Forgetting the election result (if only that episode of political self-harm could be forgotten), how is Australia’s democratic health looking after its latest outing?

Australian authorities like to boast that our particular system of parliamentary democracy, especially our globally almost-unique voting procedures such as compulsory voting and preferential voting, are best-in-class compared to other countries but, if democracy is to mean what it says on the tin, there are more than a few areas up for dispute.

It may be time to bust a few of the cherished myths about Australian democracy.

Compulsory voting

All Australian citizens are legally required to enrol to vote under the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 (the Australian Electoral Commission [AEC] brags that a ‘record 98.2 per cent of eligible Australians are enrolled to vote in the upcoming [2025] federal election’) and must do so (unless they have a valid reason) or cop a fine (or ‘administrative fee’, as the AEC euphemistically calls it) which, if unpaid, may result in court appearances resulting in a heftier fine up to a maximum of $303 plus having to pay the AEC’s legal fees.

Compulsory voting has it predictable cheer squad. The Conversation is reliably on message, telling us that ‘many experts’ [Caution!! Experts Ahead!!] ‘consider Australia’s electoral system to be one of the finest in the world’ and is the ‘envy of the industrialised voluntary-voting world’. Furthermore, ‘the majority of Australians apparently share this view: 70 per cent approve of compulsory voting’ (that this still leaves one in three Australians who don’t think much at all of the principle of compulsion in voting is, apparently, neither here nor there).

According to the AEC, there are 32 countries in the world with compulsory voting, of which 19 actually enforce it. Given that there are around 150 countries in the world, however, these 19 (including Australia) are in a tiny minority of countries that force their citizens to vote under threat of penalty.

‘Without compulsory voting’ we are informed by our academic wizards ‘turnout would be considerably lower at around 55-60 per cent of the eligible population, mimicking similar democracies such as the US or Canada’ to which we might reply that those countries seem to do just fine, with the politically engaged often exercising their voting rights with passion and vigour whilst the politically disengaged have opted out of the system as is their right.

The ‘turnout at Australian elections’ gloat the compulsory voting cheerleaders ‘has never fallen below 90 per cent since the introduction of compulsory voting in 1924’. Well, the threat of fines and court appearances can achieve such statistically mighty feats but this is hardly congruent with democracy whose inseparable partner is that thing called freedom.

‘Switching to a voluntary system would plunge Australian democracy into the same crisis of citizenship that democracies everywhere in the voluntary-voting world are going through: that is, the rapid decline into gerontocracy as voters – especially young people – turn their backs on voting in droves.’

So, without state sanctions for the non-compliant, the crusties will run everything, as they apparently do in Britain (where only around 44 per cent of 18-25-year-olds vote), or Canada (where only 38 per cent of young-uns vote), or ‘worse still, the US’ where ‘older people are now three times more likely than the young to vote’.

These admittedly disappointing youth turnout figures, however, are more a reflection of the bland mainstream political choices on offer for younger voters who see no hope of any political alleviation of their demographic-specific woes such as housing affordability or competition with immigrants for jobs. But, not to worry, forced voting will paper-over the deeper malaise.

For all the alleged genius of compulsory voting in Australia, however, it still fails to get around five per cent of enrolled voters (one in every 20 of them) to actually vote, whilst a further five per cent of those who do vote still vote informal and two per cent of eligible voters are (illegally) not even enrolled to vote. That makes 12 per cent or one in eight Australian citizens who are not persuaded by the compulsory nature of Australian voting.

How the vote-or-else approach may affect the quality of the democratic outcome can be illustrated by doing a stint of polling booth How-To-Vote (HTV) volunteering. In my sadly-receding younger days, I did a fair bit of HTV volunteering on election day and some of the characters who rock up simply to avoid a fine must be from a different planet to judge from their behaviour (what time of the day must they start drinking – or smoking illicit substances – I think to myself) but if they inadvertently cast a formal vote this devalues the votes of those making a more considered democratic choice.

Preferential Voting

Preferential voting in Australia makes us another global outlier on that particular voting dimension where voting is predominantly First-Past-The-Post (FPP). Preferential voting in Australia has its 1918 origin in the rural-based National Party (then the Country Party) where FPP voting could split the anti-Labor vote in country areas. In hindsight, a pact between the conservative parties not to foul each other’s nests would have overcome this problem without the considerable downsides of preferential voting.

Preferential voting, for example, denies the right of a voter to ‘exhaust’ their vote before it filters down to the candidates they see as unpalatable. For some voters, it’s like being forced to choose between getting chlamydia and gonorrhea when you would really rather not have either. That is not democratic and means that preferential voting acts as cynical protection racket for the look-a-like major parties, despite the big two (Labor and the Lib/Nats) managing only 68.3 per cent of the first preference vote in 2025, the lowest since the 1930s.

Labor and the Coalition in Australia have enough ‘rusted-on’ voters that they would still win an FPP election but, as the insurgent Reform has shown in the UK, a serious challenge outside the tired old duopoly is possible under FPP whilst Donald Trump effectively managed the same in the US (which also has FPP voting) by transforming the Republican Party from the old globalist, neo-con, Chamber of Commerce outfit into a popular party of American workers.

Compulsory preferential voting may also increase the donkey (and ‘reverse donkey’) vote which, unlike a deliberately blank or spoilt ballot slip, confers an unfair advantage to the top (or bottom) name on the ballot. Such formal but junk votes cast by the apathetic, the ‘don’t knows’ and the ‘couldn’t-care-lesses’ under threat of financial penalty devalue the votes of those who do care and who do value their vote.

Photo-ID

Defenders of Australia’s laid-back, high-trust voting system routinely claim that there is no voting fraud in Australia, and, even if there is, it amounts to only 0.03 per cent of all votes cast.

Even taking this flatteringly minuscule figure on vote fraud at face value, however, even a small amount of fraudulent votes could still be decisive in Australia’s marginal, knife-edge electorates.

Voting must not only have high integrity (one-vote, one-value) but be seen to have high integrity. Photo ID would achieve this. Pretty well everyone has some form of it these days – if not, they could apply to the AEC to obtain such ID which would also have the same photo-ID status as a driver’s licence or a passport (and which could eliminate fraud in many other areas).

The ‘public funding’ rort

It is beyond time to end what I perceive as the rort of ‘public funding’ of parliamentary parties and candidates. This process siphons off taxpayers’ money of $5 for every first preference vote for parties or independents which receive at least four per cent of total first preference votes. For the 2025 election, an estimated $112 million will be nicked from our pockets and gifted to our politicians across the political spectrum with most of this amount (around three-quarters) going to the two heavyweight parties. Whose snouts are in the trough, again?

Conclusion

On libertarian grounds, no one should be forced to vote (compulsory voting and enrolment), or compelled to vote in a particular way (compulsory preferential) but you don’t have to be a strict libertarian to support the principle that democracy should allow maximum freedom in whether a person votes or in what manner they do so. As with certain ‘vaccination mandates’, the days of compulsion in voting should also have had their day.