6. The Final Election Grumble - How to Vote Cards

Hi, I’m Greg and I want to grumble about the election. Yes, I know it is over, but I want one more grumble – not just because I am like that, but because even as we speak millions of pieces of paper with candidates faces and how-to-vote recommendations are on their way to be pulped, or worse, to go to landfill.

Thousands of people all over the country spent hours and hours on polling booths handing the brightly coloured advertisements to voters, almost all of whom didn’t want to know or didn’t care. Running the gauntlet of the line of how-to-vote spruikers is part of our electoral tradition, but it is a pretty wasteful one. Think of all the trees, bleaching chemicals and toxic inks that went into the leaflets whose life-span is a nano-second in environmental time. And think of all the good community work that could have been done by that army of volunteers if they had been channelled into something more useful.

Now don’t get me wrong. As long as one party does it, all the parties need to hand out how-to-vote cards, and I confess I was one of that army of volunteers spreading the paper trail.

Yet I find it a profoundly depressing experience. Partly this is because of the ignorance and apathy of so many voters, and partly, to hand out how-to-vote cards you have to believe that someone will vote for your candidate on the basis of the banal advertisement, the false smile or simplistic slogan you have given them.

How come our system of government, one of the most successful democracies in the world, has so alienated people that they feel they have no stake or interest in who governs us?

The issues here are huge and complex, but I continue to dream of a system of democracy which is more than a vote once every 3 years – a system which engages people and where real decisions that affect people are made in the community and not in distant government forums or corporate board rooms. But until then, I get stuck spending election day handing out how-to-vote cards.

I am Greg and I am grumbling.

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast at https://radio.adelaide.edu.au/gregs-grumbles-6/
First Broadcast: 10 September 2013