The Inspector-General of Misconception (10 page)

We think that Australia now has seven, maybe only six, ‘festivals' or ‘national days'.

We hesitate about the number because some of these festivals are still emerging and some are in transition. Some are dying.

By festivals, we mean a public gathering of a significant part of the population to celebrate openly as ‘a whole', say New Year's Eve, or those times when most Australians gather in their homes in larger than normal groups to do something special which everyone else in the country is doing at around the same time; for example, Christmas.

New Year is the first of our festivals.

On New Year, we choose to consciously ‘sense' that a cycle of living is finished and a new cycle beginning.

It is a social decision in that ‘year end' and ‘year
beginning' are invented ideas. Other cultures use different dates for their ‘new' year.

Australians gather in public to watch fireworks, often become intoxicated, and traditionally ‘make good resolutions' which, custom has it, we never keep.

This custom of good resolutions has within it the Western idea of self-improvement but curiously, this intention of self-improvement is by custom annulled by the much older belief in an inexorable fate.

By believing that we are destined not to keep the good resolutions, New Year becomes a festival of happy resignation to human frailty.

Next in our calendar of festivals is Australia Day – held on the day the first fleet landed in Sydney Harbour.

This was, for many years, a dog. Great efforts have been made over the last few years to make this a national people's festival and it now involves many organisations and people and, according to its organisers, is a growing festival.

It is the Festival of Nationhood. It celebrates the ‘nation' as a political unit, and as a festival, is increasingly redefining itself with pageants expressing the history of the country, Aboriginal reconciliation and multiculturalism.

Our good friend Nicholas Dettmann has proposed over dinner tables for some time now that we change the date of Australia Day to the day before the landing. This would then encompass the idea of there being an Australia with its people
before
the arrival of the fleet. And would make us conscious of the huge historical event
which befell the Aboriginal people that next day.

Following Australia Day is Anzac Day – a national day. It is our Day of the Warrior.

Unlike most countries, the Australian Day of the Warrior is marked by citizens marching in civilian clothing and with no displays of military hardware.

Anzac Day attracts growing crowds and we see that in opinion surveys, younger people prefer it as the ‘national day'.

In a shivering nervous way, we rather like tanks and parades of military hardware, but we are told that this is not ‘the Australian way'.

Then there is Easter. This festival is in a strange condition.

We don't know what we are celebrating at Easter.

Except for practising Christians, the death and the resurrection of Christ is all but forgotten.

Nor is it our Spring Festival which it often is in other parts of the world.

It is more like a pagan fertility festival with its eggs and the Easter Bunny. We still eat hot-cross buns, symbols of the moon and the four quarters of the year, which pre-date Christianity.

Easter was once associated with the country agricultural shows which culminated in the ‘Easter Show' in the state capitals. Being a country boy, by far the most exciting event in our childhood was the trip to the ‘Big Smoke' for the Show.

The shows are, in turn, related to the ancient harvest festivals celebrating a successful harvesting of the crop.

The farming community could revitalise Easter, maybe combining it with the growing interest in gastronomy and wine and food festivals.

Labour Day and May Day were once the Festival of Labour and celebrated the working class and the labour movement in a time when a large part of the population identified itself this way.

But as the unions take on a service role and lose their emotive force, the Festival of Labour is definitely on the wane.

During the cycle of a year, the Australian community now increasingly involves itself in arts festivals.

They mostly involve all the arts and crafts, although some such as Tamworth's National Country and Western Festival, and town jazz festivals, are specialised.

The arts festivals take place in the new ‘arts centres' of towns and cities which have become a type of ‘cathedral'.

These are emerging as our Festivals of the Imagination; and while there is no single festival, all the festivals are, in combination, a celebration of the same thing.

Curiously, we do not have a Festival of Sport (maybe all grand finals are festivals?). The Melbourne Cup, ‘the race that stops the nation'?

Or is that better classified as a mass spectator event? Although many attend Melbourne Cup lunches and booze-ups around Australia.

Marathons and ‘fun runs' are a type of participation festival.

We don't think Mother's and Father's Days count.

Election nights? Festival of Democracy? On federal
election day, many Australians go to an election night party and celebrate victory or weep for the fate of the country over the next three years.

Finally, we have Christmas, which in our lifetime has changed dramatically from being a religious celebration of Christ's birthday to being the celebration of family.

It is the most elaborate of our festivals.

Everyone complains about the cost and bother of the gift-giving and wrapping, the card exchange, the tree, the decorating of the house, the feasting with paper hats, crackers, and special dishes, and the inter-family visiting – but we do it.

