Please do not confuse that last post by "skeptic" (with a K) with my earlier post by "sceptic" (with a C). Completely different persons.

My point was that voting is a duty, like jury service, and that the democratic "right" is the right to live under democratic government, rather than to do as you please with the ballot paper.

To avoid confusion, I am going to change my online nickname to "federalist".

Helen I think you are misreading the act

'retire alone to some unoccupied compartment of the booth, and there, in private, mark his or her vote on the ballot paper;'

does not specify that you have to vote for anybody on the ballot paper, just that you should mark your vote on the ballot paper. You can therefore mark the paper how you wish or not at all. The act does not specify that you must vote for anybody on the paper you have in front of you.

COMPULSORY and SECRET like illicit SEX?

Gawd, I agree with Morgan. For the first time in my adult life I exercised my option to not participate in the process. I not only didn't vote, I didn't bother to enrol. "Anarchy!!" some will scream,but I note that the world has not failed to continue turning and the political rats have not yet starved in their gilded cage, deserving as such a fate may be.

I am undoubtedly in breach of the law that requires me to participate but does not require me to do so meaningfully. Pfft, if the only choice offered is the one that Hobson prefers then I'll take Shank's pony gladly and I'll even pay for the privilege if that's what it takes to make Hobson revise his business model.

For the first time in my life I can say I don't care about the outcome. All of the rhetoric offered by both parties was about people in groups that I simply don't belong to. It's all about sectional interests and pork-barrelling, which I simply can't condone.

As any who know me will attest, principle is important to me. I didn't take the $900 handout offered by Rudd because it was based on a precept that I don't condone - that the government's role is to subsidise retail enterprises and because I simply didn't need it. The idea of having it offered genuinely offended me. The same goes for "family tax benefit", which I have never claimed my entitlement to. If having children is so expensive for middle-class people that it requires subsidy, then there is a structural problem. I don't agree that this structural problem exists, therefore the "benefit" is nothing more than a handout, with all the baggage that accepting a handout entails.

If I am able to make decisions like this and have the Government accept them (noone has been around to compel me to accept these handouts), then I am surely able to make a decision not to participate in a self-serving farce by the political class.

A pox on all their houses.

Ludwig, 'Not wanting to be represented by any of the nominated candidates does not indicate a preference for non-representation, it indicates a feeling that there is no one on offer that is good enough to be their rep."

That's pretty much how I was thinking of it. As it stands an informal vote does not contribute to no one getting elected to the seat, someone will still be elected.

Optional preferential voting with one of the options always being "none of the above" sounds like a great approach.

R0bert

I think there isn't much for me to say, as everyone else summed the situation up nicely.

A question- would it be democratic if we were forced to vote for ONE particular party? What about two? What about ten?

Otherwise, I'll leave for now, adding that quoting John Stuart Mill (a rather anti-democratic and bigoted individual) and the South Australian parliament as a good example of governance really doesn't help.