Voting dilemmas

Mark Latham thinks that lodging a blank ballot sheet constitutes a protest vote.  Bully to him if he wishes to be frivolous and waste his opportunities in this way, but he shouldn't persist in advocating that others do likewise.  An informal vote simply props up the status quo he so publicly excoriates.  For a man who was once determined to transform public life, Latham has turned out to be remarkably defensive about maintaining the problematic conditions he wanted to break down.  He is a walking paradox.

I've been thinking very carefully over the last three weeks.  There are several areas of policy that are important to me: culture, higher education, and welfare come to mind.  Economic policy is at the back of this, but you can trawl any of a number of places on the web for more penetrating analysis of the wares being flogged in this department.

Neither of the two major parties has seen fit to put out a meaningful arts and culture policy.  Labour did make a gesture last week, but that's all it was.  And it wasn't an especially polite gesture either.

Both parties persist in the fiction that the role of academics in public universities is to pursue research which can be applied to industry.  This is an important facet of Australian university work, but it is not the whole end of a university.  Education policy generally is fairly poor no matter where you look, but Labour is still looking slightly more realistic than the alternative.

Both Labour and Liberal take an essentially punitive approach to the unemployed.  Yes, it is desirable that anyone who wishes to work should find it.  However, sometimes it is unavoidable that one cannot work.  Moreover, the much-vaunted economic policies of the last quarter century have not been kindly to unskilled workers -- the promotion of construction and mining don't come near to covering the opportunity gap set up by the vaporisation of industry.  There is systemic unemployment in Australia, and it is difficult to see how this is to be addressed by the welfare-to-work policies of Labour or Liberal.  The latter actively blame the unemployed for their predicament, which is simply wicked.

Most Australians would like to see social progress on a number of fronts.  Only the Greens have offered policies that address this aspiration, whatever your view of the practicality of these policies.  The Liberals are still wedged on the Howardist extreme, and will be unready for government until that policy framework is comprehensively dismantled.  They need to move into post-Cold War politics.  This means that the only dilemma facing the thinking voter is how far one's preferences should travel before Labour gets your (much-travelled) vote.

Latham is wrong.  A protest vote consists of directing your preferences away from the major parties.  It is the wake-up call they need.