And it seems to us, that we do it with ever-increasing detail and affluence.

It is the Festival of the Family of All Sorts. In a gay newspaper this year, we read an advertisement which said, ‘If you're a young lesbian without family and friends, there is no reason to be alone.' It offered ‘a Christmas Day feast given by the Lesbian and Gay Youth Services'.

Hooked on to Christmas is the Office Party, a celebration of work and the bonds of work.

Where is our Festival of Eros?

The revival of St Valentine's Day? Mmmm. As with Mother's and Father's Days, we find this more an event stimulated by commerce.

The Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras (held in most cities) may increasingly become a celebration of Misrule or Difference for some, Eros for others. Although recent ‘respectability-seeking' themes have dominated.

Maybe there is something of Eros and Thanatos – sex
and death – in all festivals, even in Christmas which exists because of the forces of Eros and which has death hovering over its older guests.

The facts of the case are as follows.

Headline in the
Australian
newspaper, ‘Viable remedies for voter fatigue (abolish by-elections)'.

Hardly a year passes in Australia, says a political writer, ‘without a federal, state or territory election'.

After a federal by-election was held a fortnight after a state election in New South Wales, the ABC pronounced ‘voter fatigue'.

Another political writer tells us that people do not like to vote in cold weather, hence Prime Ministers call elections in winter at their peril.

Upon examination of these and other statements by political observers, The Office realised that it might have a bizarre first in the history of Western democracy.

As if that were not curious enough, John Howard
talked of ‘voter resentment' felt by the citizens who had to vote twice in a fortnight.

We immediately sent out our Field Officers to investigate.

Our investigations also showed that there is another related misconception which is:
that Australians are asked to vote too often.

‘… and we have to face another federal election within twelve months,' groans a columnist in the
Sydney Morning Herald,
another journalist also suffering from the yoke of enfranchisement.

At the last election, we found this piece of advice offered by a political writer. ‘If we want to save time at the polling booth,' was posed as a question of civic concern and was then answered by a newspaper as guidance to those voters whose lives are so urgent that they need to ‘save time' at the polling station.

We lead a rather urgent life ourselves. We find Berocca dissolves too slowly and the half-dissolved tablet catches in our throat. It is true that we cannot find time to ‘wait several minutes' to allow the conditioner to work on our hair. We are also now beset by the challenge of using a ‘treatment' in our hair because our hair always looks ‘damaged' and, yes, we desire radiant, bouncy hair. By the time we leave our ‘treatment' for another five minutes, the morning has gone.

To return to voter fatigue. The Medical Team of the Inspectorate agrees that there may be people who have The Big Friday Night Out way of life and that this would leave them so depleted of energy that they might
suffer fatigue from dropping in a vote twice in a fortnight.

We can see the truth of this. We ourselves have been known to have heavy nights. Why, only last week at the Frolic Club … ah ah, we see our concerned minder waving his handkerchief at us again.

However, after our initial investigations, we began to doubt that these commentators could justify
physical fatigue
from the act of voting twice in a fortnight.

Perhaps they were talking more about the voting population being fatigued by having to muster
the will
to vote twice in a fortnight.

Having to hum and hah, switch from state to federal issues, to ponder yet again the nature of government, the Grand Philosophical Questions of ‘how should we live?' and to assess the candidates.

The paradox of the Australian anti-voting posturing is that in the early days of voting, the most serious problem was those people who tried
to stop people from voting
.

Alcohol, disincentives, threats and disenfranchisement were used and have been used against parts of the voting population to keep them from the ballot box.

In the deep south of the USA, efforts were successful in keeping black Americans off the registers for decades.

In Cambodia, Pol Pot tried land mines.

As an example of how others view the arduous activity of voting, we look to East Timor.

Many Timorese on voting day last year were so excited, they couldn't sleep and gathered at polling booths at 3 am waiting for them to open.

Some walked all night to be at the polling booths by morning.

However, commentator Mike Carlton said that at the conclusion of election night we are ‘… happy in the knowledge that the whole wretched business won't happen again for another four years …'

At first we suspected That Forces Were at Work to demoralise and sap the democratic spirit by spreading the sardonic bar-room wisdom that voting was a tiresome bore.

However, we found more to it than that.

We first discovered that there is an old-style ALP position lying behind the claim that we have ‘too many' elections.

‘State governments,' one columnist said, ‘are an absurd superfluity in a country of 19 million people.'

