It's not who you vote for that shapes a nation - it's how you vote. [pub. The Big Smoke 1/5/25]
I wonder what this country would look like if we voted as an electorate, instead of as an amalgamation of self-interests.
Growing up, I always knew who my parents voted for. I was five when the Howard years began, 16 when they ended. Despite having a reputation both at home and school for recalcitrance—a reputation that I believe to be wildly unfair—my parents’ political perspectives went undebated.
The Howard government’s climate and energy policies were shaped in close partnership with the fossil fuel industry. They refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, scuttled his own party’s emissions trading scheme after industry pushback, and cut funding to renewable energy R&D while keeping fossil fuel subsidies.
After a family trip to the Great Barrier Reef as a child, and having had sea-level warming and coral bleaching explained to me using crayons, the possibility that my own children may never experience the magic I had been so blessed to swim amongst made me feel sick.
Despite having been raised to blame the decimation of our environment on “conservatives”, I still struggle to find coherent definitions of “conservative” and “progressive”—words that seem to amount more to political denominations than guiding principles.
How does the conservative choose what to “conserve”? What role does democracy play in those decisions? Who decides what entails “progress”?
I came face to face with the results of conservative policy towards Australia’s First Peoples on family trips to the Northern Territory. We drove in air-conditioned cars through third-world towns. I watched the traditional custodians of the very land that our government was selling for parts stand in line at the barred windows of pharmacies and grocery stores full of unaffordable and sweaty produce.
From the NT intervention, to refusing to issue a formal apology to the Stolen Generations, to Children Overboard and the subsequent expansion of Australia’s mandatory detention of asylum seekers, to WorkChoices, and to the Iraq War, conservatism under Howard made Australia look like an entire nation of people who vote with abject disregard to the nation-building as a concept. And despite this being something even a child could understand, Howard was the second-longest serving Prime Minister after Pig Iron Bob.
But how?
The answer approaches as we begin to understand the difference between who one votes for and how one votes.
Who one votes for is tribal. But how one makes that choice is what turns democracy from being a contest between candidates into an expression of an entire nation’s aptitude for holistic decision-making.
My parents threw election parties throughout my childhood, wheeling our TV into the backyard in Ashfield and propping it up on milk crates. For those born this century: TVs used to be more three-dimensional. Imagine a drier with a screen on the front, bulging outwards from the cube’s edges like the beginnings of a blister.
Family friends would eat and drink, intermittently turning towards the TV to check on results while us kids would run around hopped up on creaming soda and Wizz Fizz.
The election parties stopped when we moved to the Eastern Suburbs. My father expressed resentment at family friends who had prodded him and my mother for sending my sisters and I off to private schools. He expressed further resentment at the fathers of the other boys on my high school cricket team—fathers whose conversations at the sidelines, he said, were “just textbook examples of insider trading.” A shift from the sidelines chat at my old club.
By the time Kevin 07 T-shirts appeared I’d had years to accustom to the political differences between my family and everyone else’s. My father’s deteriorating mental health and my mother’s disturbing capacity to replace red flags with billable hours had coalesced into a rather unpredictable, sometimes dangerous family home. And despite it all, the politics remained constant.
When I was 15, it occurred to me that my parents’ jobs and incomes were not dissimilar to the incomes of many of those around us now.
My mothers’ explanation of not who she votes for, but how she votes has followed me into every election since:
“Would we pay less tax and have a little more cash under the Libs? Probably.”
“So why not vote for them?”, I asked.
And she said, “I don’t vote just for myself.”
When I brought this up at school the next day I was lambasted by my peers “for not understanding how democracy works”.
I wonder what this country would look like if we voted as an electorate, instead of as an amalgamation of self-interests. Would our First Peoples, our environment, our energy policy, and our duty to asylum seekers be better represented at federal elections if we, as a nation, undertook a more philosophical measuring of not just who to vote for, but how to vote?
In a world where each of us only votes on matters directly affecting us, what scope is there for serious people-powered intervention against all that ails us as a nation?
I’m not going to tell anyone who to vote for. For all I know, one might, after careful consideration, believe that the Trumpet of Patriots or The Greens have the capacity to deliver outcomes that speak not just to my, but to my country’s needs.
A nation full of individual voters taking solely their own needs into the ballot box with them is not a nation: it is a queue.
Read at The Big Smoke here.