We had an election last year and I warned all – especially myself – to consider casting a donkey vote.
This coming weekend I will be fined if I don’t vote and angry with myself if I do. On the other hand I do believe it’s every citizen’s duty to help to choose a government. In practice I think this means my choice must encompass one of the two major parties somewhere on my ballot paper.
I consider the present government has made many inequitable decisions which are either corrupt or woefully incompetent. I have always voted for the other team, but Labor has worked assiduously to convince me of its own venality and hopeless thrall to factions.
I look about me and wonder, where is the Labor candidate or the Liberal who rises to cry ‘whoa!’ about our cruelty towards people seeking refuge on our shores?
You might think me absurd to consider a national issue in what is ‘only’ a state election in which the issues should be local.
But the refugee is neither local nor national. Literally, she is non-national. Morally she is universal. She is us, she is me.
Who, among the incompetents and the self-seekers and the factionistas and the corrupt – who will stand for the person on the boat?
I do know that many Aussies in the neighbourhoods stand alongside the newcomer and brotherhood and help. Which is the party – or the nonparty candidate – who will stand against Party and for ‘mon semblable, mon frere’ – the newcomer?
howardgoldenberg 
Are you going to share with us what you did in the end?
As a side note, my friend Jason Goldsmith, who feels the same way as you decided to run as an independent for the seat of Prahran. he only got about 50 votes I think but love that he actually did something ( to your point about doing “nought”)
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Sally
Salvation
Salutation
Salutary comment, thank you
What, in the event, did I do?
In the section of the ballot paper where an elector has to choose five candidates and mark them 1,2,3,4,5- I awarded all of them with a 6.
I am sorry I wasn’t a prahranite: Jason would do me
In the upper house I found a few candidates who seemed ok and tried to vote for them in order of appeal
Perhaps I takings self too seriously ry
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We are facing the same problem here next year. Our beloved NHS is being eroded and privatised and an anti-immigrant party has managed to make itself sound acceptable enough to grab all the disaffected voters – who just want change and so believe the respectable veneer and ignore the nastiness underneath. I will vote, but as we have no proportional representation, my vote count for nothing in our conservative area. It is difficult not to feel powerless and depressed, but I have no right to complain as I am not planning to go out and campaign.
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I too like to whinge – to cry foul and do nought about it
Better than silence – marginally
HJG
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Please don’t waste your vote!
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I don’t waste it entirely
I used it to protest against the three major contenders and against numerous pretenders
Hg
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“Donkey voting” is numbering all the candidates downwards from 1 at the top of the list. Don’t do that! Then you really WILL be voting for donkeys. “Informal” voting is writing–or drawing like Bruce!– your statement of protest on the paper and is not a vote for anyone.
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Useful distinction, thank you aunty syl
(What an intriguing moniker)
Forty eight years ago I nearly and very briefly had a girlfriend named Cynthia
At the time, in hope, I thought of her as “sweet sin”
She was fully the former and free of the latter, in my knowledge of her
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This is an easy comment Dear Doc. Howard, I’m with you! I don’t prefer to be anti voting, anti government, and “A” political but I am. I have in the past drawn a donkey on my voting slips! I may be forced to do so again! xxx Bruce.
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