G'day, guys! How's it going? Welcome to this episode of Aussie English. Today I have the pleasure, the absolute pleasure of interviewing none other than my father. So, this is Ian Smissen and he is on here today with me because I thought it would be important to chat about Australian politics. So, I'm sure that if you guys are in Australia at the moment you will be seeing the election campaign going crazy all over the news, all over the TV and it's at that point now where, you know, you're probably getting sick of it. To be honest, with Bill Shorten and Scott Morrison constantly ragging on one another and yeah just filling up way too much time on the TV. Anyway, I thought it would be important to chat about Australian politics. So, today I want to share with you the very first section of a five part series that I've done with my dad and in this part we're going to talk about the Australian political parties okay so that you get an idea of who they are, who they represent, their origins and you'll have a bit of an idea if you want to go out there and you have to vote. If you're an Australian citizen and you're voting in the upcoming election. So, if you want access to the other four parts of this interview, as well as all of my other courses and all of the premium podcast content, make sure you go to AussieEnglish.com.au and you can start your trial your seven day trial for one dollar. Anyway, let's get into today's interview, guys. I give you my dad, Ian Smissen. Take it away!
Dad! Welcome back!
Thank, Pete, good to be here!
I thought I'd get you in today because obviously we have an election coming up.
We do, six exciting days to go.
Six exciting days, I'm doing it by the mail so I don't even know what day it's officially on... What day is it on that we have to or you have to jump out and?
Saturday the 18th.
You go down to the local primary school, right?
Go down to the local primary school where you went 20 years ago and we all line up and vote, buy a sausage in bread.
That's the culture, right?
Shake hands with somebody that you don't want to vote for, just because they're there slapping hands and kissing babies.
You have to kind of dodge all the guys at the front, right? Handing out flyers as well.
Yeah. If you know how you're going to vote, they just become annoying and it's just a waste of paper, but you know...
Yeah I know. So, who are you going to vote for? Is it rude to ask that, by the way?
Look, if we're talking about Australian culture generally that's an interesting one because I think in, certainly in my parents generation, they would never tell me who they voted for, let alone discuss it publicly.
Is that because they don't want to have an argument or some kind of heated discussion?
No, I think it was more that, you know, this is a private decision and I'm going to keep it private. In the end we knew where the, which side of politics their opinions lay. Well, in fact my father used to tell me because he voted informal and that is and we can talk about the political system in Australia, what that means, but he voted informal because he came from Britain and they didn't have compulsory voting in Britain and Australia is one of the only countries in the world, I think it's about ten that have enforced compulsory voting.
So, do you want to explain both of those, informal voting is...
And so informal voting is where you're required to vote or as I joke you're actually not, you're required to turn up to vote, get your name crossed off and put a piece of paper, the the electoral ballot, in to the big cardboard box.
You don't even have to do that, right? You just have to have your name ticked off.
You have to be handed the piece of paper, I think.
Because I went to the last one and I just said take my name off and I was like Is that all I have to do? And she was like yeah, yeah well... You can vote. And I was like "not interested". I just hadn't thought about who'd vote for, so I was like I just don't have any...
I have no opinion.
And I can't be bothered, I have something to do today. So, to be honest I just want to not get fined twenty dollars or whatever it is.
So, that's it. And so that's that, we have enforced compulsory voting in that every person over the age of 18 in Australia is legally required to register to vote and is then legally required to turn up to vote.
And what happens if they don't register?
If they don't register, you'll effectively, you'll get chased, they'll find you. It's not, it's not a witch hunt, but it's...
The police won't show up.
The police line show up on your doorstep, but you'll end up getting letters from the Electoral Commission where they will find all there's a bank account, you've got a driver's licence all of those sort of things so, I think there is a team of people sitting in the background somewhere in Canberra that are probably chasing people up to get them registered on the electoral roll. But once you are on the electoral roll, you're required to turn up to every election whether it's a federal election for the country or whether it's a state election or even just a local city council election, you're required to come and vote.
So, in Britain it's not like that?
No, there's only 10 countries in the world, I think it's 10, that have compulsory and enforced...just don't spit your coffee here.
Exactly.
Yeah. They'd have enforced compulsory voting, that is it's compulsory to vote, but the Electoral Commission actually enforce it. So, you get a fine if you don't. There's a number of other countries that have compulsory registration to vote, but if you don't turn up to vote on the day, they don't really care. But so, you get if you don't come and vote in any one of those, either you have to provide a legitimate reason why you didn't. So, unforeseen illness or whatever else, forgetting isn't quite good enough.
