In his pre-coronation ‘Ask Me Anything’ session on Reddit, Andy Burnham said he is ‘a strong supporter of electoral reform’ – although he didn’t specify what such reform should be. But other Labour figures, including former home secretary David Blunkett and especially Burnham’s mentor, former leader Neil Kinnock, are agitated that a great many of the party’s traditional constituency – the poor, the less well-educated, welfare dependents, and people of immigrant backgrounds – don’t even vote at all.

British voter turnout isn’t something to be proud of. At the 2024 general election, it was just 59.7 per cent. The highest-voting constituency, Harpenden and Berkhamsted, could only manage 75.2 per cent, while the lowest, Manchester Rusholme in Burnham country, polled an abysmal 40 per cent.

Even Count Binface’s entertaining campaign to unseat Nigel Farage in the recent Clacton by-election couldn’t motivate more than a 44 per cent turnout: Farage won not quite two-thirds of those votes. Including the 56 per cent who didn’t vote, in the end Nigel was the choice of less than three in ten eligible Clacton voters: hardly the vindicating ‘overwhelming endorsement’ he claimed desperately on polling night.

If voters choose not to vote, surely that’s their right

Kinnock, Blunkett and the progressive left’s solution to voter apathy? Make voting compulsory. If you’re registered, you would have a duty to vote, and if you don’t, you’re liable for a £10 fine. Besides grandees like Kinnock and Blunkett, three Labour-aligned think tanks – Demos, Think Labour and the Institute for Public Policy Research – each advocate compulsory voting.

Think Labour (formerly known as Labour Together) released a report in May – particularly notable given the think tank’s head, Alison Phillips, has joined No. 10 as Burnham’s deputy chief of staff. The report is premised on the proposition that ‘low turnout tilts the field against progressive politics’ and only compulsion can overcome the voluntary voting’s inbuilt biases.

Lords Kinnock and Blunkett have declared their support for adding compulsory voting to a Bill amending the Representation of the People Act, currently in the House of Lords. ‘When turnouts have fallen for various negative reasons, election results are consequently distorted, accountability can be diminished and disengagement from community obligations becomes habitual,’ Kinnock told the Daily Telegraph.

All advocates cite one country, where voting has been compulsory for over a century: Australia. They highlight that since compulsory voting was introduced Down Under in the 1920s, voter turnout at national elections has all but once exceeded 90 per cent.

In Australia, compulsory voting is deeply entrenched. Recognising that everyone being expected to vote on a weekday is highly disruptive to businesses and public services, Australian elections are held on Saturdays. Even with generous provision for pre-poll voting, queues can be long, but the mood is generally relaxed and even festive. Because most polling stations are at schools closed for the weekend, the schools themselves and community groups such as the Scouts turn voting into mini-fetes, with cake stalls and ‘sausage sizzles’ selling ketchup-splodged sausages on slices of soggy white bread – the famous Australian ‘democracy sausage’.

If you don’t vote, the Australian Electoral Commission asks you why and, if they don’t like your excuse, you’re fined at least A$20 (£10.65), with steeply escalating late penalties. Failing to vote even at local council elections can trigger a fine, as I found recently at my cost.

Australia expects every man and woman to do their electoral duty, whether they like it or not. British enthusiasts for compulsory voting cite high voter turnout as a good thing, but the quantity of the Australian vote doesn’t guarantee its quality.

As in Britain, some Australian voters are very politically informed. They follow politics avidly, consume traditional and social media coverage, and form their own opinions. A great many others, however, are not. Poor civic education in schools also means a great many Australians have only a superficial understanding of how they are governed. More often, voters simply don’t care about politics between elections: they turn up on polling day, register their vote and scoff their democracy sausage. They don’t have the right to not vote, so they apathetically get it over with.

Australian political parties love compulsory voting, however: it means they don’t have to waste resources to get out the vote, a big challenge in most Western countries. Since taxpayers fund parties to the tune of A$3.50 (£1.86) for each vote they receive, it’s a nice little earner for them too. Some serial candidates have been known to make comfortable incomes from public vote funding, despite having a snowball’s chance in hell of actually being elected. Before she was finally elected as a senator in 2016, the populist One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, was for years just such a serial federal and state candidate.

Whether apathetic or not, under Australia’s single transferable vote system, voters must number a square for each candidate. Failure to do so generally renders their vote ‘informal’. Having been a party official observing vote counts, I can tell you that, for many voters, going informal or spoiling ballot papers is their ‘none of the above’ option, often with obscene, scatological messages and crude anatomical drawings. British compulsory voting proposals, advocating a ‘none of the above’ option on each ballot paper, are something the Australian system could adopt for itself.

But if British progressives think compulsory voting will force their natural supporters to turn out, Australia proves they should be careful what they wish for. In the 101 years since federal compulsory voting started in 1925, conservative governments have held sway for 64 years; Labor governments for just 37. What’s more, to be elected, after disastrous socialist experiments in the 1940s and 1970s, to win elections the federal Labor party has campaigned and governed from the centre, even centre-right, mostly suppressing its radical and loony left tendencies to stay in office.

Given it’s now more affluent and university-educated Australian voters who skew left and less well-educated and blue-collar voters leaning right, compulsory voting arguably undermines the left-of-centre vote in Australia, not boosts it. Compulsory voting in Britain likely would reward Nigel Farage, not Andy Burnham: Labour figures like Kinnock and Blunkett should take note.

Democracy is about freedom of choice. If voters choose not to vote, surely that’s their right. Labour should respect their decisions and leave them be.