So, tomorrow my wife and I will head to the local government primary school (where our kids are students) to vote in the latest Federal Election. However, thanks to kids' activities during the day, by the time we get there it'll be too late for us to buy our democracy sausages - the barbecue will be finishing up at 2pm and we're unlikely to get there before then.
On top of that, sadly, for the many schools across the country which will be taking advantage of the election to do a bit of fund-raising through barbecues and cake stalls, a record high number of people have already voted, taking advantage of pre-poll voting. While many people do so for genuine reasons, I get the impression that quite a few people vote early because they object to the idea of being forced to wait for up to 15 minutes in a queue on polling day (aagh, 15 wasted minutes every 3 years, the horror!).
Anyway, this election promises to be an interesting and close one. For the first time in a number of years we have a genuine policy difference between the major parties, as well as a difference in leadership styles.
On the one hand the (conservative) Liberals, currently in government, are led by Scott Morrison, while the opposition Labor Party is led by Bill Shorten.
Morrison has only been in power for about eight months, taking over the leadership of the party after Malcolm Turnbull was dumped by the party. This marks the fourth successive electoral cycle in which the ruling party has replaced its own leader mid-term. While this leadership instability has been getting on the nerves of the public, both major parties have changed their rules so that leader-dumping is harder. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the future.
Morrison is an interesting character. He plays a lot on being the typical Aussie suburban dad who cheers for his local football team, but he's also a Pentecostal Christian (I think the first such person to lead a First World nation). On the one hand he says the Bible isn't a policy manual, but on the other hand he was the minister in charge of the decidedly un-Christian operation to turn back the boats of asylum seekers. And to cap it off, he places himself outside the "Canberra Bubble" (that is, isolated from "real Australians"), while being an almost perfect example of a political insider throughout his working life.
Shorten is quite a different person. He followed the career path of many Labor politicians of making his way to the top of the union movement, then stepping across into politics. Shorten's public persona is dull and colourless in comparison to the extrovert Morrison, giving me the impression his speeches could put grumpy babies to sleep. But the other interesting comparison is that Shorten has led the Labor Party since they lost power in 2013, the longest time anyone has held that position for at least a couple of decades.
There are more differences: Morrison is very much a one-person team, trying to make the election as Presidential as possible; his electoral advertisements focus on the comparison between him and Shorten alone. By contrast, Labor strategy has focused on the breadth of experience in Labor's front bench (many of whom were ministers in the last Labor government), comparing it the with the large number of senior Liberal politicians who are retiring at this election.
But this election isn't going to be a two-party race. Here in Australia, we elect 12 Senators from each state, six each election, using a form of proportional representation. This opens up opportunities for independents and minor parties to hold the balance of power in the Senate, meaning that whichever major party forms government is going to have to negotiate with a fragmented cross-bench to get its legislation through; and this cross-bench has been getting larger every election since the 1970s. But even in the House of Representatives with its single-member seats (which favour a two-party system) there's no guarantee of a major party taking a majority. This is because of a number of seats which are being challenged by high-profile independents, along with the popularity of the two major parties being fairly close.
So where in the past we've generally known the result of the election on Saturday night, this time there might be a bit of a delay. And it'll be made harder by the large number of pre-poll votes: IIRC these don't get counted for several days, making it nearly impossible to predict close results. We're just going to have to wait and see...without our democracy sausages.
