Judith Brett — How a Benthamite Political Culture Shaped Australia's Electoral System [Aus. Policy Series]

Australia stands alone among English-speaking democracies with its compulsory, preferential voting system. But why?

This episode is the fourth instalment of my Australian policy series. It was recorded in Melbourne on March 6, 2025.

I speak with Judith Brett—Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University and author of the canonical history of Australia's electoral system, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage—about how Australia became an electoral trailblazer.

We trace the accidental adoption of near-universal manhood suffrage in the 1850s, the political calculations that led to compulsory voting and preferential voting, and why bureaucratic efficiency is so deeply woven into our electoral culture.

Along the way, we explore how Benthamite thinking and low taxation in the colonial era combined to create a voting system that is unique among English-speaking democracies.

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Transcript

[Transcript may contain errors.]

JOSEPH WALKER: Thank you all for coming. Allow me to provide some context before we start the conversation. 

So among English-speaking democracies, Australia's voting system is an anomaly. 

In all other English-speaking democracies, voting is voluntary. But we compel it. 

In those democracies, first-past-the-post voting systems are the norm. But Australia uses preferential voting. 

Core Anglosphere countries, with the exception of New Zealand, vote on weekdays. But we vote on Saturdays. 

Australia was the first country to establish an independent and professional electoral administration.

And we've been electoral innovators since the mid-19th century, most notably inventing the Australian ballot. 

So Australia is in a class of its own, both in terms of the structure of our electoral system and our administration of elections. 

But how did we get here? And what does this say about our political culture? 

Well, joining us to help answer these questions is one of Australia's foremost political historians. Judith Brett is Emeritus Professor of Politics at La Trobe University. She's the author of many books and essays, but the one we're focusing on tonight is From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage, which in my view is probably the canonical history of the evolution of Australia's voting system, and also just one of the most interesting books on Australian political history that I've read. 

So Judy, welcome to the podcast.

JUDITH BRETT: Thank you for having me.

WALKER: I'm not going to treat this conversation as a substitute for the book. My questions are gonna be a little more idiosyncratic, and I've got a bunch of different questions that I'm excited to ask. We'll chat for the next 45 to 60 minutes, and then we'll hear [audience] questions. 

My first question is going to be about Australia's political culture.

BRETT: Right.

WALKER: So you describe Australia's political culture as majoritarian and bureaucratic. 

BRETT: Yeah.

WALKER: And Hugh Collins has called Australia a Benthamite society. And the reason for this is that when Australia was setting up its political institutions, as you know, the prevailing political philosopher was Jeremy Bentham and his sort of brand of utilitarianism. In contrast, in America, it was John Locke when they were setting up their political institutions. 

But that's a pretty circumstantial story, and so, you know, lately, I was looking for evidence of direct examples of either Bentham or other utilitarians influencing Australia's political institutions. 

I was excited when I read your book, to read a couple of examples. So there was Henry Chapman designing the secret ballot in Victoria. He was influenced by Bentham. And then Catherine Spence in her ideas about proportional representation, she was influenced reading an article by John Stuart Mill. 

But I was curious, outside of electoral systems, do you know if there are any examples of where Benthamite utilitarianism influenced the founders of Australia's political institutions?

BRETT:  Well, look, the way I would put it is... when I was thinking about that, obviously the big contrast I had in mind in the introductory section of the book where I look at the political questions about political culture was with the United States.

To just sort of explain what my thinking was, the United States is being founded 16th, 17th century under the influence of the ideas of John Locke and social contract theory and natural rights theory. 

Now, the person who put me onto this was, John Hirst, who has also written about the Australian electoral system and was a good friend of mine, and he didn't support compulsory voting.

WALKER: Oh, really?

BRETT: No.

And his argument was the people are the source of the government's authority, so how can the government be compelling them to vote? And that's like social contract theory - the idea that all the sovereign power, if you like, inheres in individuals and then they give a little bit over to the government in return for, you know, it's a deal, in return for protection and law and order, right? So, and you can still see the way that influences the thinking in the United States. 

