Australia’s next gold medal winning Olympic performance? Voting

Looking around the world from here in Australia, let’s for a moment or two turn our eyes from the monstrosities of diseased nationalism and allow ourselves to feel good about the very few pathologies we don’t manifest ourselves. In particular, let’s congratulate ourselves on our electoral system.

For one thing, we have a parliamentary system rather than a presidency. This means, that we really don’t have to fear having our head of state go rogue, an eventuality that has come into sharp focus in the US as a partisan Supreme Court has granted former president Trump virtual legal immunity for any action he took (or takes) in the oval office.

Yes, I know that Governor-General Sam Mostyn is technically Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force, but I still maintain that she would, even so, find it difficult to order the Special Air Service to assassinate Pauline Hanson. She’s just not that hands-on.

In the Australian system the Governor-General has all the powers of a king, and that king is Charles the First, on the scaffold, in his shirt. Enormous authority is granted to a figurehead on condition that they never for a microsecond think of using it.

Even the one disconfirming instance, where John Kerr dismissed the Whitlam government, involved neither tanks nor paratroopers taking over the radio stations – by world standards, hardly a coup at all. An extra election here or there soon slides back into the customary electoral white noise.

For another thing, having a parliamentary system means that it’s easier to react to changes in the political situation. Australia copped a lot of ridicule a few years back for running through its prime ministers too quickly, but the upside of that is that if any of our parties were faced with the prospect of going to an election with a leader who’d been convicted of fraud (or rape), or even one who was having to rebut claims of dementia and/or Parkinson’s disease, we’d be able to go from “The leader has my full, unconditional, and absolute support” to an enthralling ABC documentary on their rise and fall in a single news cycle.

And within the category of parliamentary systems, we have one elected by proportional representation.

The recent UK election was first past the post. The Labour Party more than doubled its number of seats, going from being 170 seats behind the Tories to 291 ahead, on the strength of a 1.6% increase in its vote share. That’s 63% of the seats for 34% of the vote. I mean, I’m as delighted to see the Tories out as anybody, but I would like to see some relation between vote share and parliamentary strength.

Mind you, the small change in vote share may also be due to another defect of the British system, which is that any voter whose main objective is simply to throw the rascals out is faced with a complicated series of probability calculations about tactical voting that in Australia is all taken care of by the preferential system. Modern elections are at least as much about voting against people as for them, and first-past-the-post simply doesn’t cater well for that.

Note, too, that not only was Labour up only 1.6% in vote share, but it was also actually down in vote count, because the number of people turning up at the booths plummeted from 67% to 60%. That Labour landslide was brought about by a whopping 20% of British voters, which in Australian terms would allow 96 of Australia’s MPs to be swept into power variously by (according to Google) our substance abusers, our sports haters, or descendants of convicts. I’m not saying that that wouldn’t be fun, but compulsory voting does spread the responsibility around a bit.

Having had that moment of self-congratulation, we should probably note also the ways in which our worst features are shared. We both have unenthusiastic electorates who are increasingly turning away from parties of government to minor parties and independents.

We both have a strong faction of far-right spoilers, and a conservative party that’s increasingly following the far right into pointless culture wars. We both look to refugees (and migrants) for scapegoats to explain the defects in our economy and our society. Both countries refuse to face up to the necessity of higher taxes to meet the increased demands of ageing and climate change.

Even so, it’s not too soon for a proposal to put voting on the list of sports for the Brisbane Olympics. I predict a close final between us and those bastards in New Zealand.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.