A century of compulsory voting and the character of Australian democracy
Paul Strangio
Compulsory voting, political legitimacy and public reason in Australian democracy (PDF 205KB)
This paper was presented as part of the Senate Lecture Series on 26 July 2024.
Introduction
Australia is a nation bashful about extolling its democratic achievements. How else can we explain that this month marks the centenary of the most extraordinary feature of the country’s democratic architecture and yet the anniversary is slipping by with scant comment nor reflection.1 I refer, of course, to compulsory voting, which was legislated in the federal Parliament in July 1924. Maybe the inattention is also due to the fact that the practice is second nature after 100 years. Habituated to being compelled to participate in elections, we are inured to its specialness.
Compulsory voting is not unique to Australia. Calculating how many countries have compulsory voting is notoriously difficult since, in around half the nations where the practice exists in name, it is not enforced. However, most estimates put the figure in the vicinity of 20 to 30.2 If not unique, Australia’s experience of compulsory voting is distinctive for a number of reasons. First, its emergence in the early 20th century was consistent with the nation’s larger tradition of precocious innovation and ready experimentation when it came to electoral institutions and practices.3 This record is typically traced back to the pioneering in the 1850s of the secret ballot (sometimes called the ‘Australian ballot’) in a number of the Australian colonies and the embrace of other advanced democratic measures in the second half of the 19th century. These included manhood suffrage, payment of members of parliament and the extension of the franchise to women, beginning in South Australia in 1894. The innovations continued in the 20th century with such things as preferential voting legislated in 1918 and non-partisan bureaucratic electoral administration. Second, Australia is alone in embracing compulsory voting among the Anglophone democracies to which it typically compares itself. The electoral systems of Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States (US) are all based on voluntary voting (it is compulsory to register to vote in New Zealand). Third, unlike many other compulsory voting countries, Australia does not pay lip service to its operation. Compulsory voting is enforced by electoral authorities, albeit leniently, has been strongly upheld by the courts, and is backed by a regime of sanctions for non-compliance.4 Fourth, compulsory voting has been consistently and unambiguously successful in achieving high voter turnout. Though there has been a slight downtrend in turnout at the past 5 national elections (it hit a low of 89.8% for the House of Representatives in 2022), it has generally been in the mid-90% range since the adoption of compulsory voting a century ago. At the last election before its introduction, in 1922, turnout was 59.4%.5 To put this turnout level in comparative perspective, it is some 30% higher than the recent average figure in countries with voluntary voting and also well above the recent average in other countries with compulsory voting systems. Further highlighting the point, turnout at the 2024 British general election was 59.7% and an estimated 59% at the 2024 US presidential election.6 Fifth, is how strongly and consistently the public has backed the practice. Evidence from more than half a century of opinion polls and the Australian Election Study surveys show support hovering around the 70% mark.7 Indeed, a new study of 3 places where compulsory voting exists, Australia, Belgium and Brazil, shows that support for the practice is significantly greater in Australia than in the other 2 countries.8
Perhaps the most singular aspect of the nation’s experience of compulsory voting, however, is how seemingly impregnable is the practice if measured by its durability, the dearth of controversy over it, the consistency of its enforcement by authorities and the way it has been dutifully complied with, and supported by, citizens. Together these things make Australia an exemplar of compulsory voting internationally.