In Britain, there was a constitutional monarchy by the middle of the 18th century. What I mean by that is that parliament basically had control of the government. It had control of the legislation. The monarch was no longer able to raise taxes without the permission of the parliament. Laws had to be passed by the parliament. It's a system that we've got, you know, the remnants of, if you like, or still the, the bare bones of. 

So the focus of political reformers was not, if you like, this sort of starting from scratch in the way it was in the United States. It was how do we make the political institutions that we've got operate more democratically. I don't know whether they used that term, but operate more efficiently, operate for the benefit of a greater number of people, because the electoral system that supported that parliament was a very unrepresentative one. There was the rotten boroughs, which, you know, somebody or there was once people living there and they'd all... demographic shifts, they weren't there anymore and some landed, uh, gentry or aristocrat had control of who became the member of parliament. And there was, again, there was the rising industrial cities, which had no, traditionally had no representation. So the focus was on reforming the government, and that's what Bentham was writing about. So Bentham wrote about how to make parliament more representative and work better, if you like, and more efficient. And so that was... and so instead of thinking... And the other point about Bentham is that Bentham saw rights as being given by government, not rights as already existing prior to government.

And so that's why I think in a general way we can think of Australia as a Benthamite society. The focus... Like, Australia was set up by government, set up by the British government, and so the focus of political reformers is on getting that government to be more responsive. And the other point I would make, I guess, there is the influence of Chartism. Chartism is a working class political movement, 1830s. Uh, in 1832, there was a reform bill in Britain which was supposed to make the parliament more representative. It got rid of rotten boroughs. It did a bit of a redistribution. It extended the vote to people with some property. It was still obviously property qualifications. Uh, but nothing much changed, and so there was a great deal of frustration, particularly amongst working men, and so the Chartist movement started and it had the various demands and they were for manhood suffrage, that all adult men have the vote without any property qualifications, and for the secret ballot, the two that I guess had a big influence here. And they wanted annual parliaments too. And a lot of the immigrants, particularly who came to Victoria, were influenced by Chartism, and I think Chartism, again, is partly influenced by Bentham's ideas. It's like, it's not just who reads Bentham. It's the fact that sort of Bentham's way of thinking is in the air.

WALKER: Right.

BRETT: That's how I'd put it.

WALKER: So one of those people who was influenced by Chartism was Henry Parkes, who I think attended some of the early Chartist rallies in Birmingham during his youth.

BRETT: That's right, yeah, when he was very young.

WALKER: One follow-up question. Do you recall what John Hirst's arguments against compulsory voting were?

BRETT: Yeah. It was that, how can the government... It was exactly the social contract theory argument. It was that the government's authority derives from individuals, so the government from the individual votes. That it's the votes of individuals which grant legitimacy to the government to make laws, so how can the government make laws to compel you to vote because it hasn't got the authority until you've voted for it?

WALKER: So, sort of a logical impossibility.

BRETT: Yeah.

WALKER: Got it. Interesting, I never would have expected that. 

So speaking of John Hirst, one of the things that I'd sort of overlooked until I read your book was this second historical explanation for our Benthamite society, which I think John Hirst wrote about as well, and that is that for about the first 100 years of Australian history, the British government paid for our governments and taxation was accordingly pretty low here. Whereas that was not the case in America, they had, you know, the problem with taxation without representation, and that sort of inspired the Declaration of Independence. So the attitude Australians developed towards government during the colonial era was that it was this sort of thing that just gave you stuff, um, without really costing much money. That was really interesting, and I was curious of those two reasons, the kind of Benthamite philosophy being in the air, so to speak, and then the low taxation environment. Which one do you think weighed more heavily on our political culture?

