Will the democracy snowflakes have a dummy spit over an Indigenous Voice to Parliament

Those of us who find voting one of the great joys in life and who sing and dance all the way to the polling place struggle to understand, struggle to find room in our hearts for voters who resent being asked to vote.

We are reminded of the existence of influential multitudes of these moody brutes by Australian National University political scientist Professor Matt Qvortrup.

Last Saturday's Canberra Times bristled with his surely-correct prediction the Noes may very well have it when the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum is held.

A canny analyst in my New Yorker wrote this week about his "election dread" as his troubled country's mid-term elections loomed and, even without Matt Qvortrup's professorial soothsaying, some of us have already begun to feel a kind of "referendum dread" about the vote on the Voice.

The dread perches on the thought that it will be a struggle to go on loving Australia and Australians if the referendum is lost.

Mr Qvortrup, who has a refreshingly disparaging opinion of the average voter, says in Australian referendums (and only eight of the 44 have won an affirming Yes) compulsory voting reduces the already fragile Yes vote. This is because, he divines, voters resentful at being forced to cast a vote on an issue they just don't understand or just don't care about cantankerously vote No.

"It would be good if democracy could be people pondering and deliberating carefully about the pros and cons of particular issues," he muses, wistfully, "but basically people use them [voting in referendums] as a way to give the government a kicking".

While knowing that Mr Qvortrup is right about this, it still bewilders and disappoints a thinking Australian that citizens in a democracy can resent being asked to vote.

It seems as absurd as members of a tennis club taking offence at being asked to play tennis.

And how does voting No in a referendum plant a kick on a government? Surely it only kicks the idea being rejected and kicks those who took delight in that idea. Certainly those of us who were daring to dream of an Australian republic were the ones kicked by the No vote in the 1999 referendum.

Some of us still have the bruises on our souls.

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A No to the Voice will especially kick those First Nations people who, with the Uluru Statement from the Heart, have invited us to begin to end their tragic powerlessness and to make peace. A No vote will cruelly kick all of us, dreamer-patriots, for whom a Yes vote would make us feel our Australia a more credible and decent nation-state.

For some of us, the right and the opportunity to vote in this lucky country, in which votes count for things, are blessings. Let us call ourselves, those of us who feel this way and who know that voting supplies a democracy's essential nourishments, the democracy crusaders.

Then, surely, to adopt the modern use of "snowflake" as defined by Wikipedia ("'Snowflake' is a derogatory slang term for a person, implying that they have an inflated sense of uniqueness, an unwarranted sense of entitlement, are overly-emotional, too easily offended ... ") people who are offended and angered by being asked to vote are democracy snowflakes.

It is distressing to think of how, at the Voice referendum, one's vote given enthusiastically, informedly and gratefully (whether we vote Yes or No) can be cancelled out by the vote of a truculent democracy snowflake ignoramus who spits out his No vote as a kind of tantrum, in the dummy-spitting spirit of an infant shrieking "No!" to his parents' request that he eat his nutritious broccoli.

What is to be done?

As well as the passing of a law enabling the prosecution of the democracy snowflakes for their wilful neglect of a democracy's needs (as criminal, surely, as the neglect of children and animals) I see, managed by the Australian Electoral Commission, a kind of Votebank.

Working like those foodbanks that collect surplus food to distribute to the deserving poor, it will confiscate-collect those votes that enfranchised democracy snowflakes resent having and don't want and distribute them to those of us, the deserving democracy crusaders, who will use those votes conscientiously.

*Dumfungled, meaning a state of weary confusion, is this week's Scottish Word of the Week from Scots Magazine.

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