The campaign against compulsory voting
This is not to say compulsory voting has been a sacred cow in Australia. In the final decades of the 20th century and first decade of this century, there was a concerted push to end the practice from within the Liberal Party.9 The principal torchbearer of the agitation for voluntary voting was the avowed libertarian South Australian senator, Nick Minchin. For former Senator Minchin compulsory voting was anathema:
…in relation to the most important single manifestation of democratic will, the act of voting, I profoundly detest Australia’s denial of individual choice. It seems to me that an essential part of a liberal democracy should be the citizen’s legal right to decide whether or not to vote. The denial of that right is an affront to democracy.10
But Nick Minchin was far from alone in opposing compulsory voting on the conservative side of politics in this period. A survey of Coalition candidates at the 1996 election indicated that 60% favoured voluntary voting. In 1988, the Liberal Party’s federal council resolved in support of voluntary voting, and that position was also held by the South Australian and Victorian divisions. At the leadership level, among those who were either on record as opposing compulsory voting or believed it ought to be reviewed were John Hewson (federal leader, 1990–1994), Nick Greiner (NSW Premier, 1988–1992), and Jeff Kennett (Victorian Premier, 1992–1999). Most promising for the advocates of voluntary voting was that John Howard, elected Prime Minister in 1996, had been on record as a critic of compulsory voting since entering the federal Parliament in 1974.11 John Howard’s opposition to the practice appeared to be partially based on the individual rights argument, but also derived from a calculation that its abolition would advantage his side of politics. This was consistent with most of the political science literature, which suggested that compulsory voting (narrowly) benefited Labor.12
The cause of voluntary voting was ultimately a futile one. At times its champions seemed on the cusp of progress only to be frustrated. In May 1992, early in Paul Keating’s Labor government, a coalition shadow cabinet endorsed proposal for a change of policy to voluntary voting was presented to the Liberal-National joint party room. It provoked strong resistance and was subsequently referred back to the shadow cabinet by the Liberal leader, John Hewson. It did not see the light of day again. Later that year, Jeff Kennett, the Victorian Liberal opposition leader, who was on the verge of winning the premiership, abandoned plans to take a policy of abolishing compulsory voting to the October election. While he personally favoured voluntary voting, Jeff Kennett had been dissuaded from pursuing that course by the party’s polling that showed overwhelming public support for maintaining the status quo. Similarly, once in office, Jeff Kennett spurned calls from the Victorian Liberal division for his government to end compulsory voting. In 1993, in South Australia, there was more promising news for abolitionists with the election of a Liberal government, led by Dean Brown, on a platform that included the repeal of compulsory voting. A bill for that purpose passed the South Australian House of Assembly in the first-half of 1994 but was narrowly defeated in the Legislative Council by the combined votes of Labor and the Australian Democrats. In 1998, another South Australian Liberal government, led by John Olsen, attempted to legislate voluntary voting, only for the bill to be left languishing in the upper house.
The election of the Howard Coalition government in March 1996 was ostensibly a fillip to the voluntary voting cause. In mid-1997, the government bloc on the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters (JSCEM), which included Nick Minchin, recommended an end to compulsory voting: ‘If Australia is to consider itself a mature democracy, compulsory voting should now be abolished,’ they declared.13 However, with National Party members opposed to change and with little or no prospect of the required legislation passing through the upper house, the government declined to act on the recommendation. The hopes of the abolitionists were raised again when the Coalition won control of the Senate at the October 2004 election. Nick Minchin and other supporters of voluntary voting egged on speculation that the future of compulsory voting was under question. Howard responded by dousing down the idea of imminent change, yet left the door ajar to action in the next parliamentary term. In 2005, however, with the issue causing friction within the Coalition, the prime minister decisively closed down the issue. Though restating his personal preference for voluntary voting, John Howard acknowledged that many in his government disagreed: ‘I don’t feel that strongly about it that I would want to change it in the face of those [opposing] views’. Nor had he found the issue a barbecue stopper: ‘As I move around the country, I don’t get people stopping me in the street and saying, “You’ve got to get rid of compulsory voting”’.14 In short, at a point when his government was spending large amounts of political capital on one of the prime minister’s idee fixes (industrial relations deregulation), John Howard was unwilling to risk Coalition discord or open up another political battle front on a matter about which the public was wholly unperturbed.
The debate on compulsory voting thereafter petered out. Moreover, the closure of the Howard era at the November 2007 election, effectively left Liberal Party champions of voluntary voting at a dead end. The surest sign that they were beaten was Nick Minchin’s forlorn admission when delivering his valedictory address to the Senate in June 2011:
I have fought a lonely and quixotic battle to restore to Australians the legal right to choose whether or not to exercise their right to vote. I have not been able to convince even my own federal parliamentary party of the worth of that great cause.15
An impregnable institution?
Why did the struggle to abolish compulsory voting in Australia conclude in meek defeat? The most fundamental reason is that, as Howard acknowledged in 2005, the public were unexercised over the matter. The near two-decade long opposition campaign spearheaded out of the Liberal Party abjectly failed to disturb voter acceptance of the system. To the contrary, Australian Election Study data indicates that support for compulsory voting had declined to (a still healthy) low of 64% as that campaign gathered force in the late 1980s, but by the time the Howard government lost office in 2007, support had rebounded to an equal record high of 77%.16 In sum, far from stimulating community concern about the practice, the agitations had coincided with a strengthening of faith in it.