BRETT: Look, it's a bit hard to know because…W.K. Hancock, who wrote that little book called Australia in the 1930s, wrote that Australians look at government as a large public utility for the service of individual interests. That is, they don't see government as... The big problem of government being, yes, we need it for law and order. We need it to defend the borders. But we've given it this authority, but it's potentially coercive, and we have to make sure it doesn't coerce us. That didn't seem to be what... And we'd have to make sure it doesn't take too much of our property to pay for itself, you know? And as you say, because Australians weren't paying that much towards the upkeep of the government. And the government was essentially building a colony, so it was borrowing the money to build the infrastructure. 

In America, the railways were put through by private enterprise. In Australia, the railways were developed by governments. The land was sold by governments, and that's how they were raising money. They were raising money from the selling of the Indigenous people's land, essentially. But roads, ports, if productive life was to be possible in this new society, this new colony, well, then infrastructure was needed, and the infrastructure was provided by the government. 

So, I think what that does is it means that there's a certain trust in government as potentially benevolent, rather than as potentially oppressive.

WALKER: Right. 

BRETT: Which is the more influential? I think probably that latter, I would say. The fact that we depended on government for the development of the infrastructure and also a lot of migration. A lot of the migration was assisted migrants. The government helped them get here.

WALKER: Yeah. So I want to test a more kind of fine-grained cultural analysis on you and get your reaction. So if I think of the dominant strands of Australian political culture, the two that stand out to me as being the longest running are first egalitarianism and second, our obedience to impersonal authority, which again was a point that John Hirst was famous for making. And the egalitarianism comes maybe from the fact that in the early days of the colony, there was a labor shortage, so workers had more power relative to capitalists than did their counterparts back in England. Another explanation might be that the gold rushes brought all of this immigration, which kind of shook up Australian society like a snow globe, remixed society, diluted hierarchies. But for whatever reason, we have this sort of long-running egalitarian strand. We also have this other obedience to impersonal authority strand, and I suppose the distinction here is between personal and impersonal authority. So Australians are just as individualistic and WEIRD, in the sense of the acronym, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic, as Americans are, um, but when it comes to institutions, we're very obedient. And I think maybe those two strands were kind of consummated in the bureaucratic state because to create and maintain an egalitarian society you need high levels of redistribution, and to have redistribution, you need a bureaucracy. So that's my, that's my kind of armchair cultural analysis. Can you edit that or give me feedback?

BRETT: Well, the only thing I would say is bureaucracies are in many ways inherently... They're sort of, they're meritocratic if you like. 

I mean, if you think of what is the 19th century... What are the 19th century radicals or reforming working class or the beginnings of the labor movement, what are they opposing? They're opposing a society in which people's status is fixed by birth, right? Um, and people, and positions, posts are distributed according to your personal networks. Bureaucracies are impersonal. That's part of what they are. They run by rules, and ideally, it shouldn't matter if there's rules. The bureaucrat administers the rules impartially, and it shouldn't matter whether that bureaucrat was your mother's cousin when you went to Centrelink, you know? He's not going to give you more money and he didn't get the job because he was somebody else's cousin, you know? Like, so there's something inherently democratic, if you like, in a bureaucracy because it's against a sort of status, um, based society. So in a way that sort of makes sense that it brings the egalitarian and the egalitarianism and the bureaucracy together I think.

The thing that John Hirst said about Australians' egalitarianism though was that it was most obvious in our informality of manners.

WALKER: Right.

BRETT: It wasn't particularly necessarily obvious always in our policies about redistribution. You know, there was the, the Labor Party would argue for these, but you know there was strong countervailing arguments and pressures and vested interests. But the informality of manners crossed... Was more general than that. So people didn't like people putting on side... And people who were rich couldn't automatically expect deference from people who were not rich or for this, from their servants or whatever, you know? And so that's a sort of a thing about the sort of day-to-day social temper of the place, I think where particularly… I mean New South Wales' history's a bit different. I mean, I think the thing about the gold rush is in Victoria is there wasn't much of a snow dome to be shaking up, you know, with the very low European population that had only been here since about 1838, so we're only talking about 12, 13 years.

