Last Saturday was Election Day for our state, to determine which party would govern for the next three to four years. 

Congratulations to the winners and commiserations to the losers. Nearly half of my state are now celebrating in the glow of long-hoped for victory. The other almost-half are consoling themselves with the thought, ‘Well, our mob achieved a lot of good things over the past 16 years and we can hold our heads high in defeat.’ And the backers of the Independents and smaller parties are wondering what went wrong.

What I liked about the day was that it was quiet. No police. No armies. No guards on the voting booths. No one had to worry about being shot, or beaten, or blown up for going to vote. The most anyone had to worry about was running through the gauntlet of people wielding how-to-vote cards. 

The hardest decision after, “Who do I vote for?” is, “Do I buy a sausage from the sausage sizzle stand or not?”  (For my foreign readers: it’s an Australian tradition on Election Day for community groups, outside almost every voting booth, to sell a barbecued sausage wrapped in a slice of bread, as a fund-raiser. You can also have them with tomato sauce on top and some even go all out and fry up some onions as well. You will also find such stalls outside hardware stores every weekend. Australians are suckers for a sausage.)

Everyone must vote in Australia – or face paying a big fine – but you don’t actually have to mark a voting card if you don’t want to. The legal requirement is that you turn up and get your name crossed off the register. But, if you’ve bothered to turn up, why not make it worth your while and vote as well? Most people do. Also, many of us who aren’t well, or are working during the hours the booths are open, or are disabled, or old-age pensioners, can put in a postal vote instead. 

Some might say that forcing your citizens to vote isn’t true liberty but I disagree. We all know that some people need a bit of a boot up the bum to do the right thing. The good thing about our system is that the people vote, the preferences are counted and the person with the most votes, wins. There’s no electoral college that can ignore the majority vote and choose someone else who takes their fancy; like what happened with the election of Donald Trump. Why bother giving your citizens the right to vote, if you have a small group with the power to override their choice? You might as well just let that group decide in the first place.

There are still some problems: what system doesn’t have them? But, on the whole, it seems to work rather well. I look at what happens in other places and I thank God I live in Australia. We shouldn’t take our democracy, and our rights as citizens of a democracy, for granted. We should celebrate it. Next Election Day, don’t buy one sausage: go mad and buy two, one for each hand!