What else accounts for the failure of the opponents to seriously threaten compulsory voting and to weaken public satisfaction in it? As Judith Brett persuasively contends, there is an affinity between compulsory voting and Australia’s majoritarian political temperament. In that sense, the individual rights argument against compulsion prosecuted by Nick Minchin and his allies fell on stony ground.17 In a pragmatic-minded political culture like Australia’s, opponents have also been disadvantaged by the fact that in advocating for voluntary voting they were typically dependent on abstract principles or untested assertions about what would happen in the circumstances of that change. By way of contrast, upholders of the status quo have been able to point to demonstrable benefits, not least the consistently high voter turnout. Equally, the existing system’s defences are buttressed by path dependency. As the political scientist Don Aitkin noted in the 1960s, ‘the fact that compulsion applies in all State and Federal elections and referenda has helped to perpetuate [it]’.18 Australians voters, in other words, know no other way. Writing in the same period, Aikin’s political science colleague and later the inaugural Australian Electoral Commissioner, Colin A Hughes, agreed, observing that compulsory voting had acquired the standing of ‘settled policy’.19
The lack of consensus in favour of voluntary voting within the Liberal Party was another impediment to change. While evidence suggests that from the late 1980s that position was ascendant in some of the state divisions, support was less reliable where it principally mattered—in the federal parliamentary party. On the one known occasion when the matter was tested in the Coalition joint party room in May 1992, there was a rebellion against a proposed change to a policy of voluntary voting. Some Liberals were genuinely convinced of the democratic value of compulsory voting while others, contrary to the conventional view that the practice electorally benefited Labor, feared that voluntary voting would gift its opponent because of the voter mobilising force of trade unions. Moreover, the federal Liberals had to take account of the views of their Coalition partner, the National Party. While there were examples of National members supporting the campaign against compulsory voting, in the main that position enjoyed little sympathy in the party and among its leaders. It was more common for Nationals to believe that voluntary voting would penalise the party given their vast regional seats, ageing membership and stretched resources.
A final plausible reason why opponents of compulsory voting have proved incapable of rousing public resentment is that the system is not especially oppressive. As frequently pointed out by both opponents and supporters, the compulsion is not to vote per se but rather for an elector to attend a polling booth, have their named crossed off the electoral roll and receive a ballot paper. Electoral authorities have also generally treated non-compliance leniently. Typically, among those who offer an explanation for their non-compliance, only a small number are judged to have provided an inadequate reason and only a miniscule proportion of them are eventually convicted.20 And while it has not been unusual following elections for a tiny number of non-voters to be gaoled rather than pay the small fine for failing to vote, there have been few, if any, high-profile conscientious objectors or ‘martyrs’ to the cause of opposition to compulsory voting.21 In fact, a more common theme, as articulated by the JSCEM report on the 2016 election, is that the penalty for non-voting is insufficient and ought to be reviewed.22
All of this leads to the conclusion that compulsory voting is a highly resilient institution in Australia. Of course, we cannot rule out opposition to it, despite currently being dormant, bestirring, as happened in the 1980s. For the foreseeable future, though, Australia’s compulsory voting regime is robust and secure.
Australia’s democratic exceptionalism
Though enjoying sustained and widespread public support, compulsory voting’s importance to Australia’s democratic system is largely under appreciated.23 Moving to a conclusion, I would like to suggest that it is one of the elements of the nation’s democratic exceptionalism, and one of the reasons why the political centre holds better here than in many other comparable societies.24 Writing a few years ago, the eminent historian, Stuart Macintyre, observed that, unlike the case in the US and parts of Europe, right-wing populist politics had not really taken root in Australia. This may be too sanguine an interpretation. It is the case that, as Macintyre asserted, insurgencies such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party have been mostly ‘ephemeral’.25 Yet, my view is that, beginning with the era of Howard’s prime ministership, and particularly from 2001 onwards, conservative populism has been smuggled into mainstream Australian politics through the Liberal Party’s rightwards ideological pivot.26 Still, Macintyre’s fundamental point stands. Australia has been more resistant to aggressive political populism than have advanced democracies in Europe and North America. Australia has endured nothing commensurate to a Trump or Brexit moment. Why?
