We can refer to both now as acts because — in what is an increasing trend in the Australian Parliament — the bills flew through both houses in a single day.
Why is this an increasing trend? Voting is mandatory…so are voters more trusting of their institutions or just apathetic?
Voting is compulsory at federal elections, by-elections and referendums for those on the electoral roll, as well as for State and Territory elections. Australia enforces compulsory voting.[24] People in this situation are asked to explain their failure to vote. If no satisfactory reason is provided (for example, illness or religious prohibition), a fine of up to $170 is imposed,[25] and failure to pay the fine may result in a court hearing and additional costs. About 5% of enrolled voters fail to vote at most elections
Compulsory voting does not imply a politically engaged populace. I believe the majority of voters do not enjoy the requirement to attend on polling day, and treat the whole affair like supporting a football team. Except they care a lot less about the election results than their football team. Mandatory voting probably has the effect of protecting the two major parties more than anything else.
There was a surge in minor parties in the Senate about a decade ago. In the (very large) Senate ballot you were able to vote for a single party, and their official preferences registered with the Electoral Commission were automatically applied to the entire form. Minor parties with similar policies were obviously preferencing each other, and preferencing major parties very low. (The whole point of a minor party, sometimes a single issue party, is a significant deviation from the uncontested policy agreed upon by both major parties). So the process was changed and now the voter has to manually nominate at least 6 parties on the Senate ballot form. The effect of this is even the motivated voter with interest in the policies of a minor party cannot usually name 6 that they prefer over the 2 major parties, and so one (if not both) will end up getting a reasonably high vote preference when the previous scheme would have seen them near the bottom. This further secured the position of the two major parties.
Even though people may not be engaged in politics mandatory voting is important. It reduces extremist politics and the constant need to be increasingly divisive. It forces regression to the mean.
In non mandatory voting systems the politicians need to motivate people to the polls. The default of the population is apathy so to generate action you appeal to the extremes who are the most likely to act. The more people you can make act the more you can get to vote for you.
But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
Except this implies that disagreement on any policies agreed upon by the two major parties is extremist. What is the solution to issues where both parties perpetuate the status quo?
I would suggest reversing the Senate ballot 6 votes rule. We can have status quo in the lower house, and negotiation with minor parties representing the population on issues they deem most important - and handled incorrectly by the major parties - in the Senate.
It is important to note that you are making an argument for outcomes where the design of the system should be philosophical. What system best represents the will of the people? (Or whatever question best frames this problem. This is troublesome and often prejudicial.) It's the subsequent application of this system that is the people's voice. We should not be designing a system to get the political outcome you prefer.
Compulsory voting in an unengaged populace can only serve to lower signal-to-noise ratio. How many times do we need to relearn "garbage in, garbage out"? The responsible ballot choice when uninformed is "abstain". AFAIA, Australia doesn't provide that option.
Also, the intransigent moderates you mentioned create inertia biased toward status quo and inhibits appropriate policy action and change (see e.g. the slow-moving trainwreck of climate destabilization).
To be precise, there isn't a specific "Abstain" option on the ballot paper, but it is perfectly legal to leave the ballot blank. After all, if they could trace blank ballots back to the voter to punish them, it wouldn't be a secret ballot.
For context, "informal votes" (i.e. those votes which are rejected at the counting stage) have typically accounted for less than 5% of votes cast, and blank votes were about 20% of the votes cast in the 2001 federal election[0]. That suggests that about 1% of the population is "abstaining" in this way.
Disengaged voters will simply vote for the current leadership or loudest guy, typically the same thing, without a thought towards the issues.
Strongmen love compulsory voting, it creates a false perception of legitimacy, because corruption or no corruption, if only 30% of a population is engaged in the issues and the other 70% could give two shits, that is a slamdunk for incumbents.
There's some evidence for this. Chile adopted voluntary voting in 2012. According to this study[0] this decreased the incumbent's advantage in the elections that follower.
It's not extremist politics. There was no TV marketing about how x group is the devil and they need this law to stop it. The government just passed quickly without much publicity. The average Australian is not radicalized like Americans are and they generally do not hate peoples existence based on how they vote / make their vote their identify.
