But he was Secretary of War from 1966 to 1968, when my friends and I were awakening to the terrible waste of the Vietnam War. We cringed at the insistence of Prime Minister Harold Holt, who appointed Fraser to the job, that he would “always work with LBJ.”
Malcolm Fraser’s famous perspective by the late The Age cartoonist Ron Tandberg. Credit: The Age
Crucially, Mr. Fraser was promoted to Minister of Defense from 1969 to 1971. Birthday cards or not, he was responsible for recruiting young men my age into the military. Wars where armies could and did send them into battle, sometimes resulting in senseless death.
I was subject to conscription under Fraser, so I didn’t vote, but I was pretty pissed about the whole damn thing.
We had to register at age 20, but we couldn’t get the right to vote until we were 21. I was old enough to be forced to wear a military uniform by lottery, but not old enough to have a say in it.
Many young people like me were trying very hard to vote. We wanted a Gough Whitlam government because he had promised to withdraw all Australian troops from Vietnam, abolish conscription and lower the voting age to 18.
Moreover, it was obviously embarrassing to wake up the day after the election and think that Australia still had the very stupid Billy McMahon as Prime Minister.
Gough Whitlam won the youth vote in 1972. His daughter Kathy was carrying the slogan of the day when she caught up with her father on the campaign trail. Credit: Fairfax Photography
So when the 1972 election approached, Fraser had by then resigned from the defense portfolio after an altercation with then prime minister John Gorton, and despite being very gripping over Wannon, I expressed their opinion at the ballot box. Even if you vote, you will never lose.
Still, on a Saturday morning, after lining up in a crowd of people eager to make a statement about the future of their country, whatever that may be, I found myself at a nearby restaurant set up by the good ladies of local school mothers. It felt good to rush to the cake stall. The club’s tables are overflowing with delicious sponges and Swiss rolls.
democracy sausage
The business of overturning governments requires food, and cake was enough. Because in 1972, modern gas-barbecue sizzling sausages hadn’t yet arrived at our voting booths.
Coincidentally, the term “democracy sausage” didn’t appear as a hashtag on social media until 2010, but now it seems to be permanently woven into our culture.
Australia’s compulsory voting system and Barbie doll traps mean that some people participate in the democratic process at very high rates, but that participation is limited to the weeks and days leading up to polling day. There are some too.
We have heard the tired argument that compulsory voting is a form of tyranny. No matter how libertarians may claim it, that is not the case. This is an elegant way for almost all of us to make ourselves responsible for deciding who will and won’t govern us over the next three to four years.
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Around 90 per cent of eligible Australians (and regularly more) vote in elections, which is close to the highest figure in the world.
The flip side of that is that within days, fewer than 66 percent of American voters will most likely participate in the momentous task of electing a president.
One of the candidates promises to be an actual tyrant, unfit to lead anything that calls itself a democracy, let alone one touted as “the world’s greatest democracy.”
The fact that one in three Americans won’t bother participating in the process of deciding whether a despot candidate will lead them on Tuesday, November 5th tells us all that’s not good enough. are.
As it happens, a two-thirds turnout would be an unusually high number. Voter participation in the United States was a dismal 50% for most of the last century. In 2020, that percentage rose to an all-time high of 66 percent, as voters were inspired enough to choose Joe Biden over Donald Trump.
Despot candidate: Donald Trump campaigning for a return to the White House. Credit: AP
And now?
Will Democracy Hot Dogs Help?
