YOU are the problem with Australian politics. You and your friends. Hell, maybe even your family too. It’s not the Liberal Party’s fault for being so obsessively xenophobic and scaremongering – their approach has been proven to work. It’s not the Labor Party’s fault for being slightly more tolerable than the Liberal Party by offering almost the exact same policies – their approach has been proven to work. It’s not even the media’s fault for failing to provide critical and objective analysis of all the parties running for the various State and Federal elections. It’s YOUR fault, and here is why.
Are you eligible and enrolled to vote? If you are over 18 and answer “no”, you effectively censor yourself from having anything meaningful to add to the discussion on where Australia is heading. Please exit stage right. If you answer “yes” and this is not your first election, there are some follow up questions for you. Do you know who represents you in Parliament and which party do they belong to? Can you remember what their policies were for your electorate and whether they were implemented or not? Have you ever spoken to or tried to communicate with your representative? Do you feel that YOU and YOUR views are being represented in Parliament? If you answered “no” to any of those follow up questions, YOU are part of the problem.
Do you vote because your family always voted that way? Do you vote differently from your family to rebel quietly? Do you vote because you want to be a part of the winning team? Do you vote because you’re scared of what you’ve been told to believe about the other party? Do you not even know who you’re going to vote for until you get into the polling booth because you couldn’t care less? Do you just go and get your name ticked off the rolls and then vote informally? Do you think that a vote for The Greens is a vote for Labor? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, YOU are part of the problem.
I’m not going to begrudge someone a vote for any party if they have a strongly held conviction that a particular policy is something they agree with and think will forge an Australia they believe in. At least those people have made a decision. But if you’re voting out of rusted-on convictions of partisanship and “ra-ra my team!” then YOU are part of the problem.
It takes less than 5 minutes to research which parties are running in this election and what their basic policies are, longer if you really want to read the nitty-gritty. It takes 5 minutes to number all the boxes below the line on the Senate paper to clearly indicate YOUR preferences. Are you going to try and say that you don’t have TEN minutes to spare every three years? Ten minutes that will ultimately decide the course of the country you live in? YOU should really care about the direction the country is taking, and YOU should start deciding what’s important to you, and who best represents your interests in Canberra. If you find that no-one is close enough to what YOU want, run yourself. Unless you’re schizophrenic you’ll at least have one candidate you agree with.
The Leaders’ debate only confirmed my suspicion that NEITHER the Labor Party nor the Liberal Party will represent me, as they seem hell bent on scaring the general populace with the boogeyman of a tide of yellow/brown people, threatening to take away our… something something. Other issues concern me more deeply than discriminating against truly desperate people seeking a better way of life.
The tools are at your fingertips to determine for yourself who will best represent you in Parliament. Once you’ve decided, you can try and tell other people why you think that person is the best for you. It might not be Friday Night Football, but it’s a damn sight more important, so put aside ten minutes to talk to your friends and family about your vote (and theirs). You can always agree to disagree, but at least you tried to make Australia a little closer to how YOU want it to be.
Stop being part of the problem, and start being part of the solution.
Cop that Australia!!!
It’s not hard:
http://www.aec.gov.au/Voting/How_to_vote/Voting_Senate.htm
Implying it matters if you don’t live in a marginal seat.
If enough people stopped thinking with such a defeatist attitude, it would matter a whole lot more.
If people started thinking before voting there just may be an increase in the number of marginal seats, no?
I’ve often wondered what people living in safe seats get out of it, other than the sense of being on the winning ‘team’ of course. All the money is always pledged at marginal seats. All the visits are scheduled around marginal seats. Well over 80% of the narrative is driven by marginal seats… Are people really that far up one party’s arse that they absolutely and definitively agree with them on everything?
I shudder to think.
>OP yells at me because my apathy is killing Australian politics.
My electorate is not a marginal seat.
>Maybe if you pretended it was marginal it would matter
Facepalm
Maybe if you got off your ass and actually helped campaign for the person you wanted to represent you in parliament, it wouldn’t be as safe as you lament.
Plus, “safe seat” means exactly squat in the Senate.
You mean sacrifice my time and effort for a risky outcome with no absolutes? No thanks, trying to earn a living here. But continue to shout at me some more and call me the problem – it helps me plenty.
Well, if you’re just going to bitch about the status quo and not do anything to try and fix it, you are part of the problem.
Helping someone’s campaign doesn’t have to mean giving up everything, it can be as simple as taking 30 minutes to distribute fliers, or knock on doors. Even forwarding their press releases via email can help spread the word.
But you go on pretending that nothing you can do will ever change anything, because that’s the sort of attitude that gets shit done.
Wow.
I live in Lalor so I guess I’d better vote for Julia then. It is a safe seat after all, so what does it matter who I vote for?
Swings happen when people start to give a shit and stop predicting outcomes before the election has even taken place. Sure, I understand that Julia is going to win Lalor, but my vote could be the start of a swing that takes place over a number of elections.
At the same time my vote in the Senate can still be focussed on ensuring that the balance of power goes to somebody with a brain.
i think the aggressive tone of this article is definitely counter productive. as much as it might be right; people tend to start ignoring anyone who’s yelling at them. immiture i know, but it’s true.