I was engaged in an “interesting” discussion on here on Saturday with someone who, to their credit, openly admitted they had voted for One Nation and then preferenced Labor.
It wasn’t so much the vote that interested me. It was the justification for it.
They had rejected the Liberals because of Peter Dutton’s work-from-home policy.
There was just one rather important problem with that reasoning.
The policy applied to Commonwealth public servants, not the entire workforce, and following the backlash it was dumped on 7 April 2025, almost a month before the federal election.
Yet it had apparently played a part in determining how this person voted and, importantly, where their preferences went.
And that rather proves my point about taking voting seriously.
I don’t expect voters to be political analysts. But if you are going to reject a party because of a particular policy, surely it isn’t unreasonable to expect you to know what that policy actually was, and whether it even existed by the time you voted.
That isn’t asking too much of voters. It’s asking them to take some responsibility for the choices they make.
That exchange got me thinking about something much broader.
I do take voting seriously. I always have.
Why? For the simple reason that governments affect our daily lives. Sometimes directly through the laws they pass and the taxes they impose. Sometimes indirectly through the regulations, obligations and costs those decisions impose on businesses, institutions and services around us.
I don’t expect everyone else to take it as seriously as I do. I don’t expect them to be a political tragic who follows every parliamentary debate, reads every policy document or spends their evenings examining economic data. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do that.
But they need to take some interest in it.
Why? Because politics eventually finds its way into almost everything. Housing. Energy. Tax. Superannuation. Health. Aged care. Education. Immigration. Employment. Law and order. Infrastructure. They affect us all to a lesser or greater degree.
Which is why I take a fairly dim view of some of the excuses routinely offered to justify how people vote.
“My vote doesn’t count.”
Yes, it does.
One vote obviously doesn’t determine an election, but millions of individual votes collectively determine who governs the country. You cannot separate your individual decision from the collective result it helps produce.
“I live in a safe seat, so it doesn’t matter.”
Yes, it does.
Safe seats are lost. We saw that on Saturday in the WA by-election. Margins change. Primary votes send political messages. And in the increasingly volatile political environment we are experiencing, yesterday’s impregnable fortress can become tomorrow’s marginal seat.
I expect something fairly simple from voters: know what you’re voting for.
You don’t need a degree in political science to check whether a policy actually exists, whether it applies to you, what the major parties are proposing or where your preferences may ultimately flow.
And, importantly, ask yourself: will what I’m voting for make the country a better place?
Then we got onto compulsory voting and preferences.
There are arguments for and against compulsory voting. Personally, I think we owe something to those who fought so hard to win the right to vote. Turning up once every few years hardly seems an unreasonable way of honouring that legacy.
And compulsory voting requires you to turn up; it doesn’t force you to cast a valid vote.
Naturally, I would prefer people to actually cast a valid vote, and to select their candidate and allocate their preferences with at least some knowledge of what those choices mean. And certainly on something more substantial than one personal beef.
And frankly, if someone has absolutely no interest in finding out what any of the candidates stand for and intends to play silly games with their ballot instead, I’d rather they put a blank ballot paper in the box than make a completely uninformed choice that has consequences for everyone else.
I regularly see posts along the lines of, “I’ll never preference the Liberals until they dump Turnbull,” or “I won’t vote for them until they pull Australia out of the Paris Agreement.”
Fine. People are entitled to make those decisions.
But they should also understand what they are actually asking for and what the consequences of making that one issue the determining factor in their vote might be.
Reopening the Turnbull wars would be an enormous political distraction and hand Labor plenty of ammunition. Turnbull has no say in Liberal policy today, so exactly what would be achieved by making his expulsion a prerequisite for supporting the party?
Other than, perhaps, turning Turnbull into the martyr he already seems to believe he is.
Likewise, withdrawing Australia from the Paris Agreement isn’t something a government simply announces on Monday and completes by Tuesday. It involves a formal treaty process, takes time and potentially carries diplomatic, trade and economic consequences.
If the immediate objective is to abandon net zero, then abandon net zero and deal with Paris when the time is right.
You can still believe Australia should leave Paris. You can still believe Turnbull should be expelled from the Liberal Party. That isn’t my point.
My point is that voting involves choices between alternatives, not writing a political Christmas list and refusing to participate until somebody delivers every item on it.
If you decide that one issue overrides everything else — energy, tax, immigration, housing, health, defence, the economy and ultimately who forms government — that’s your right.
But own the consequences of that decision as well and stop with the excuses.
Then came another excuse:
“People are too busy to read policies.”
I don’t buy that one either.
Many of the people telling me they are far too busy to find out what political parties or candidates actually stand for aren’t too busy arguing about politics on social media, sharing political memes or bitching and complaining about the Govt that, in all likelihood, their vote or preferences helped put there in the first place.
Seriously, how difficult is it?
Most voters might have seven or eight candidates on their House of Representatives ballot. Take a quick look at them. Who are they? What do they stand for? What are their major policies and what is their history?
Nobody is asking voters to read War and Peace, memorise every chapter and then run a probability matrix before deciding where to put the numbers on a ballot paper.
Just make some effort to understand the choice you are making.
Because those little numbers have consequences.
Then there is the perennial defence:
“Politicians say one thing before an election and do something completely different afterwards.”
Sometimes they do.
Circumstances also change. Governments encounter economic shocks, wars, pandemics, natural disasters and financial realities that can legitimately force them to alter course.
Frankly, no party should promise that it will never drop or change a policy. Governments have to be able to respond to circumstances. What they do need to be much better at is explaining why they have changed course.
But history also tells us that governments generally give us plenty of clues about how they intend to govern.
Which brings me to May 2025.
Nobody should have been terribly surprised by the government Australians elected.
Labor had already governed for three years. There was a record to examine: broken or abandoned commitments, power bill shocks, a cost-of-living crisis, soaring immigration while housing was already desperately short, and millions spent on the failed Voice referendum.
Whatever your assessment of that record, voters weren’t buying a mystery box.
Did people genuinely think the Govt was suddenly going to have some great “come to Jesus” awakening after being returned to office?
That doesn’t mean everyone had to vote Liberal. Far from it.
Vote Labor. Vote Liberal. Vote National. Vote One Nation. Vote independent. Vote for whoever most closely represents your values and priorities.
But understand what that vote means, and don’t use the excuse afterwards that you didn’t know what you were getting.
And in our preferential voting system, understand what your preferences mean as well.
You don’t get to control what millions of other Australians do with their ballots. You do control what you do with yours.
And there is something fundamentally inconsistent about spending the next two years raging about governments, politicians and policies while insisting voters bear absolutely no responsibility for deciding who gets the power to implement them.
Democracy doesn’t end when we walk out of the polling booth.
Accountability shouldn’t begin there either.
We rightly demand that politicians take responsibility for the decisions they make.
Perhaps voters need to accept a little responsibility for theirs.
