Everyone
The girl's in the garden. I'm studying. The XX are playing. Autumn's kicking in.
And Tasmania's had a state election. Ordinarily, I wouldn't worry too much about what happens in Tasmania; who cares, right? To me, Tassie is the home of poorly treated convicts and mass murderes. It's wet, too. And it's always very eager to be seen among the Big Boys of Australian federal states.
But it's not. In reality, Tasmania is the New Zealand of Australia: smaller, a little on the sensitive side, and less sophisticated when it comes to the dark science of federal-cum-international relations. It isn't taken seriously by states like Victoria or New South Wales. If it were in the UN, it'd be off the security council.
All that said, Tasmania had an election last night, and I stayed up well past my bedtime to watch it. You couldn't call the results nail-biting, but their electoral system is positively pornographic when compared to others. It's so complicated, apparently it'll take at least another two weeks' to sort out who's won, and even then, it might be a hung parliament!
Tasmania has a model of single transferable vote (STV) it calls the Hare-Clark system. Voters rank candidates in order of preference. They give a '1' to their most preferred candidate, a '2' to their second most preferred candidate, and so on. Once all the preferences are counted, the candidate who meets a predetermined quota is declared the winner.
Yes, yes. It's all very complicated. Few jurisdictions employ the STV system for that very reason. There's some concern the voters aren't smart enough to work the system out. It takes a degree of forethought to cast a proper STV and that doesn't fit comfortably with the international trend toward personality politicking; the more American, the better.
In that respect, Tasmania's system is pornographic when compared with, say, our own. Don't get me wrong, the more proportional the system the better, and ours is fairly proportional. But what's the basis of that proportionality? Where's its legitimacy?
Did you know in 1946 New Zealand, 97% of eligible voters actually voted? I didn't. Back then, voting was taken seriously. It probably had something to do with the world's very recent experience of brutal, world-wide violence that engendered such a strong democratic ethic. Whatever the reason, the right to vote was still treasured, and it was regularly exercised whenever the opportunity arose.
By 1966 the number of voting Kiwis had dropped to 86%. Since then, it's comfortably been in the 80 percentile range - on average (it did hit 79% in 2008).
And Australia? No contest, bro. In 2007, 95% turned out to the polling stations, and rarely does it fall below 90%. Contrast that with the US, where a glance reveals stats floating between 50% and 70%.
Voting shouldn't be an "easy" thing to do. It shouldn't be a manufactured experience in the sense visiting a theme park is. Frankly, a little forethought probably wouldn't go amiss. But what are we afraid of? With a generation of civic education, the problem's almost solved. Can you believe our current school curriculum doesn't even make provision for formal, New Zealand-based civic education?
Scary, right.
