory in the United States, supposedly the new protector of democratic ideals. It is not compulsory in other Commonwealth countries – like Canada and New Zealand (where they get a 90% voluntary turnout).

It is not even compulsory in Britain! The “mother country” from which we inherited our whole system of politics and justice. It is a grotesque, supposedly democratic, imposition. On you.

And don’t write in with what I call the “Andrew Peacock copout” where he has diligently explained to me that “voting is not compulsory in Australia… you just have to attend the polling booth on Election Day”.

You should go because you want to not because you face a fine if you don’t want to. Who wants the votes of voters who don’t want to vote? In a way, by not turning up, they already have.

September 26, 2004

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2004