There is no such thing as "a group of liberal supporters protesting" like you see with trump and biden supporters.
The Australians voted for these parties who then pass this policy. This policy is extreme. That sure seems like extremist politics to me.
I don't get why you are talking about the US. This policy was passed by Australia. I am not saying that non mandatory voting will avoid extremist politics. All I am saying is that mandatory voting is not a silver bullet to avoiding extremism.
The Australians who voted for these parties largely do not give two shits about the bills, because a) unlike HN, they don't understand them, why they're bad or any of the consequences, and b) because the media monopoly here ensures they don't get adequate explanation or coverage, which in turn feeds a).
I agree with GP that this is less about the Australian population being extremist or facilitating extremism as much is it is about voter apathy and a lack of proper coverage or education on these bills.
Just because the average person doesn't know what bills are passed is irrelevant to what I am saying.
All I am saying is that forcing people to vote has no impact on stopping extreme policies. If you were correct Australia wouldn't have passed this and other similar laws over the past few years.
I agree that voter apathy can lead to extreme policies passing. That point is irrelevant to what I was trying to convey that extreme policies are still passed despite mandatory voting.
I feel like even when they do get coverage it doesn't matter. This issue has had plenty of coverage but the situation is pretty much "yeah? well what are you gonna do about it? Both parties support it"
Even the greens have been supporting objectionable laws relating to tech. I feel a good chunk of people do care but there is not a single thing that can be done about it.
> who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views
Except this isn’t true. Non voters are significantly less educated than voters. This creates paradoxes like both Trump and Biden voters being wealthier and more educated than the average American.
Non-voters are less likely to be “extremist” in the sense of having strong party loyalties. But they’re much more likely to host a whole myriad range of beliefs that are disproportionately found amount the least educated and aware. They’re more likely to believe in psychics or be 9/11 truthers or to think Bill Gates is tracking people with Covid vaccine microchips.
> But with mandatory voting the apathetic mass (who are most likely to be moderates as they don't really care but generally are reasonable educated people and don't agree with the extremist views) cast almost random votes which smoothes out the skew to the extremes non mandatory voting causes.
Pure moderates aka centrists don't exist. Those people average out to be moderate but they're actually "cross-pressured" - they have crazy beliefs that are inconsistent because they never thought about them.
The one constant is that nobody in real life is a libertarian, even though you always run into them on the internet.
There was a surge in minor parties in the Senate about a decade ago. In the (very large) Senate ballot you were able to vote for a single party, and their official preferences registered with the Electoral Commission were automatically applied to the entire form. Minor parties with similar policies were obviously preferencing each other, and preferencing major parties very low. (The whole point of a minor party, sometimes a single issue party, is a significant deviation from the uncontested policy agreed upon by both major parties). So the process was changed and now the voter has to manually nominate at least 6 parties on the Senate ballot form. The effect of this is even the motivated voter with interest in the policies of a minor party cannot usually name 6 that they prefer over the 2 major parties, and so one (if not both) will end up getting a reasonably high vote preference when the previous scheme would have seen them near the bottom. This further secured the position of the two major parties.
The previous system was being actively gamed. Because the Group Ticket Votes flowed between candidates in unnaturally high proportions, it was possible to snowball your way to election from a very small number of initial votes. How small? Wayne Dropulich of the Sports Party initially won election with 0.2% of the initial first preference votes.
This possibility meant that there was a large incentive to create a minor party and join a large preference-sharing network of parties which shared little in the way of ideology. No-one knew who was going to get the Senate seat when the music stopped, but it was a pretty good lottery to enter. You may remember Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts Party, who won election based on above-the-line preference flows from these groups: Bank Reform Party, Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party, HEMP Party, Shooters and Fishers, Australian Stable Population Party, Senator Online, Building Australia Party, Family First Party, Bullet Train For Australia, Rise Up Australia Party, No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics, Citizens Electoral Council, Palmer United Party, Democratic Labour Party, Katter's Australian Party, Socialist Equality Party, Australian Sex Party, Australian Voice Party, Wikileaks Party, Drug Law Reform, Stop CSG, Animal Justice Party, and the Australian Independents Party. That's right, the vegans of the Animal Justice Party together with the Shooters and Fishers - I'm sure that's all about well-considered ideology?
