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Australians take pride in being plain-spoken people. So why do we pussyfoot around when it comes to voting? Take a dekko at this morning’s Newspoll of voting intention. It doesn’t include a “don’t know”. All it has is a polite footnote that states “six per cent ‘uncommitted’ and three per cent ‘refused’ [and were] excluded”.
What really happened is that close to one-in-ten Australians of voting age either told Newspoll’s poor callers to go, er, and plant seed in their boot or mouthed goldfish noises down the line – or every permutation in between. It’s a fair bet a good proportion of these simply didn’t care. This, of course, is a deeply subversive thought. We always think of our electoral system as one based on compulsory voting. It actually demands compulsory enrolment. While the Electoral Commission would like to see you fill in the ballot papers, technically it’s fine just to have your name on the list, get it crossed off, collect the forms, o off and turn them into origami.
Today is the day that enrolments close for July 2. The Electoral Commission is in a tizz. Ninety-four per cent of us are apparently already on the roll, but it’s still warning us “that leaves approximately 950 000 eligible Australians who are not currently enrolled to vote in the 2016 federal election.”
The worthier websites have been cranking up their own campaigns. “Enrol To Vote, Because 1 Million Australians Haven’t,” the Huffington Post proclaimed a fortnight ago in its best “Don’t forget your hankie, dear” tone. By Friday it was shouting “Reminder: Enrol To Vote Right Now! It Closes On Monday”, warning “enrolling to vote is super important”.
The house magazine of gussied-up and dumbed-down academia, The Conversation, has been even more enthusiastic. “Lecturers: encourage your students to enrol and vote in the election” it proclaimed in almost North Korean tones before going off and indulging in a little hand-wringing with “Many young people aren’t enrolled to vote – but are we asking them the wrong question?”
Fairfax and the ABC have been equally fearful for da’ yoof. “Half of Australia’s 18 year-olds will not vote in this election,” 7.30 fretted 10 days ago while the Sydney Morning Herald decided to report matters sunnyside-up: “Two teenagers behind an initiative to get more young people involved in the political process say Gen Y isn’t as politically apathetic as many like to believe.”
Keeping up the finger-nail chewing, The Conversation claimed,
“One study of Year 12 students and non-students across Australia found most young people enrol to vote because they consider it the right thing to do, but only half reported they would vote if voting was not compulsory … Many viewed political leaders as dishonest and untrustworthy … Another survey published in 2014 identified feelings of powerlessness about the democratic process … Previous studies found young people see “career politicians” as distant. Some young people struggle to differentiate political parties from their members.”
Gosh. In other words youngsters are swallowing the “everything is rotten, we’re all being repressed” rubbish spouted by their teachers, their lecturers, Fairfax and the ABC and, as a result (gasp!), not enrolling to vote.
“The 18- to 24-year-old demographic has the worst numbers on voter enrolment,” the ABC reported this morning. “Nearly half of all 18-year-olds, and a total of nearly 350,000 young people, are not enrolled to vote.”
Well, now we know why – or at least have an explanation why a good chunk aren’t on the roll. As for the rest, here’s hoping they’re doing what young people are always supposed to do: bBreaking the rules.
I don’t think any of this has anything at all to do with left-leaning media, since those who fail to enrol do not read such things in the first place. Don Argus wrote a great article last week in “The Australia” and said that fixing equality is never going to happen while-ever people choose lifestyles that ensure inequality. Bravo to Mr. Argus. I’ve always thought the ‘inequality’ debate was full of vexatious cant and absolute propaganda. Argus said we could only hope to tackle “equality of OPPORTUNITY”. Some politicians – and quite a few academics like Joseph Stiglizt – are not intelligent enough to know the difference.
Of course, I meant “fixing INequality”. Doah!
The leftoids always want equal outcomes – an impossibility, of course, but the Robin Hood myth never dies.
Jeremy Clarkson, he of now-sacked-from Top Gear fame, wrote an article about 5 weeks ago that was reprinted in the Weekend Australian Review section. Essentially, Clarkson lives in an unremarkable London suburb (like a hundred others, he says) but as part of his job he is loaned cars to test for a week then write some article on. This time he was loaned a Ferrari 488 for a week … he could not believe the amount of wimpy, spiteful envy he copped from all directions. He even had people thumping on the roof, screaming obscenities at him when he was stopped at traffic lights.
Brain-dead populism indeed. People deserve exactly what they get.
Good article again thank you Christian. I could only add that the left have only ever viewed democracy at best as the most civilised/easiest way to be able to legalise/legitimise their desire to have access to the efforts of others, and for them to be able to control the production of wealth and to control those who produce it. They realised that it is easier to ‘win’ an election than it is to start [and win] an armed ‘revolution’ to enable them to legislate for the ‘re-distribution’ of ‘the wealth’ by force [as in the USSR], and they also know that such legislation often seemed to suffer from lack legitimacy, even if it is/was ‘legal’ and even when it was lethal [between them Stalin, Hitler and Mao killed around 100 million people].
Winston Churchill was reputed to have said – “If a man is not a socialist at 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.” Regardless of the source of that quote, or even if its merits are true, many more young people are driven by emotion rather than by reason, and, as jealousy is the strongest of all human emotions they are more inclined to be ‘sucked in’ by the prospect/promise of the ‘something for nothing’ message implied by socialism. That is why the leftist media sources as quoted above are all so keen for young people to enroll. That is also why the leftist media sources unrelentingly attack conservatives, they know that by the time they reach 40 many of the ‘would be revolutionaries’ might now actually be wealth producers/creators and that they might have even accumulated some wealth and are more likely to now use ‘democracy’ to preserve their wealth rather than to use democracy to ‘re-distribute the wealth’.