Yes, we’ve had this debate before – more than once, in fact. Here’s the most recent post on the issue, marking the centenary of compulsory voting the year before last. But it struck me last week that there’s more to it than meets the eye, and that Australia’s love of compulsory voting is doing real damage to public debate.
The touchstone was this piece by Conal Feehely in the Saturday Paper. Reporting on a conference of the far-right lobby group Advance, he remarks as follows:
Australia’s democratic fabric is different from that of the United States or parts of Europe. We have compulsory voting. We have independent electoral administration. We have a political culture that has, historically, resisted some of the more corrosive currents experienced elsewhere. Still, that requires work to maintain.
The final sentence prevents it from being as triumphalist as some in the genre, but the message is still that Australia is better off than a lot of other democracies. I’m not convinced that’s true.
As readers will be aware, the threat from the far right has manifested itself differently in Europe from the United States. European countries have mostly faced distinct far-right parties competing with the centre-right as well as the centre and left: National Rally in France, Reform in Britain, the League in Italy, Vox in Spain, and so on. In the US, with a different constitutional structure and electoral system, that was less of an option; instead, the far right took over an existing centre-right party, the Republicans.
In Australia, with its mix of European and American influences, both things happened together. We have our own separate far-right party, One Nation. But far-right forces also established a strong presence within our centre-right party, the Liberals.
Neither threat on its own has been as powerful as the European and American examples. One Nation, although currently riding high in the polls, is yet to show itself to be a major electoral force, and the far right has so far been unable to achieve a Trump-like control over the Liberal Party. But the combination of the two, it seems to me, makes us at least as badly off as most of the countries we naturally compare ourselves with.
Australia’s political class, however, has its collective head in the sand, and a major reason is its obsession with compulsory voting. Convinced, wholly without foundation, that compulsory voting is a great thing, it has developed a narrative about how it saves us from extremism. Not only does this lead us into a false sense of security, it also diverts attention from the factors that really help and the reforms that could help further.
This attitude seems to be partly the result of unreflective patriotism – compulsory voting is the one electoral measure on which Australia disagrees with almost everyone else, therefore it must be good – but also of the fact that our news coverage of foreign politics is so dominated by the US. The pathologies of the American system are so serious that it’s quite possible even compulsory voting would be an improvement, but that hardly tells us anything about the comparison between Australia and the systems more like ours, particularly in Europe.
The focus on compulsory voting contributes to the low level of public awareness of the features of our system that really matter. The far right (both One Nation and elements of the Liberal Party) have traded on that ignorance to build up a victim story in which the electoral system, specifically preferential voting in single-member districts, discriminates against them and should be replaced by first-past-the-post voting.
There is an element of truth in the diagnosis, in that single-member districts generally work against minor parties such as (to date, at least) One Nation. But preferential voting mitigates that harm; first-past-the-post would make it worse rather than better. From One Nation’s point of view, however, first-past-the-post would have the advantage that a party could win a majority with much less than a majority of the vote, without having to worry about attracting preferences.
If the One Nation surge holds up, expect much more discussion of preferences in the coming year or two, as people realise the important role they will play in determining what happens in right-of-centre politics. As we’ve noted here a number of times before, preferences have both a symbolic and a practical function, but major parties have a habit of concentrating on the former and ignoring the latter.
Preferential voting provides a defence against the far right, but an imperfect one. We would do better with proportional representation, which would force governments to rely on actual majority support. It would give the far right some presence, as it does in the Senate (not a bad thing, since it deprives it of victim status and gives its representatives the opportunity to make fools of themselves), but give it no hope of government unless it could assemble a coalition that people actually voted for.
Proportional systems in Europe have kept the far right from gaining unchecked power; some far-right parties have been taken into government, but they cannot win majorities without depending on more moderate partners. It’s no coincidence that France, the major continental power where the far right seems closest to real dominance, has a single-member electoral system much like Australia’s (another thing that the political class is mostly ignorant of).
I have no illusions that Australia will move to proportional representation any time soon, or that we will move away from compulsory voting. But we could at least make a serious effort to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the system that we’ve got, and to educate our voters accordingly.
The World is Not Enough 