Across the Pacific, hundreds of thousands of Americans, and several thousand aliens, including Australians, are working as volunteers for candidates in next month's election. Thousands more have volunteered not for a party or a person but for the process: enrolling voters, ferrying them to polling booths, and monitoring conduct. Many are young, and there are more this year than ever, not least because this has seemed an election with clear and important choices.
Here in the ACT, voters are finding it very difficult to remember that there's a territorial election nine days hence. Even those with some casual knowledge, perhaps from the advertising, and even those with a settled view on who ought to win, would be finding it difficult to summon either deep passion for the contest or an impulse to drop everything for the purpose of getting out to persuade fellow citizens that they ought to vote one way or another.
As befits a republic in the middle of a monarchical Australia, our election even has aspects of the American primary process. Voters can decide not only which party, but which representatives of that party, they want to win. But if some candidates are working hard to establish a profile for themselves, by personal advertising, few are promoting points of difference between themselves and other candidates from their own party, even though doing so gives them their best chance of rising out of the ruck.
At the last election, when Richard Mulcahy was running as a Liberal, he was chosen from other Liberal candidates because people had at least come to recognise from his relentless advertising, that he was serious. This time about, I can hardly think of a major party candidate (Labor, Liberal or Green) seeking to stand out much from his or her party's effort. If neither candidates nor parties can invest campaigns with much of the aura of a crusade, can they be surprised at a general public indifference?
The leading candidates are attractive or unattractive enough, according to one's point of view. And parties have some record against which they can be judged. They have issued policies and made promises, calculated by professional strategists to stress important differences and to make voters prefer them over the others. That, together with advertising and public knowledge of relevant records, is presumably informing the choices which will be made on Saturday week.
Because it is a proportional system, probably 60 per cent of voters will end up seeing the government (Labor or Liberal) in power that they have preferred, and about 80 per cent will elect at least one, probably two, of the individual candidates to whom they gave a 1, 2 or 3.
The independent and small party groupings are likewise evidence of public differences. But nothing suggests that they have galvanised significant support.
This does not mean that no one cares who wins or that, come election day, voters will have great difficulty making up their minds. There's a good deal of evidence of discernment. But not of passion, commitment, crusade, or an active civic process by which groups of citizens are working hard to persuade other groups to their view.
By now we know too that it matters. The party or parties in power will be deciding where more than $2 billion is spent. Making decisions about many of our most important community services our hospitals and health care system, our schools and our education framework, our municipal services and utilities, and policing and community services. There may be a common core to each of the parties, but we have had enough experience to know that a choice between them, one way or another, can make a difference, whether one which inspires or which annoys. And enough experience to know that bad decisions can waste much public money.
Is it the media's fault that voters seem so indifferent? If so, it has not been for want of coverage; indeed, there's a good argument that voters are getting rather more than they really want. Twice as much space would not sell a single extra newspaper, even to the proud grandmums of candidates it might drive some readers to cancel. The candidates who will whinge that we have failed to do enough to draw their virtues to public attention, or to expose the warts on the faces of rival candidates, are usually really complaining of their own failure to have had much that was interesting to say, and their failure to make news to do or say anything which made them stand out from the crowd.
Our sense of duty to readers has made us seek out issues, attitudes, arguments and policy viewpoints from parties and candidates, and, sometimes, to publish more about the election than it might have rated on strict news grounds. But we cannot make ''news'' where there is none, or confect excitement that does not exist. And we don't feel we have to search out those who do not come forward. It's a game for big girls and boys, not for the shy.
Perhaps we have such a perfect system that we do not need US-style volunteers, the more public and private debates, and the same enthusiasm. Maybe the sense of a greater passion and crusade about the American election comes from the feeling among protagonists for either side that things are rotten and need fixing. Maybe, or maybe we simply take too much for granted.
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