But New South Wales, you know, you had convicts, and the Gold Rush did this too. People who were barely literate might have had the luck to have found a nugget and become incredibly rich. So there was presumably also a little bit that people weren't quite – couldn't read people's personal wealth from their accents, and, or from their demeanor. I mean, I think the informality of manners is also something where in a way we now think of everybody coming from Great Britain as being sort of British and somehow all the same. But actually, in the middle of the 19th century, they're speaking in regional dialects. The Irish are seen very, you know, looked down on in many ways by English people. And people have, you know, the Cornish, the Welsh, the Yorkshire people from Yorkshire, they've got strong regional identities. And I think that also helps explain the development of this informality of manners.

WALKER: So I'm gonna segue now into compulsory voting. I just want to clarify one thing with you. So I understand why a sort of a Benthamite society would naturally have something like compulsory voting. But is there an additional reason here, which is that, so if you are a majoritarian, bureaucratic political culture like Australia's, you want compulsory voting because it imbues the government with legitimacy?

BRETT: Well, yeah, but except, see I think you're thinking as if somehow there's political culture and then things happen.

WALKER: Yeah.

BRETT: I think that... I would think of it more that there's certain directions in which things happen, and they, in a way, strengthen particular tendencies that are there in the culture already.

WALKER: Okay.

BRETT: If that makes sense? So that the development of the majoritarianism, that we're probably more majoritarian now after a decade of compulsory voting than we were in the beginning of the 20th century.

WALKER: I see.

BRETT: Because everybody's used to it.

WALKER: So it's both a cause and a consequence of our political culture.

BRETT: It's a cause, yeah. And it's, and it's… and it's not a consequence. It's a...

WALKER: Reflection?

BRETT: Um, no, it's, um, an agent. It's an agent. It become... Once compulsory voting is established, it becomes an agent of majoritarianism I would say.

WALKER: Okay.

BRETT: So it, so just to go back on the majoritarian point put about the argument, I mean, we're not, like, there were people started talking about compulsory voting, putting up possibilities of it in the Australian colonies in the late 19th century. And the arguments were always that that way the government would have the support of the majority of the voters, not just the majority of the people who turned up. And what's really struck me when I went through the parliamentary debates and I looked at some of the newspaper discussions, you know, and letters to the paper, and, and there'd be reports of, um, political associations or political leagues having debates about compulsory voting, how little attention was paid to the philosophical arguments against compulsory voting. Hardly anybody raised questions about liberty or individual conscience or freedom or the sort of arguments that if any of you have, you know, many of you I'm sure have got, discussed this with people from the United States that you would get there, with people who just think that compulsory voting is undemocratic, is illiberal. Uh, those arguments were barely there. The arguments about why it couldn't be introduced immediately were, um, partly pragmatic ones about it'd be administratively difficult because too many people wouldn't vote. The Labor Party also was against compulsory voting until we had compulsory registration. Because it, it saw that as more important to make sure all of the, you know, itinerant workers and you know, the drovers and shearers and people who might be away from home would be able to register and hence to vote.

I mean, one of the other differences, unique things I noticed about the Australian political system, electoral system I should say, which was a surprise to me, is that on election day, we can vote at any electoral, at any polling booth in our state, right? If you're in... I had a job teaching Australian history in Dublin for a couple of years, and it became clear, like, so they're voting on maybe a Thursday or a Friday or a Wednesday. It shifted around. They didn't have a fixed voting day. But people had to go and vote at the polling booth where they were registered, which was nearest their residential address. And so for students in Dublin who lived in Galway, they had to make arrangements either to have a... so that, you know, they could do a postal vote or they could do a proxy vote. But Labor in 19–, you know, when we had the first Franchise Act in 1902, made it... one of the things it really fought for was that you'd be able to vote anywhere in your state rather than... So it was like before... In England, it's like the vote is still tied to the notion of a household, tied to the notion of your home and your residence, even though there's no longer a formal property qualification. Whereas in Australia, the vote was tied to the individual, and where the individual was, you know, where they would vote. And so there's also a way... And I think one of the reasons we've got as majoritarian, um, and accessible an electoral system as we have, I mean, once you have compulsory voting, you've got to make it accessible, is because the Labor Party was strong very early here in the 20th century. So because, I mean, as I said, that was something that I discovered in doing the research that really surprised me 'cause it hadn't occurred to me that, you know, you can be out for the day and just vote wherever's convenient for you. And now we have all the pre-polling.

