There’s change in the air for Australia’s 2019 election, with voters skipping the polling day barbecue and casting their ballots early in record numbers. Where does this worrying trend leave our beloved Democracy Sausage?
It’s a treasured tradition of Election Day Down Under, where we do rubbish politics, but great democracy. The humble sausage in bread (onions optional) has come to represent all that’s best about the day the people have their say.
Other, more bragging, democracies go out of their way to discourage voters turning out, from inconvenient polling times and locations right up to gerrymandering and suppression.
None of that for us, thanks. In Australia, it’s compulsory, it’s on a Saturday at your local school, which lays on a fund-raising barbie where you can pick up a cheap sausage and sometimes a lamington for a few bucks after you’ve done your civic duty.
Not this time. Australians have two other options if all the above is a bit inconvenient. There’s the postal vote, which has been around a while and has been increasingly popular.
But the boom this year is at the relatively new pre-polling stations. It’s estimated that five million of Australia’s nearly 17 million enrolled voters will have done their duty at one of these before election day.
That’s a record number, and here’s another one: 97 per cent of the eligible voting population is on the roll – the highest proportion since Federation. On these figures, Australian democracy is in rude, engaged health.
Young people have put down the avocados and smashed a record of their own, with an all-time high of 89 per cent of them enrolled, 50,000 of them Millennials who will be voting for the first time.
One reason for the record level of engagement can be traced to the government’s marriage equality postal survey which resulted in a wave of mostly young, enthusiastic new voters – 98,000 of them – signing up for the first time.
And no-one gave them a sausage
There’s a reluctance in Australia to attribute the surge in younger voters entirely to the postal survey and that’s understandable. They are largely ignored in our politics and diminished or derided in our media, so to say they made a difference would be to take them seriously.
But they understood enough of the political process to get behind a progressive cause in 2017 and even find their way to the postbox – yes, that was a joke going around in Australia at the time about the uselessness of young people.
What’s more, they won. And no-one gave them a sausage. What their first taste of political action gave them was arguably more motivating – victory. Mmmmm.
The postal survey was a traumatic time for Australia’s gay community and the blame for the vitriol it unleashed was sheeted home to its design which, many of us felt, was set up in favour of a ‘no’ vote.
One element of that was the historical tendency of postal voters to skew older, rural and conservative. It all backfired of course and a resounding ‘yes’ was delivered, along with a new generation of motivated voters.
As former New South Wales Liberal MP Peter Phelps put it in a tweet at the time: “So an extra 90,000 people to vote against the Coalition in a general election … Genius”.
Also Genius: Breaking the Pavlovian link between democracy and sausage.
Your Girl Reporter earns her Democracy Sausage.
And not just for the first timers. People who queued patiently in every previous election have also acquired a taste for convenience voting. And it no longer includes a Democracy Sausage.
Why would it, if you’ve already made up your mind? And 76 per cent of voters had done just that by the time the election was called, according to one poll. Why not get it over with and switch off from the campaign circus?
I can see why many Australians would feel that way. It’s been a rancid time in our politics and there are nicer things to be doing at this time of year.
The electoral commissioner Tom Rogers has flagged an inquiry into early voting to determine its effect on campaigning and whether the electorate is moving to a voting period rather than a voting day.
It’s not a bad problem for a democracy to have, that people are so keen to vote they are doing it early in their millions.
Whatever the outcome, I hope we are not witnessing the beginning of the end for the Democracy Sausage. And that the schools haven’t over-ordered on the election day snags.
Here’s wishing you good luck, Australia and good luck to the Democracy Sausage. Somehow, I think you’ll survive. See you on the other side!
© Maria Spackman 2021
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