The problem was that the previous system gave you two choices - you could rank all of the candidates - often well over a hundred - or you could accept another party voting for you. The new system instead allows you to rank the groups, of which there is a far more manageable number (and the groups are far more recognisable to candidates in most instances than the candidates anyway) - or you can still rank all 100+ candidates, if you like - or as few as 6.
The system after the abolition of group ticket voting more closely reflects voters democratic choices. The big parties get a lot of seats for the entirely unsurprising reason that a lot of people vote for them!
We don't vote on every bill, we vote on preferred parties every 3 years. It's still a predominantly 2-party dominated system though, and there's basically zero difference between the two on issues like this.
How do we vote for and elect representatives in sufficient quantities that will throw out privacy and security overreaches like this?
Very few of the representatives in both houses will understand the technical means, underpinnings, and exploit and overreach potential of these bills because they simply don't understand the technology in the middle.
All a party/member needs to do is draft the bill and then cause enuf fear and panic in a sitting parliament for the large majority of representatives to pass it. Are these things even being challenged in parliament? Who objects to this who understands it?
My theory is none of the parties object to it because its in both their interests to pass it. Labour or Liberal, both do not care about privacy or "digital rights", because it benefits them to spy on citizens.
Recent bias/availability heuristic being what it is this might not be a fair assessment: but my recollection is there has been 1 person ever who’s been able to engage on these topics. I thought it was an independent, but I also thought their name was Scott Ludlum. But a quick Google tells me he was the deputy leader of the Greens so my recollection is wrong on at least one of those fronts.
Which is exactly the problem: A single example that is but a distant memory. No contemporaries that can challenge the status quo.
I think one solution could be to vote in a faceless/anonymous type candidate that simply provides the context/details up for any vote, then votes based on the outcome of a live poll from their constituents.
There would be several tech challenges, but it could provide a more pure form of the people’s will.
Empower third parties to hold the balance of power. We did it last century with the Democrats and it moved the needle on some vital issues. We can do it this century with the Greens.
This is pretty much it. It's not so much that people do not care about these issues, its that any time they feel spooked about their investment values or taxes, all other issues become irrelevant.
IMO it’s the latter, plus a sprinkle of COVID-19 lockdown distraction (source: I’m Australian).
We haven’t had a prime minister see through a full term in quite a while (they keep getting shuffled out mid-term), and right now everyone is so focussed on lockdowns impacting ~60% of the population that it’s hard to stay up to date and focussed on some of these more important bills being put through the system.
When it comes to authoritarianism Australians are either extremely apathetic or they are generally in favour of more government intervention in private life. Try having a calm and balanced discussion with an Australian about bicycle helmet laws for a wonderful example.
Not Australian and never been to the continent, but... are bike helmet laws an actual example of authoritarianism? Like, I don't hear about the existence motorcyle helmet laws or seatbelt laws as proof of authoritarianism, aside from fringe groups of protestors (with several of them ironically dying from accidents that would've been survivable with proper safety measures).
It's a little different when you consider that the taxpayer funds everyones healthcare. Most people taking the side of requiring bicycle helmet laws are probably thinking "I don't want my taxes going towards looking after some numpty who was too stubborn to wear a helmet and crashed".
People arguing this position are assuming that requiring helmets will decrease the risk of injury, which I am well aware there is conflicting evidence around.
I guess but I don't think it's as rational as that.
I mean you generally don't see people arguing compulsory helmets for car passengers. Even though the number of people requiring medical treatment head injuries caused by cars is orders of magnitude higher than it is for cyclists.
> Try having a calm and balanced discussion with an Australian about bicycle helmet laws for a wonderful example.