WALKER: Of course, another reason the Labor government favored that ability to vote anywhere in the state was because so much of their constituency was itinerant, right?

BRETT: That's right. Exactly.

WALKER: Just to underscore your point about how uncontroversial compulsory voting was when it passed, uh, in the book you make the point that, you know, when the bill finally passes in 1924, it's preceded by about one hour of debate in the Senate.

BRETT: Yeah. And one person votes against it, I think. Well, there's one-

WALKER: Oh, really?

BRETT: One speech is made against it, and it's by somebody from the Labor Party who says... So this is 1924, right? So it's only six years after the end of World War I, where there'd been two very bitter debates about conscription in Australia. And this was a Labor man, and he was a very committed anti-conscriptionist, and he said, "I don't believe the state should be compelling us to vote. Like, I didn't believe it should be compelling us, you know, compelling people to go to war, to be conscripted." And then he said, "But I'm a member of caucus, so I'll vote the way the majority does."

WALKER: So one of the other things I learned reading your book was that preferential voting is as much an agent of this majoritarian culture as compulsory voting is. And what was interesting to me was that, you know, when the Barton government was the first proposing the Electoral Act in 1902, the original system it wanted was preferential voting for the House of Reps and then a form of proportional representation for the Senate.

But it didn't get those. Instead what we had was first-past-the-post for the House of Reps until 1918 when we finally got preferential voting, and block voting for the Senate until 1948 when it finally got proportional representation. So it was only in 1948 that Australia kind of finally got its voting systems for both the lower and the upper house that were originally intended by the Barton Government just after Federation. Uh, question for you, Judy. So, now we've had sort of 75 years of experience with these intended, originally intended voting systems. If Barton and, you know, the other people who influenced that first bill, people such as Catherine Spence, but also O'Connor, I think was one of Barton's ministers, if they could see the House of Reps in the Senate today, how do you think they would reflect on the results of their experiment?

BRETT: Well, I mean, I think they'd probably be quite pleased.

WALKER: Great.

BRETT: Because I think that one of the reasons the Barton Government was keen on preferential voting was that the first decade of the Commonwealth was a three-way split. And so there was, uh, coming out of the 19th century, those of you who have done Australian history remember this, you know there's the free trader sort of small government people in Sydney, and there's the protectionist larger government Liberals in Melbourne. Both of them are essentially Liberals, um, in terms of the sort of British tradition of Liberalism. And they, I think when the Federation, uh, when the constitution was being formed, every, certainly everybody in the political elites thought that the conflict in the first decade, you know, would be between the free traders and the protectionists, and between a sort of social liberalism and a more hard-edged economic liberalism. 

But new kid on the block, the Labor Party, labor parties or as they were called leagues often were forming in the, uh, 1890s, and they won I think it was 24 seats in the first Commonwealth Parliament, and then they increased their majorities at every election until they won majority government in 1910. So if there'd been preferential voting, the beneficiary, I think, would have been the Deaconite Liberals.

Because the Deaconite Liberals were, and Deakin was able to cooperate with, with the Labor Party, Labor, no, the three, uh, by, I think in about the, I think it was in only the sixth election you've got a in a sense what Deakin called three-elevens, that they've basically got about a third of the House of Representatives each. But Labor and the Deakinite Liberals have actually got more in common in terms of the policies that they want. So, that's what you would have got with preferential voting is that Labor would have put its preferences to the Liberals. So it would have  actually strengthened the center. And so Deakin actually supported preferential voting, I mean, for pragmatic political reasons, really.

