A couple of years ago, Judith Brett’s publisher told her his “publisher’s nose was twitching”.
Donald Trump had been elected with only a quarter of eligible voters supporting him, and just 37% of eligible Britons voted to leave the European Union.
“All of a sudden people were realising what an advantage for us in Australia that we had compulsory voting,” says Brett, a historian and academic. Her publisher, Michael Heyward, said to himself, “When did we get it?”
Australia, which has had six prime ministers in eight years, is suffering from an increasing mistrust in politicians, in parties, even in democracy. And in the next few months – the lead-up to a federal election – politics is set to become even more dispiriting.
Yet, according to Brett, Australia has a degree of inoculation from the polarisation infecting politics in the United States, the UK and much of Europe. Her new book, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, teases out the reasons – prosaic at one level, profound at another.
Australia is one of only 19 countries out of 166 electoral democracies where voting is compulsory, and one of only nine that enforce it. It is the only English-speaking country that compels its citizens to vote.
The impact is hard to overstate. In 2015, former US president Barack Obama praised Australia’s system, saying it would be “transformative” if everyone voted in the United States.
But Australia’s system is an electoral beacon for seemingly smaller reasons too. While Americans, Britons and Canadians vote during the week, Australians vote on Saturdays, making it easier for people to get to the polls. There’s a holiday atmosphere at booths, where community groups raise money by selling cupcakes, raffle tickets and “democracy sausages”. Specially-made stalls for secret voting are another Australian invention, and political parties have no role in running elections, which are left to non-partisan public servants – “something Americans can only dream of,” Brett says.
Brett is known for her critically acclaimed works on Australia’s Liberal party, including last year’s National Biography award-winning The Enigmatic Mr Deakin. Digging into the history of Australia’s unique voting system, she found it was steeped in the colonies’ foundations and culture.
America’s early political ideas, came from the philosopher John Locke, who held that individuals and their rights came before government. But by the time the Australian colonies were establishing their institutions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the ideas of political reformer Jeremy Bentham were in vogue. Bentham rejected the idea of natural or divine rights preceding governments – rights are created by law, so government comes first. Australians needed governments to build roads, railways and other infrastructure and tended to trust them. “Government came before society in Australia and was gratefully accepted,” Brett writes.
It helped that people who migrated to Australia tended to be the ambitious middle class rather than members of the aristocracy. “They can try out some of the new ideas, there is a commitment to not reproducing the class hierarchy and the status hierarchies of the old world,” Brett says.
While Australia was not the first country to have compulsory voting – that was Belgium – it happened early, with Queensland the first state in 1914 (for whites only). Federally, it has been compulsory to vote in elections since 1924.
The idea that the uninterested or the ignorant should not be forced to vote never took serious hold, with modern surveys showing more than 70% support for compulsory voting. The most common argument in favour when it was introduced, writes Brett, was that “the elected government should represent not just the majority of those who vote but the majority of those eligible to vote. This would increase the government’s legitimacy and make sure it paid attention to the interest of all the people”.
Today, more than 90% of those on the roll turn up. You don’t actually have to vote, but you have to attend a polling booth, even if you stuff a blank or spoiled ballot in the box.
Australia was an electoral innovator in many ways, but the historic disenfranchisement of Indigenous people is a “shameful story”, Brett says. When the 1902 federal Franchise Act came to be debated, the proposed law would have given “all adult persons” the right to vote in a national election, including Indigenous Australians as well as women – but the new government compromised to get the bill passed. The West Australian senator Alexander Matheson moved the amendment denying the vote to Indigenous people, saying, “Surely it is absolutely repugnant to the greater number of the people of the commonwealth that an Aboriginal man, or Aboriginal lubra or gin – a horrible, dirty, degraded creature – should have the same rights, simply by virtue of being 21 years of age, that we have, after some debate today, decided to give to your wives and daughters.”
It took until 1962 for Indigenous Australians in all states to get the right to vote in federal elections, and it was only after the election of the Hawke government in 1983 that they were required to enrol. The Franchise Act, Brett says, became another of the “infamous stepping stones of cruelty and shame” in the treatment of First Australians.
Compulsory voting keeps politics focused on the centre rather than the fringe of politics. To win elections, political parties have to appeal not just to their base but to the majority of people. Australia is also one of only a few countries with preferential voting, which means a voter ranks candidates in order of preference, compared with most countries where the candidate with the most votes wins. It ensures that those elected have the support of the majority of voters.
“It keeps the emotional temper of the conflict down,” says Brett. “That’s become more evident recently with the way politics has gone in the United States, where you’ve had issues around sexuality and race being used to motivate voters. If you need to get out the vote, you need to have things that people are going to feel passionate about, and that’s not necessarily such a good thing.”
Brett gives the example of the fringe right within the Liberal party that has fiercely rejected action on climate change – the issue that cost former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull his job. Yet most Australians want serious action on climate change and the party has “got themselves right out of whack, and you can see [prime minister] Scott Morrison trying to pull them back desperately now”.
Brett disagrees with commentators who argue Australian politics is becoming as polarised as the United States. It’s “lazy thinking … our political culture is pretty different. There may be that level of polarisation within the political class, because they’re much more heated in the way they argue their politics, but there’s not so much evidence of it, I don’t think [among the general population].” Australians may distrust their politicians and abhor their behaviour, she says, but they value the role of government in their lives and they trust their electoral system.
Australians look overseas and are shocked with how few people turn up to vote. Americans find it astonishing that anyone would be compelled to do so. Brett has always favoured compulsory voting, and she is not sure why other countries have not embraced it.
“In the US, I think it’s because of the value they put on individual liberty, the political culture is just not majoritarian. In England, I think it’s because of the fact that there’s still a deep class bias in their political system.” Other comparable countries such as Canada or New Zealand have voluntary voting, too.
The idea is beginning to be discussed in a more serious way as a reform that could rekindle faith that governments are there to serve all the people. Australians barely know their own history, Brett says, but their electoral system is worth celebrating. It’s perhaps as important as Gallipoli in forging who we are. “Australia was born not on the battlefields but at the ballot box.”