As an Australian I’d be curious to know what the argument against them is? (Keeping in mind that most Australians don’t see ‘freedom’ as a terminal goal.)
there's some research suggesting that bicycle helmets are harmful. In part because they are pretty useless at protecting against the type of accidents that actually cause severe head trauma, and then also because they seem to induce risky behaviour from both cyclists and cars around them. And then finally because they significantly reduce uptake of cycling which means people are doing other unhealthy things instead.
(I'm not actually arguing a position here, just saying that this is not as clear cut as you might think).
Because the lived experience of politicians on both sides is that the less time something spends in the limelight the less scrutiny it gets. Once something is determined to be supported by both parties (and almost universally when it involves increasing the power of government over citizens they are all in favor) it is not in anybody's interest to have it linger around for debate.
Most Australian politics is cynically focused on controlling the debate rather than solving important issues. So both sides will usually pick strategically controversial but unimportant things that they think favor them and then focus exclusively on those. Everything else is dealt with as expeditiously and in the most minimalist fashion possible. It does have the upside that a lot of "good government" where both sides agree happens in the background without anybody realising.
Democracy fails if the majority is some combination of apathetic, uneducated, or incapable of critical thought. I don’t know about Australia, but the US is in serious trouble if that statement holds. We are a Republic, which probably buys us time. I’m amazed by how many voters I know personally who have never even read the US constitution or the bill of rights. It’s a real shame, and my guess is it won’t end well.
When I first moved to Australia I rankled at compulsory voting as I believe that not participating is a valid political act. Countries without compulsory voting talk about the turnout as relative to previous years, and if it falls too far there will be questions about a mandate to govern.
In Australia that can't happen as turnout is always high, this leads to very little opportunity to overhaul the mechanism of elections to make it more applicable to the community, or to overhaul political parties entirely. Red team or Blue team are guaranteed some high proportion of the country voting for them and it gives a false sense of relevance.
However I'm now fully in favour of compulsory voting. Why?
Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
Australian politicians are no better, they would reach for those tactics in a heartbeat, compulsory voting stops us from heading down that path. There is no utopia, the system has problems, but the trade-off is worth it.
As an Australian living in America for 10 years you absolutely nailed it; compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting .
Plenty of other bs, but at least the right to participate is guaranteed.
> compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting
No, it doesn't; sloppy, deliberately overbroad purges of voter rolls (without notification of the targets) are a key voter suppression technique, and are not at all impaired by compulsory voting.
Are you Australian? I’m asking because I’m not aware of of that(very American) tactic being employed in Australia. Imho the requirement of voting moves the window of what’s acceptable in terms of voter rolls - I can’t think of one time I’ve heard of purging being employed inappropriately in aus. And I can’t really imagine a party getting away with it.
I could of course just be blissfully unaware, and it actually occurs all the time.
I am American, and I was reading “compulsory voting effectively prevents what is the worst part of American democracy - the unceasing efforts to stop people voting” as a claim that, applied where those efforts occur, compulsory voting would be an effective and adequate remedy, rather than “In Australia, compulsory voting exists and the efforts seen to suppress voting seen in America do not”.
AFAIK (which, I’ll admit, isn’t very far—my knowledge of domestic Australian politics is more of a very light random smattering than the result of any focussed study), you are correct that those don't tend to occur in Australia.
I understand your point now, thanks! I agree somewhat; if all you changed tomorrow in the USA was to make voting compulsory, you would immediately see redoubled efforts in purging rolls etc.
I agree I probably overstated, there would still be ways to stop people voting. Although it cuts out many many avenues, so you would imagine(hope?) the overall disenfranchisement would be significantly less, and decrease over time as the attitude of voting entitlement sets in.
> Look at America, what an absolute shambles of a democratic system. One party spending decades attempting to stop black people voting. Voter suppression and gerrymandering (also not possible in Australia) baked into the political system. No thanks.
It’s always interesting to see this essentially fake narrative. No one is trying to stop anyone from voting. It’s made up, to try and role the base, the same way you describe —- it increases turnout for the left. So they push the fake narrative.
Anyway, I see your point. But the US is an entirely different beast. As much as people want to knock it, the system is extremely robust. The federal government really isn’t supposed to have a mandate. That’s essentially the entire left and right debate in the US. States rights vs federal rights.
