Voting is coming!

I'll post about a book later. Right now I'm in memoryland. My father refused to ever tell us how he voted, so we never discussed who we actually voted for. The idea was, I think, that we make up our own minds. The problem is that without that discussion at the dinner table, we didn't get to discus politics nearly enough and so some of us found our political sophistication elsewhere and some didn't. Lack of pressure can backfire, sometimes. I think I'm making up for it on my blog.

Anyhow, Australia now has a new election date and it's not Yom Kippur and I've probably missed the boat for enrolling to work on matters electoral (because it was no use putting my name down if I then had to say "Sorry, I'm Jewish"), but I'm relieved in all other respects.

I've already revised my voting strategy. I was going to vote Labor, simply because Gillard needed the support. I didn't like all her policies (in fact, some I loathed intensely) but I wanted to make a stand against a whole bunch of hatreds that were partly manifesting as misogyny. Now that the misogynists have won and Rudd has replaced Gillard, I'm not voting Labor. The hatreds still manifest, but I shall address them differently.

I'm voting my usual method, with just one small adjustment.

Each election, I find out about all the local candidates. I rank them very carefully and vote under the line for the Senate, filling in every single box. One election I think I had to fill in 87 boxes, but it was worth it. It's always worth it, especially the years (like this) which are very plaguish on both houses.

My technique is simple. Candidates with truly foul politics share the bottom of the ballot. This time, they will do so along with the Liberals. I do not actually dislike the Liberal Party, but they've kept a leader with those truly foul politics in for so very long, that I cannot trust their decision-making and so otherwise tolerable candidates will go near the bottom. Since Zed is standing for the Senate, I might put him right down the bottom just because his name is the last letter of the alphabet and it means I don't have to distinguish between who is worst quite as carefully as usual.

I work up the list and the least offensive goes at the top. Except this time if the least offensive is Labor, they'll go after the next least. I'll make sure preferences flow to them (for this may be an election where preferences count) but I won't give even the most delightful Labor candidate #1 ranking, or even #2 ranking. I am, after all, female, and they have publicly demonstrated their lack of support for women in power.

It's all very straightforward, really.

There was a time in my life when three different parties wanted me to be join and do things with them and a bunch of friends said "You'd be good in politics." The parties backed down when I explained my method of voting. It appears I'm not a party player...



ETA: I went to the Electoral Commission website and it's not too late to put myself down. They don't accept applications that don't have a mobile phone number, though, so I still can't work. I know what phone I want (they finally make phones I can see!) but it has to wait until I have fulltime work. There's irony in there, I fear. My life as usual. (I suspect it's a design flaw on the form rather than a conscious decision to not employ people who only have landlines. It's an odd one, however.)