Oh, the banality of democracy!
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Queueing to vote a heartfelt "yes" on Saturday October 14, my mind strayed, bitterly, to how my sensitive, intelligent, informed vote was going to be cancelled by the "no" vote of some ignorant hobbledehoy with a fraction of my brains and refinement.
I thought of the drongos I'd heard interviewed about the Voice by ABC radio in its many man-in-the-street/ignoramus-in-the-mall vox pops.
![The result left me questioning Australia's one-person-one-vote rule. Picture Canberra Times The result left me questioning Australia's one-person-one-vote rule. Picture Canberra Times](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/Z4Q6sUEHdcmw72MBPYgZkU/12710e77-99cd-4d3a-918d-f5c359b56d51.jpg/r0_0_1760_990_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
One grab that was still grabbing my mind as I queued to vote went like this.
ABC reporter: "And how are you going to vote?"
Male-ignoramus-in-the-mall: "I'm votin' no. The Voice is just an Aboriginal land grab to take things off of (sic) the rest of us."
ABC reporter (trained to feign a polite interest in what even his most moronic interviewees think): "And where did you find that out?"
Ignoramus (his voice ringing with intellectual pride): "TikTok."
Also on my refined mind as I queued was the Canberra man interviewed by The Canberra Times who said he was voting "no" because he was a migrant who came to Australia with very little but who had done well. This is a lucky country, he thought, where hard work was rewarded. No one should receive the sorts of special advantages the Voice would give undeserving Aboriginals.
The thinking behind this attitude (insofar as there was any thinking behind it) was so wrong, its analogies so askew, that after reading it one needed a cup of tea, a Bex, and a good hour's lie down on the couch of an understanding psychotherapist.
Again, to think of my rational, humanitarian, well-informed, Christian "yes" being cancelled by that man's illogical, hard-hearted, pagan "no"!
Surely there has to be a better, a more nuanced way than this one-person-one-vote nonsense. Might our democracy insist on one-person-one-intelligent-vote, with the ignorant votes of the TikTok classes disallowed?
Might polling places be equipped with intelligence-recognition portals (resembling the security and facial-recognition portals we pass through at airports) that allow thinking voters to proceed but that turn unthinking voters away until they have improved their minds?
How about it, boffins of the Australian Electoral Commission?
READ MORE IAN WARDEN
Also powerfully on my mind as I queued to vote was a supernatural experience I'd had earlier in the week.
Love of Australia, and the question of whether one would be able to go on loving Australia after its "no", was already much on my mind. Then, suddenly who should appear to me in a vision but Dorothea Mackellar! Her 1908 poem I Love A Sunburnt Country (its actual title Core Of My Heart) is the nation's best-known, most beloved expression of fondness for Australia.
But it was a distressed Dorothea who, coming from the Other Side appeared to me (I was in my leafy garden in my leafy inner suburb).
Aware that the "no" was a certainty and aggrieved by that, she asked me to take down and pass on to today's living Australians her sorrowfully dictated alteration-addition to her famous poem. Dutifully I hereby do as she asked.
I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea,
But her ignorant, racist people continually disappoint me.
Their fear of change and progress, their mentality Neanderthal,
Their credulous appetite for slogans [such as 'If you don't know, vote NO'] no matter how banal,
Their cowardy custard trembling when scaremongers tell them lies,
The love of privilege's status quo you can see in all their eyes.
Core of my heart my country! the No to the Voice shows it's true
The narrow, shallow people of Australia are undeserving of wide, brown you.
Exceptional Canberra
As if Canberrans were not already sufficiently smug, there is much self-congratulation going on among us about how the ACT was the only niche of the nation to vote an enlightened, educated "yes".
The chief minister and The Canberra Times say we should be proud of this. Friends, too, urge me to be proud. But I find myself only half agreeing with them and biting my tongue lest I say something designed to burst their bourgeois bubbles.
Following the best pollsters closely as the Voice debate unfolded, one found them reminding us that in the wider, outer suburban, regional reaches of our wide brown land Australians often have more on their minds than perhaps sleek, successful, untroubled Canberrans can imagine.
Excellent, insightful, facts-grounded pollster Kos Samaras kept pointing to "unsuccessful" Australians highly unlikely to vote "yes".
Your quintessentially inner-suburban Canberran columnist, plushly superannuated, blessed (like 40 per cent of Canberrans) with a university degree that has helped enable well-paid and stable employment, sleek and comfortable without a financial worry in the world, had scarcely thought of anything but the referendum in recent months.
But some polling in some other, most unCanberran Australian places found that the Voice was fifth and often lower on lists of things keeping struggling folk awake at night. For them, the struggling and worried, the Voice was way behind roof-over-the-head, food-on-the-table issues such as wages, the costs of living and housing unaffordability.
Canberrans, especially inner-suburban ones, live in a plush bubble. If we are exceptional then perhaps our exceptionalism has nothing to do with virtue (in which case "pride" does not come into it) but is more to do with our being exceptionally rich and plump and lucky.
- Ian Warden is a regular columnist
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