The issue you’re seeing in the US are that the left are socialist/Marxists who want a strong federal gov (authoritarian). The right believes that’s anti-American, and believes we should have strong states and personal freedom (Republican). If the left stopped trying to enact federal control (through monetary, economic, political, etc), the right would be totally happy. California would do its thing and Tennessee would do theirs, the best would win.
Unfortunately, that’s not what we’re doing.
This literally goes all the way back to the founding with the federalists (John Adam’s) and anti-federalists (Thomas Jefferson). The system is dysfunctional by design, the goal was never to have a strong government and while its tense, you have more freedom and security than just about anywhere.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked, "What's the interest of the Arizona RNC in keeping, say, the out-of-precinct ballot disqualification rules on the books?"
Carvin responded, "Because it puts us at a competitive disadvantage relative to Democrats. Politics is a zero-sum game."
If you are saying the Republican Party has spent decades trying to stop black people from voting, that is simply incorrect. It is what the other party’s propaganda would like you to believe. Same with voter suppression.
Southern conservative as Democrats or Republicans like Jesse Helms and Trent Lott were very much in favor of not letting African Americans vote. Who they caucused with later is unrelated.
But yes, to say it was Democrats or Republicans would be very technically inaccurate.
It isn’t a coincidence that the states that were practicing Jim Crow before are the same states trying to discourage voting today.
"Texas ranks number 10 overall when it comes to engagement among African American voters, including being first overall in proportional representation of blacks in state legislature and national party conventions."
Just because they've been trying doesn't mean they've been successful yet. But just pile up more voting restrictions and let's see what happens...its not like Texas has very high voter engagement over all (which is on par with other poor southern states and...Hawaii).
Of black voter engagement (via some metric). Overall they are in the bottom 10 of voter engagement. I guess it should be ok to be compared to Mississippi.
Yeah, that's the problem that the new voting restrictions aim to fix. Likely also the redistricting; both because the Voting Rights Act, by which the federal government prevented Texas (among other states) from wholesale disenfranchisement, is out of the way.
The reality on the ground is that all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does and almost nobody on HN will dare to talk about that fact because it's inconvenient to the propaganda game.
It's the sick joke of eg Major League Baseball moving the All-Star game from Georgia to protest new voting laws, shifting it to Colorado which already had similar voting laws to those that Georgia wanted to implement. It's all bullshit propaganda.
The same is true of immigration restrictions. You're not supposed to talk about how strict most other affluent nations are when it comes to who they let into their countries to become citizens.
Can you imagine the global uproar if the US began a cultural genocide program against Muslims like Denmark is aggressively doing? Forcibly taking children away from their parents to be re-educated via nationalist propaganda and forced value systems.
How about something less sinister - a national ban on full face veils like France, with punishment by forced re-education. The US would be called draconian, Islamophobic and racist for such treatment. Meanwhile over there's Macron one step away from calling for a cultural crusade.
When the US does it, it's bad. When everybody else does it, it's logical and good and progressive.
> all Western European nations have stricter voting laws / requirements than the US does
The UK* has never required voting ID for elections, and it is possible to walk into a local polling station and be given a ballot paper after just stating your name and address. Sadly that may no longer be the case for future elections, because the UK Conservative party has decided to introduce a voter ID requirement, modelled on the success that the Republicans have had with it at decreasing turnout especially among the poor and minorities.
The fact that other Western European nations have voter ID laws is likely because they generally have mandatory national ID cards already, and it makes to use those to record who voted (how many times). If Republicans were first pushing for mandatory state ID, then later requiring those IDs at polling time would not be seen as so suspicious.
> The same is true of immigration restrictions.
I'm sure it's possible to find examples of policies in some European countries which are worse than the equivalent US policy, but to provide some factual comparison for how welcoming the US is of (poor) immigrants, let me point out that Sweden hosts 8.52 refugees per 1,000 people while the US hosts 0.92, ranking 13th and 68th respectively on the global league table for this.[0]
But you're right, the US would receive criticism for adopting more bigoted policies, just as France was condemned for its bigoted face veil policy.[1] If you live in the US, it shouldn't be surprising that you hear (and are more sensitivity to) criticism of the US more than criticism of countries like France.