This is really the too-many-governments argument hiding behind the too-many-elections whimsy. This columnist is up on two charges: Groaning Under the Yoke of Freedom and Dead Horse Flogging.

Our investigators also used hidden cameras to catch a jaded bar-room pose lurking among those who voiced aversion to electoral voting. This is the line that to value the vote, or to take an enthusiastic interest in voting, is politically wimpish.

The Office Psychiatrist identified it as ‘unadaptive resistance to the pressures and stringency of existence'.

Next we discovered the Tweedledum and Tweedledee position – that the political candidates offer no real choice.

We put our Archive People onto this and they found that the corpse of this idea was more than two hundred years old. And smelled like it.

One of the first historical expressions of the ‘no real choice' argument is from 1787 when a French cartoon showed the Monkey (a politician) addressing the French voters, depicted as poultry. ‘My dear creatures,' the Monkey says, ‘we have assembled you here to deliberate on the sauce in which you'll be served.'

This pose has no basis in contemporary political reality unless you are hankering after what was once known as ‘radical' change. That is, a total change of economic and social system. It was once thought that the ballot box offered the way to change, say, from capitalism to socialism (or as is more common now, the other way around).

In the last New South Wales elections, there were twenty-eight parties contesting the lower and upper houses.

To see ‘no choice' is to be a victim of either the old hankering for radical change or to fail to exercise political perception. The choice, however, in contemporary politics is not Left or Right but the making of the more sophisticated and complicated choice of management teams and parliamentary power composition.

However, the Despair-with-Politics position is still under investigation and will be the subject of another report.

In the Operations Room we first tried to determine
whose interests
are served by these anti-voting notions.

Anti-voting is not in the interests of politicians
because voting gives those who are out of office a chance to gain office. The more elections, the better the chance then of gaining office. It also gives a confident party in power a chance for an additional term.

It is not in the interests of political journalists, although it is they who repeat the noxious notions about voting-how-boring, how fatiguing.

It is not in the interest of the electorate because it reduces the opportunities to register all types of disapproval, let alone to change the government. It even gives people an opportunity to express disaffection through an informal vote.

The people whose interests it does serve are those who are not involved in the political process and those who find democratic politics irritating and dull and would like a different method of arranging things.

Firing squads perhaps.

There are some who oppose the existence of government – the extreme conservatives and anarchists – and thus find voting irrelevant.

There are the few dreamy anarchists who want participatory democracy where everyone has a vote on everything, issue by issue.

We are inclined towards these dreamy people.

They are really for
more voting
but of a different kind. If the governmental process was changed to participatory democracy, we would vote every day.

Our Assistant has just whispered in our ear, reminding us that here at the Inspector-General's Office we are not permitted to have an opinion on these matters, being
concerned as we are with only cockeyed, rancid, thread-bare and decaying notions in public discourse.

Our Findings:
We find that the idea that Australians are fatigued by voting twice in a fortnight requires urgent medical research; that is, of those responsible for contriving the notion and repeating it.

They must also write out fifty times, ‘We understand the irony of having to write out fifty times the famous saying, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must undergo the fatigue of fighting for it”.'

We find that there is both felt and expressed dissatisfaction with ‘politics'. In this matter we find the electorate guilty of political torpor for not being more enterprising in their electoral activity and candidature, so ensuring that the electoral dynamics rise to meet their expectations.

Our Inspectors determined that some people were guilty of
feigned disenchantment –
the voting-how-boring set and the idea that voting is a waste of time. This is a minor offence and is not deemed by Our Office to be thoughtful commentary. Case dismissed. Let it not happen again.

Those who do not wish to be part of the voting process have a justifiable gripe against compulsory voting. We find them boring but justified. It would be better to leave politics to those who take an informed interest. They may put I-don't-vote-so-don't-blame-me stickers on their automobiles if it makes them feel superior.

A Complaint:
The aesthetics of the polling station leave much to be desired. Cardboard ballot boxes
contribute if not to disaffection then maybe to the dullness in the presentation of the voting
event
.

The ballot box is perhaps the most important and historically significant icon in our society. We would like to see them made of highly polished wood and to appear venerable. We would like to vote in the wooden ballot box in which Chifley had carved his name.

Polling stations should have framed portraits of the pioneers of the democratic system and displays of the history of the innovations of voting. Each polling station should have a photographic display of the history of the electorate in which the voting is occurring.

A Political Memorabilia shop at major voting centres should sell political mementos and books on the history and theory of politics. Who knows? Sales may cover the cost of the ballot.

At least, there should be freshly cut flowers at the polling stations.