31. The SA Election

Hi. I am Greg and I want to grumble about the state election.

I am not going to grumble about the fact that we don’t know the result yet – it is frustrating, but it is a small inconvenience and won’t impact on the future of our state.

Nor am I going to grumble about the misreporting of the campaign with weeks or months of media commentary about a safe Liberal win. It does make me wonder what the analysis of the journalists and pundits is really worth, but I suspect they were not alone in this instance.

And I am not going to grumble about standing at a polling booth for ten hours in a desperate attempt to get maybe one or two more votes for the candidate I was supporting. Possibly pointless, but if we ban how-to-vote handing out, then we might simply reinforce the power of the major players who dominate the media coverage. As much as I hate them, the same might be true of the core-flute street posters.

I could grumble about the numbers of people I saw on Saturday who complained about having to vote, didn’t know who was running and were indifferent to the result. Yes, their votes carry the same weight as anyone else’s, but I won’t grumble about that because voluntary voting would just magnify the power of marginal groups at the expense of a real representation of community opinion. And perhaps complete indifference is as legitimate a democratic position as any other.

Finally, I am not even going to grumble about the fact that the party that got the majority of votes has not necessarily been elected. The only real way to stop that would be not have local electorates, but that would make government very distant and unresponsive. And if government was truly proportional to the vote, there would always be minority government.

That said, I would not necessarily grumble about minority governments either, because, in recent times, at both state and federal levels, minority governments have proven stable and had good legislative records.

So all in all, I don’t have much to grumble about in this election. Ok, the upper house electoral system still needs reform, it would be nice if the media and the major parties didn’t treat it like a presidential contest, if the campaign events were less scripted and if more issues and voices were heard, but given all these systemic constraints, the election was ok.

I am Greg, and I am obviously getting soft!

This Grumble can be heard online or by podcast.
First Broadcast: 18 March 2014

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