Australian federal election - a love letter to democracy, and some resources

Executive summary: Democracy is a luxury which we can’t afford to lose. Voting (intelligently) is a citizen’s duty. Check your enrolment at https://oevf.aec.gov.au/ now.

The Australian federal election has officially been called for 7 September 2013. Those who know me will know that I am quite involved with the Greens. However, I intend to keep claudinechionh.net a party-politics-free zone, aside from the occasional appearance of Greens events in the Melbourne Green Events newsletter.

As much as I care about what my party stands for, I care even more about the kind of free and open democracy that we enjoy in Australia. Standing up for democracy is almost in my blood and is a constant theme in my family story. We came to Australia from Singapore as ‘economic migrants’ of a sort - primarily for business/employment reasons. But it didn’t take long for me to appreciate, even at a young age, how different the two countries were in the way they encouraged or suppressed political difference and freedom of expression.

My parents and I have never been on exactly the same page politically, but we all appreciate our freedom to learn and talk about different policies and opinions. I grew up in a household that subscribed to all of Melbourne’s daily newspapers; one thing I miss about single adult life is the Saturday morning ritual of the four of us juggling the different sections of the Age, Australian, and Herald Sun which covered the dining room table. (Yes! I grew up reading the Murdoch press.) For (I believe) decades, both of my parents have worked as polling officials in elections at federal and state levels. One of the many reasons it took me so long to join a party was that it would disqualify me from sharing the polling-booth experience with them. (Members of political parties are forbidden from working for the Australian Electoral Commission, and rightly so. The AEC is independent of parties, and on the one occasion that I did work at a booth, I was disappointed by the number of voters who didn’t realise this and talked to me as if I were a party member, which I wasn’t then.)

And that was an unexpectedly long prelude to what was meant to be a brief post highlighting some online resources to help Australians vote this year.

Firstly, if you are in any doubt as to whether you are enrolled to vote, or enrolled at the correct address, you have until 8pm on Monday 12 August to check or update your enrolment at https://oevf.aec.gov.au/

Our federal voting system (which I think is broken, but that’s for another post) requires a number in each box for the House of Representatives ballot paper, and either a 1 above the line or a number in each box for the Senate ballot. The Senate ballot seems to get longer at every election. If you vote above the line, the party or ticket that you vote for determines your entire Senate vote - effectively a pre-determined below-the-line vote. If you vote below the line, you determine where each vote goes, but only if you number the boxes correctly - and at possibly a hundred or more boxes this year, the Senate ballot paper is easy to accidentally invalidate.

At the last federal election, Benno Rice’s Below the Line web app enabled voters to navigate the Senate paper before election day and prepare their own personal how-to-vote cards, especially useful for keeping track of all the numbers. Benno is working on re-launching this for the 2013 election - follow @belowtheline_au on Twitter for updates. In the meantime, Cameron McCormack has launched a similar app, briefly at belowtheline.cc and now at senate.io. Neither of these apps will be usable before nominations close on 17 August.

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is hosting Vote Compass, a web app that attempts to match your priorities with those of the Labor, Liberal/National, and Green parties. However, if you’re concerned about online, privacy, you may want to read Stilgherrian’s analysis first.