One answer is that, while not without substantial destabilising effects, the big modernising reforms executed in the final decades of the 20th century by the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and the early Howard government, laid the foundations for a robust economy that has helped insulate the nation from the drastic austerity measures and severe erosion of living standards experienced in many other countries. In a similar way, the Global Financial Crisis of the first decade of the 21st century was, compared to its severe economic and social effects in other parts of the globe, mostly harmlessly shrugged off by Australia. This resilience was again attributed to the reforms of the previous quarter of a century, as well as the good fortune of the nation’s buoyant trade relationship with China.
Another reason why Australia has been mostly immune to seduction by militant right-wing populism relates to what I have already suggested is an imperturbable and pragmatic national temperament. This seems to go hand in hand with what Judith Brett identifies as the powerful majoritarian impulse and lack of worship of individual rights in the country’s political culture.27 Correspondingly, too, the public has a discerning antennae for political moonshine—as displayed, for example, by its swift waking up to the inauthenticity of the Coalition prime minister Scott Morrison with his habitual performative contrivances. By the time of the 2022 federal election, he was the least popular major party leader in the nearly half century old Australian Election Study.28 History suggests, as well, that Australians have little truck with leadership demagoguery.
That the centre has held better in Australia can also be attributed to institutional bulwarks. Though, in common with many other countries, there is plenty of evidence in Australia of growing disenchantment with the political system.29 One thing that helps to put a floor under faith in the nation’s democracy is the politically independent electoral authority, the AEC. The 2022–23 survey of trust in Australian public services, a regular national survey of the population, found that the AEC was the most trusted national public service institution, enjoying a trust level of 83%.30 The very high public confidence in the AEC and its impartial administration of the electoral system undoubtedly lends credibility to election results and integrity to the democratic process as a whole. So do the whole raft of procedures it manages to facilitate voting. To name a few: Saturday election days, assistance for the ill and aged and those from non-English speaking backgrounds, mobile polling stations, postal, absentee and early voting, and active and regular updating of registration. Indeed, Australia has been described as ‘the most voter-friendly country in the world’.31 Contrast this to state-based voter suppression practices in the US.
Voter participation is, of course, mandated by the other major institutional bedrock of the nation’s electoral system, compulsory voting. As noted early on, compulsory voting has kept voter turnout above 90% for all but one election over the past century. It is a level of participation marvelled at, and envied by, kindred democracies.32 It affords legitimacy to election outcomes in this country. Significantly, it also produces a socially even turnout.33 Compare this to the situation in the 2024 British general election. With turnout slumping to 59.7%, the lowest in a quarter of a century, an investigation by the Institute for Public Policy Research revealed a clear pattern of the ‘haves’ exercising much greater say at the ballot box than the ‘have nots’. Those who stayed away from the polls were predominantly less well off, non-homeowners, the young, the lower educated, and of minority ethnic background.34 Australia is not blemish free in this regard. Low and declining turnout in remote electorates with high Indigenous populations is the most worrying chink in the performance of compulsory voting. In 2022, turnout in the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari, the electorate with the highest proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inhabitants in the nation, fell to a record low of 66.8%, down from 72.6% in 2019.35 Even so, the practice largely succeeds in achieving inclusive voter participation across the country.
Crucially, compulsory voting is also generally recognised for its moderating influence because it ensures that it is not only impassioned partisans at either end of the political spectrum who participate in elections and who are therefore the chief focus of governments and political parties. Under a compulsory voting system, middle-of-the-road citizens and their concerns and sensibilities count. Politics, as a consequence, generally gravitates to the centre inhibiting the trend towards polarisation and grievance politics so powerfully evident in other parts of the globe.36
What I have described as Australia’s democratic exceptionalism is not a cause for complacency. The 21st century has been mostly a story of underperformance in national politics as reflected in such things as instability in government and relative policy stasis. Against that background and in an environment of a global contagion of democratic recession, as already noted, public confidence in the political system has dwindled. The introduction of compulsory voting 100 years ago sprang out of a spirit of innovation and experimentation in democratic practices going back to the colonial era. Perhaps it’s time to mine that spirit once more.