* Technically voter ID was trialled in some English constituencies recently, and it has long been standard in Northern Ireland, so perhaps "Scotland" is a better example of a "Western European nation" here. On the other hand, not every US state requires voter ID, so I hope it's still fair for me to say "the US does" require it.
You pointing out edge cases isn't a very convincing argument against Europe as a whole.
In general, Europe has more strict voting ID laws (fact).
In general, Europe has more restricted immigration laws (fact). I mean in the US the debate isn't even about who to let in, rather if we should even have a border and allow people to come in as they please.
In general, Europe is more racist. When Orlando Patterson, a renowned race-baiter in the US, surveyed the evidence he found that America was less racist than any other white-majority country by far. Americans are more open than Europeans to living next to a neighbor of a difference race. And we have sharply rising level of intermarriages.
I think you are making some reasonable points here, even though I don't agree with all of them. You're right that I was cherry-picking the example of the UK (just as the comment I responded to was cherry-picking examples of French and Danish policies) but I think I was justified in doing so since the other comment said "all Western European nations". Perhaps the difference between "all" and "nearly all" is not worth quibbling over, but my cherry-picked example does show that it's perfectly possible for a country to have legitimate elections without voter ID, which I think is relevant here.
Your comment would probably be more convincing if you provided some citations for your claims, though. The EU average for refugee population, on the link I gave last time, is 2.3 per 1,000 people and the European average is 2.01 per, which are both twice as much as the US. I suppose it's possible that Europe is more welcoming of refugees than other immigrants, but I think your second "fact" is not self-evidently true. The only policy you might have in mind is that EU states can, in some circumstances, expel citizens from other states, despite freedom of movement[0] and the Schengen system, which doesn't have an equivalent in the US as far as I know.
Of all your claims, though, the one that I think most needs to be supported is the idea that not having a border is a mainstream position. I don't think you're saying that every inch of America's land and sea borders need to have an impenetrable physical barrier to even qualify as a border at all, so can you point to an example of an official mainstream party policy saying that there should be no limits on who can enter the country? I'm sure some people on Twitter have suggested that the US shouldn't have a border, but I don't think it has more political support as a policy than, for example, the "shoot to kill" policy suggested by Georgia state Rep. John Yates (R).[1]
I think the poll worker would be entitled to perform a citizens arrest at that point, unless "the first person in line to mumble" that was also wearing a very good disguise.
So even without a physical ID document, the poll workers have at least the ability (if not the duty) to remedy a fraudulent vote attempt. The latest US "voting rights" push is to have as few voters as possible physically enter a polling place. Americans aren't grumbling about ID because they hate minorities; they're grumbling because their dead relatives voting in Chicago have been a running joke for 60 years.
The Democrats say that voting is being discouraged. What is being discouraged is invalid votes, to diminish fraud. Republicans would love to encourage an authentic black vote.
I'm not sure this is true, even as a black republican with several black republican voting family members. My experience is that most black voters are more conservative, but almost always vote based on race rather than policy. This is obviously changing, to skew towards black voters being less conservative- but calling candidates racist will usually trump all other values that go into the voting decision.
Black and Hispanic voters are more socially conservative on average, but they vote for the people that don’t actively work against their interests, as anyone who isn’t a push over should.
I’ll gladly vote for a Republican if I feel like the other side is working against my interests, ideology isn’t a determining factor.
So why do Black people say that Republicans are trying to stop them from voting?
I can't tell if you're completely comfortable with the fact that no evidence exists supporting fraudulent voting, or if you just think it's A-OK to break a few black eggs in order to make the omelette of your desires.
It also sets up conditions by which people have no choice but to make a choice which is in their own interest, rather than having a political process built on vote suppression, non-participation and the kind of clientelism which arises when politicians are more concerned with energizing their own base than expanding their appeal.
