Source : the age
Like millions of disengaged voters around the country, 26-year-old plumber Tom Chambers has no interest in politics.
“I don’t really understand it. I don’t know, they’re all the same really,” he said during a lunch break in Melbourne’s central business district this week.
Plumber Tom Chambers, 26, said he was not interested in politics. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui.
There is no exact data on how many Australians are checked out of the election, but voter turnout at the last election was at its lowest proportion in a century, membership of political parties is falling and the fragmentation and digitisation of media means political campaigns are fighting with every other form of entertainment for voters’ attention.
This helps to explain why political parties are turning to influencers, non-traditional campaigning and social media – at the same time as trying to dominate the nightly news – to get their messages across.
Australian National University politics lecturer Jill Sheppard said the big number of people who remain undecided, so-called “soft voters”, is being driven by their cynical view of politicians and the news.
“That softness of the vote is coming from voters who aren’t engaged and aren’t persuaded by the very little they hear,” said Sheppard, who contributes to the Australian Election Study that tracks voters political attitudes and choices.
This political apathy has been picked up by pollsters like this masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor has found that up to one-third of the nation’s 18 million enrolled voters have not decided which party they will endorse.
Campaign headquarters for Labor and the Coalition say the large cohort of undecided voters makes it possible for either party to sway enough voters in the final week of campaigning to form government.
These trends have coincided in a rise of independent candidates being elected to parliament at the expense of support for major paries.
Meanwhile, voter disengagement has grown. The 2022 election recorded the smallest proportion of voter turnout since the 1920s, when compulsory voting was introduced.
The Australian Election Study found that in 2022, nearly one-fifth fewer people “care a good deal about the election” compared to two decades ago, in 1993.
In the same period, the number of people who did not watch the election debate halved, with 30 per cent avoiding the contest in 1993 compared to 66 per cent in 2022.
Mara Board, a humanitarian and development student who lives in St Marys, said she pays more attention to global issues than Australian political news.
“I don’t really see the government doing anything,” said Board. “People my age are really into politics and what’s going on, but not over here in Australia. [Politicians are] just not really around doing much for people our age, they don’t really talk to us.”
With the chance to form government on the line in the final week of the election, political parties are about to kick off a furious bout of campaigning to capture the support of the large cohort of undecided voters. But Sheppard does not expect these outcomes to count for much.
“[Political parties] can’t fatten the pig on market day, and you can’t convince people weeks out from the election that you will be better than you have been for the last three years,” she said.
Chambers said most of the little local news media he consumes comes from the internet, despite his recognition of the importance of politics.
“I’m not too interested but I know it’s important,” he said.
Despite his indifference Chambers plans to vote Labor, “just because I believe [Coalition Leader Peter] Dutton is trying to get rid of the union,” he says.
“That obviously affects me. And Labor always helps out the trades – supposedly – at least.”
Jeannie Boros, 66, said she is not interested in politics and most of her knowledge of it comes from television news programs.
Jeannie Boros, 66, said she would end up voting the same way she always had. Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui.
When it comes to voting in this election, she will be guided by a simple principle: stick with what she knows.
“I listen to both parties, but I just go back to my old party. It’s just ingrained [in me],” she says.
The big block on undecideds was a quirk of Australia’s compulsory voting system, which creates both benefits and risks for the democratic process.
“In another country, these soft voters wouldn’t vote, we would just call them non-voters, and that is absolutely unique to Australia,” Sheppard said.
Despite the rise in popularity of independent politicians, compulsory voting props up the major parties, according to Sheppard.
“Being loyal doesn’t necessarily mean you’re engaged.
“In Australia, we have about the highest rates of partisanship in the world. It declined everywhere in the world before it started to decline here, and it was held up until now by compulsory voting.”
Sheppard said there were two distinct groups among the large cohort of undecided voters – those who are “reading policy announcements and thinking hard” and the “ones who don’t”.
Ollie Sardelich, 27, is one of the highly engaged voters.
“Choosing to put your head in the sand kind of just makes things worse,” she said.
However, the disengaged voters “vastly outnumber” those who are actively weighing up their choices, and they are likely to get their ballot casting duty over with as early as possible.
“That much larger group will not engage much more heavily between now and when they vote and they’re likely to vote pretty early because they want to be done with it,” Sheppard said.
