Ben Debney || Electoral democracy is a managed charade on the part of players who are all bought by the same campaign donations before they even take office. Laborite and Tory alike have to maintain the pretense of policy difference to avoid the overarching fact that they are both wholly-owned subsidiaries of transnational capital, like Federal Parliament in general. Everyone from George Carlin to Noam Chomsky has never tired of pointing out that liberals and conservatives are the carrot and stick of the class order, both devoted to the same goals by varying means.
Electoral democracy needs to manage the citizenry then in much the same way as the mainstream, business union movement disciplines organised workers on behalf of capital. On both counts, the tail wags the dog. These developments are not one bit surprising given the hollowing out of a liberal capitalist world system that was already purposed to ‘defending the minority of the opulent from the majority,’ to borrow from James Madison, by transnational corporate autocracy.
One of the ways this is done arguably is through the massaging of statistics around voting intention during elections. This is not to say that statistics are fabricated so much as they tend not to mention what they leave out: people who don’t vote, because they don’t feel like the system represents their interests, or because they can see it’s a managed circus amongst participants who are bought and self-interested, or what have you. It is hardly as though anyone needs to struggle to find reasons to feel disillusioned with the system.
We find then that statisticians count not voting intentions per se, critically including not intending to vote at all, but voting intentions amongst those still willing to participate. Thus, for the current political cycle in Australia:
As we can see here, the closest Roy Morgan will get to admitting the existence of a demographic that rejects all the options is to mark us down as ‘can’t say’–though naturally they, nor anyone else, want to dig into the reasons why this percentage can’t choose. Indeed, is it at all possible that surveyed voters wouldn’t choose, again because we dislike all options? Pollsters and statisticians don’t appear to want to know, and apparently with good reason.
We find in fact from the Australia Institute that when we do look into this issue, the idea of a broad popular consensus around the merits of electoralism start to unravel.
At the last federal election in 2022, 14.6 million Australians cast a valid vote. A further 800,000 made it to the voting booth but cast an invalid or blank vote – either deliberately or by accident. 1.8 million were on the electoral roll but did not turn out. 650,000 Australians were missing from the electoral roll. Taken together, over three million Australians entitled to vote did not have their vote counted. By contrast, the Labor Party only won the two-party preferred vote by 600,000 . . . Thus, despite voting in federal elections being compulsory, only about four in five eligible Australians (82.5%) cast a valid vote in the 2022 federal election
The total number of eligible voters in Australia is roughly 18 million (17 in 2022); according to the Australia his seems like quite a lot of sweeping under the rug.Institute, a full 4 million eligible voters didn’t even bother in 2022 (your humble writer was one of them). In 2022 that means a full fifth of voters didn’t even show up. This was in addition to the 800,000 who got their names marked off to avoid the $20 fine and over half a million who didn’t even bother to stay on the electoral roll.
To put things even more in perspective, the primary vote for the Greens in 2022 under Adam Bandt was 1.7 million. The fact that nonvoting outpaces green capitalism by a factor of almost 2:1 is certainly nothing the Greens will ever advertise; again, the tail needs to wag the dog such that the mass will be cajoled into participating in the system, even when there are unmistakable signs of widespread disinterest and discontent. For the Greens, wagging the dog means having to encourage the electorate to believe in the system as it tries to force an endless-growth economy on a finite planet. That disinterest in the system outweighs interest in greening capitalism by almost double maybe figures.
In a similar vein, Anthony Albanese’s primary vote at the 2025 federal elections was about 5.3 million. 5340000 divided by 18000000 comes out at about 29%. 2025 was a bumper year for Labor, as
The Labor government of Anthony Albanese was elected for a second term in a landslide victory over the opposition Liberal–National Coalition, led by Peter Dutton. Labor secured 94 seats in the House of Representatives—the highest number of seats ever won by a single political party in an Australian election. Labor also received the highest two-party-preferred vote of any party since 1975—at 55.22%.
Voter turnout was about 90%, slightly up on the 2022 election which had one of the lowest turnouts for a system based on compulsory voting. Labor got the highest vote on preferences ever won by a political party in Australia again with about a fifth of eligible voters–1.8 million people–not even showing up. At the rates of people who went near an election booth, this means that Labor won 49.5 percent of votes in a year that all observers agreed was a standout. In other words, they didn’t even secure half the eligible votes.
The population of Australia is roughly 28 million. If 16.2 million Australians voted, that means that 12 million people’s lives were determined by the voting choices of 57.8 percent of the population. Electoral democracy doesn’t look any better when we realise the 2025 election was decided by about 28% percent of the total population–again, in a bumper year for the ruling party. Maybe another one of the reasons for losing almost a 5th of the electorate, even despite compulsory voting laws and inevitable fines for not showing up, is the obvious interest of a minority in passing off electoral capitalism as majority rule.
James Madison, the ‘Father of the US Constitution,” infamously described the function of democratic governments as defending the minority of the opulent from the majority.
“The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. The government we mean to erect is intended to last for ages. … unless wisely provided against, what will become of your government? In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes…”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/321956-the-man-who-is-possessed-of-wealth-who-lolls-on
Property owners have never loved democracy, for all their pretenses to the contrary. We know that management of democracy through the ‘manufacture of consent‘ under conditions of ‘inverted totalitarianism‘ is key to maintaining such pretenses. What the management of polling statistics indicates is that the electoral system doesn’t just wag the electoral dog in the same way that business unionism disciplines workers for capital. It also arguably tells that the electoral system is key to the system of class rule; electoralism, up to and including green capitalism, does after all, build a consensus around property rights, understood to mean the same thing as individual freedoms.
In other words, if the bumper crop of 30% of registered voters returning Labor was the basis for breaking records, maybe it also tells us something about how we see democracy itself–how the wagged dog itself understands the voting process. Labor is not, after all, the true party of labour. It is a recouperated, colonised shell. Are ALP voters for the working class voters and the people, or are they for the middle class and property? If the track record of the ALP is anything to go by, ALP voters are voting for property, in line with Madison’s dictat, and against everyone who no longer even shows to participate in the process at all.
If this is the case, the massaging of polling statistics around voting intention is hiding more than alienation with the system itself. It masks the class cleavages the electoralism system enshrines and aggravates, only ever increasing the motivation to spin-doctor and lie.
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