It has amazed me over the last yr or so the amount of pple..and I mean my own family as well..who dont actually vote.

These are the same pple who whinge and moan about the Liberal Government and how bad they are and yet are not enrolled to vote.

That thinking just astounds me in its sheer stupidity.

If we dont get behind our prefrred Party how can they succeed?

Labor may not be in the mess it is now if pple got behind them to effect change..

Please ask your friends 'are you enrolled to vote?'

You might be very surprised.

Please vote.This country desperately needs a change of Government.

as I said I asked six pple if they voted..they all said no, there reasons were varied but the reasons just didnt cut it.

I reasoned that if this ratio of 'couldnt be bothered ' pple were applied to the whole country proportionately at election time then that would be thousands upon thousands that didnt bother to vote.

Some elections are won or lost on a handful of votes..this is where the difference comes in.

These IR laws and all the other stuff this party has foisted on Australians has got to come to an end.

To sit idly by and allow a man like Howard to ruin our nation, is as bad as if we'd committed these crimes ourselves.

I don't see how people not enrolled to vote get away with it. It can't be all that hard to track them down. Still, I suppose it's no big deal for the politicians; all they want is enough of the votes which are cast to get them over the line.

Following on from that, Holyshadow, are you aware that, apart from the fact that you are looking like breaking Wayne Smith's record for the number of posts, this is why the ALP is so dead set against the abolition of compulsory voting. It is a well known fact that there are more thickos voting Labor than there are voting Coalition. Take away the compulsion, and the Labor vote would drop far more than their oponents'.

I can't quote the research, sorry. But you probably already know this, given your reference to family members.

Spare us the gratuitous insults, Leigh - they only diminish your credibility.

On topic: perhaps HS's relatives might have been faced with a choice like I had in the recent Qld election, that is a choice between only two candidates (either ALP or NP). Under such circumstances I dutifully turned up on election day, but deliberately cast an informal vote since neither candidate came anywhere near my political views.

I actually disagree with compulsory voting. In fact, I think that prospective electors should be required to pass some kind of test of their comprehension of our electoral system, and also of their knowledge of the salient issues of the moment.

Personally I think being forced to vote is the sort of patronising nanny value which I vote against (voluntarily).

Leigh is right. Take away the civic penalties for not voting and labor would fall even further off the radar.

On a similar topic, having voted within both systems and discussed the relative merits of each, I would vote against all the preferences rubbish and go back to a first past the post method of direct elections.

The only thing preference voting achieves is appointment of the compromise and something for the party numbers men to trade with behinf the scenes, hardly the stuff which makes for honest government, an election process appointing representatives with the aid of corrupting deals.

Yes, Col. Preferential voting is a farce, and compulsory voting is anti-democratic.