Quoting political scientist Waleed Aly:
"In a compulsory election, it does not pay to energize your base to the exclusion of all other voters. Since elections cannot be determined by turnout, they are decided by swing voters and won in the center... That is one reason Australia’s version of the far right lacks anything like the power of its European or American counterparts. Australia has had some bad governments, but it hasn’t had any truly extreme ones and it isn’t nearly as vulnerable to demagogues"
I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I enjoy the quote from a political scientist, while ignoring the reality.
In Australia we have an example of what happens when you force everyone to vote. It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
> I think your point about compulsory voting creating ripe conditions for more propaganda is not borne out by reality - the USA is just as flooded with fake news as Australia.
I think you assume what you see on TV is legit news. I agree, you see the same “fake news” everywhere. The problem, is those who believe fake news are often not those voting because they don’t do their own research, they aren’t engaged. You want the engaged going to vote, because they’re engaging with society. Forcing everyone to vote is basically a recipe for getting the candidate that “gifts” the most to the people. It’ll be the downfall of nations.
> It’s not going well, they literally have concentration camps, ask for papers, don’t let you leave your homes, etc.
Anyone who thinks this is actually what is happening in Australia is falling for propaganda.
> they literally have concentration camps
Offshore detention centres for refugees seeking asylum is a stain on Australia that cannot be excused or erased.
If you mean the quarantine centres they are finally building then.. they are nothing like concentration camps. They are a better alternative than the hotel quarantine system they have been trying and failing to make work until now.
And within 12 months we'll hopefully have vaccine rates hight enough travel for vaccinated people can get back to normal and they'll only be needed for people who choose not to be vaccinated and choose to come to Australia.
> ask for papers
I assume this is asking for vaccine certification? Seems reasonable, given our failure to get enough people vaccinated quickly enough.
> don’t let you leave your homes
I think this refers to home quarantine? That people in quarantine aren't allowed to leave their homes seems kind of the point?
> vaccine passports haven't been implemented in Australia yet.
The lack of vaccine passports is of little consolation when its citizens have already accepted this:
"The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person."
That is specifically about enforcement of home quarantine as an alternative to hotel quarantine for interstate travel. It's not generally applicable in any way.
Sorry, I should have provided more clarifying context. My point wasn't that this was a general policy, but that Australians have accepted a system of self- and AI-administered biometric constant surveillance for at least some citizens, some of the time. I could easily see this being used to enforce future lockdowns, or being a replacement for vaccine passports (checking that non-vaccinated citizens don't attend any venues they are not permitted to).
Mandatory voting can be done well if the first two options for every race are "I approve of none of these candidates" and "I approve of all of these candidates". Nobody should be forced to vote for a candidate that they don't want to, but it's also useful to be able to distinguish between a disaffected voter (the first option) and an apathetic voter (the second option). With non-mandatory voting, that distinction is erased, and the winner gets to freely claim that they have a mandate of the masses even if 70% of the eligible populace stayed home because they hate all the candidates.
Minor parties and protest candidates already offer the mechanism for that in Australia, and preferential voting means those protest votes often make a meaningful difference
In my anecdotal experience, people don't care about politics here and will most likely vote on either "I'd rather have a beer with X than Y so I'll vote for X" or "they're both as bad as each other so I'll just vote like my family always have."
That didn't sound like the point you were making, and others agree with me. Everyone is responding to you thinking that you were criticizing mandatory or compulsory voting, not universal suffrage. Your choice of words "forced to vote" rather than "right to vote" conveyed that meaning.
Forcing people to vote is universal suffrage on steroids. I don’t think universal suffrage is good be default (it might be idk), but I think forcing the vote takes the worst parts of universal suffrage, uninformed and/or indifferent population voting, and over samples that group
Why is this an increasing trend? Voting is mandatory…so are voters more trusting of their institutions or just apathetic?
Voting is compulsory at federal elections, by-elections and referendums for those on the electoral roll, as well as for State and Territory elections. Australia enforces compulsory voting.[24] People in this situation are asked to explain their failure to vote. If no satisfactory reason is provided (for example, illness or religious prohibition), a fine of up to $170 is imposed,[25] and failure to pay the fine may result in a court hearing and additional costs. About 5% of enrolled voters fail to vote at most elections