I think I kind of got away with it for forgetting because I'd moved to Canberra and they sent me an email or something saying you haven't voted in this one and I was like I've just forgotten to change that I'm actually not in the state.
And that would have been state voted in a or forgot to vote in a state election where you weren't living in the state and you forgot to change the your enrolment. Yes, you get fined twenty bucks I think it is, twenty dollar fine if you don't vote, which is it's it's a trivial amount for most people, but it's just the sort of statement that saying look, you know, you're supposed to do it, just go and do it. It's less than a parking fine. You know, so...
Well, a parking space a huge now.
Yeah in Melbourne they are.
So, do you think it's a good idea or a bad idea that we have mandatory voting? Do you think it's fair?
Oh,yeah. That's a really interesting sort of moral philosophical question, really. I having grown up with it for my whole life it's one that you don't think about. I actually think it is reasonable for a couple of reasons: one, we want, I believe that, as a country we want our citizens to participate in the democratic process. And if we don't make it mandatory, then there's a reduced chance they will. The second thing it does, and having spent a lot of time in the United States for work over the last decade and been there at a couple of election times...
You got to see Obama, right?
Yeah, yeah. Got to see Obama and Bill Clinton on stage. Me and Bill and Obama and 35.000 of our closest friends at a rally. One of the challenges that they have in the United States is simply getting people out to vote. So, there's an enormous amount of money and time and advertising and effort and a whole lot of people just to get people out to vote.
And the reverse too, right? Where there's quite often a game played to try and prevent people.
To try and prevent people. Yeah.
To like to sow seeds of dismay or hopelessness and be like no, screw this.
No point coming, it's a foregone conclusion. So, that's a challenge, but then the second part of that is that you have people lining up for hours on election day in the United States to vote because there's never and no number of people that are going to come and vote. So, there are far fewer voting public polling stations places where you can go to vote that are open on voting day, but that means that you can end up with, you know, queues a mile or kilometres long just to get in to vote.
That's another reason not to do it, you're like screw that (?) waste of my day.
Yeah, exactly. Whereas in Australia we know exactly how many people there are to vote in our town. 15000 people plus or minus a few thousand, depending on holidays and weekends, that live here of which half are probably registered to vote because they're 18 or over. So, we know that there are seven or eight thousand people that are going to have to vote and in order to get through that number of people, the Electoral Commission knows that they've got to have two or three places open all day and staff them with the right people so there's never a queue of more than 15 to 30 minute wait at the busiest time, which is usually first thing in the morning and and you're always going to get in and vote quickly.
It also means that the Electoral Commission have got the apparatus set up to count those votes really quickly. And apart from postal votes and other sorts of vote where you can vote in an electorate that you don't actually live in so, that then has to be transferred over to that electorate and so on, but the majority people who vote on the day the counting is done by the end of the day, voting closes at 6:00 by 8:00 the counting is basically done. And then it's just collating it through the rest of the evening to get those together. So, but I think the other side of that of other than just the logistical side, I think the other part of it that's important is to understand that if we want our citizens to vote and participate, then requiring to vote is a reasonable thing. You could argue on the opposite side of that and say well, you know, why should we force people to participate in our society? But I think it's a fairly minimalist participation where all you're saying at the national level is that you know you've got to turn up once every three years and put a tick in a box.
I think it's one of those things, for me at least, I can kind of see the libertarian side of it where should you should be able to opt out, and I guess you have the opportunity of doing that as long as you go there, but at the same time it would be nice if I could just press a button online and be like ok, I don't have to waste 20, 30 minutes, 60 minutes of my day.
The mechanism, the mechanism for voting is something that we probably need to look at at some stage, but the opportunities for either accidental or deliberate manipulation of electronic voting or for something to go wrong are way higher than simply counting bits of paper.
Which is what? Something similar to what happened with the census years ago, right? When we got virus, what was it? There was some sort of spyware attack or something.
Look, I think it was just, you know, there are a few attacks on it, but...
And it crashed the system... (?).
And it crashed the system, so that you couldn't do it. And yeah can you imagine what the federal election would look like if voting was open for even if you opened it for the week beforehand? But voting was open for a week and then for five or six of those days it wasn't available or something went wrong. And then you got to go and do it again and, you know, so it's a really hard one. You'd think that the technology should be available now to do it, but I don't think we're quite there.
Alright, guys! Well I hope you enjoyed that interview. Remember, if you want to check out the other four parts of this interview, it's about an hour long make sure that you sign up to the Aussie English Classroom. You can start your seven day trial for one dollar. Just go to AussieEnglish.com.au. I'll see you in there!