WALKER: If we did get preferential voting in 1902, would Labor have become the political force that it became?

BRETT: No, it might not have. You know, um, that's, that's a good question, and I think Labor sort of knew that. I mean, Labor, some of the people in Labor had their eyes on majority government. They thought they could get there.

I think some of the… I don't think Deakin thought they would, you know, but he was wrong.

WALKER: Because it was otherwise a pretty remarkable rise for a political party going from I think they first started sending candidates in the 1890s. And then by 1910, they form Australia's first majority government under Andrew Fisher. 

So apart from questions of political culture, one of the big themes that stuck out to me in your book was the role of sort of contingency in the history of our voting system. And, you know, one, one example is, is that question we just touched on, what would have happened to Labor if we'd got preferential voting earlier than we did. But I had some other, some other questions on contingency. So one of the really interesting things you document is how Australia kind of inadvertently achieved near universal manhood suffrage by about the 1850s.

BRETT: Right. Yes.

WALKER: And that was for a couple of reasons or accidents. One was when the New South Wales Legislative Council recommended the minimum property qualification. It asked for 20 pounds, but in England they decided on 10 pounds instead, so a lower threshold. And counterintuitively that was actually designed to reduce the influence of wealthy ex-convict families-

BRETT: That's right.

WALKER: relative to the kind of new free migrants coming to the colony who had yet to establish themselves. So that was the first accident. The second accident was the gold rushes caused all of this inflation which pushed people above the minimum property threshold. So here's one counterfactual history question. If it wasn't for the gold rushes, when and how do you think manhood suffrage would have been universalized in Australia? Was it inevitable in the 19th century?

BRETT: That's a very hard question.

Um, I mean if it hadn't been for the gold rushes, Victoria's population would have just been chugging along. Essentially it would have been pastoral economy. There would have been a need for shepherds and farm, you know, drovers and shearers and suchlike. It probably wouldn't have because the, mean it's, it's hard to know because yeah, 1848, you know, there's revolution, so, you know, and uprisings all over Europe. It's quite a high point of people thinking about politics and voting and representation. But I think it might have been slower. Um, on the other hand, you mightn't have had inflation but you already had wages much higher here than they were in England, so that this property qualification would have enfranchised quite a lot more men in New South Wales than the British Parliament had intended. And that would have set up a sort of momentum. 

But I think gold is, the discovery of gold is obviously transformative. It's certainly transformative for Victoria because the population grows really rapidly within, you know, a couple of decades. The gold runs out and so there's got to be something for these people to do. You know, most of them haven't earned enough money to go back to England and will, they, they don't necessarily want to. And that was the origins of protectionism, of the idea that well they could develop, I mean two things I guess. One was the, um, the campaign to unlock the pastoral settlements and break them up into smaller family farms. And the second was to develop a manufacturing industry that was protected by tariffs. And so Victoria, you know, became a manufacturing colony, and which is why it supported protection. 

So it's very hard to imagine what would happen without the gold. Have to think about it. 

WALKER: So one of the other examples of contingency in the book is the disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people.

BRETT: You know, I don't know whether I think of that as contingency actually.

WALKER: Okay. So, and maybe you can correct my understanding here. So it seemed like it wasn’t a foregone conclusion that they would be disenfranchised in the 1902 Franchise Act. 

BRETT: That’s right. 

WALKER: And the debate in Parliament kind of goes off the rails and the Barton Government doesn’t really put up a fight. Doesn’t seem like something they are interested - 

BRETT: So, I should sort of fill in the background for people. The Franchise Bill that the Barton government brings to the Parliament does not disenfranchise Aborigines. It disenfranchises natives born in, you know, Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, except for the Maoris, um, and a few, you know, pla- so it's basically disenfranchising non-white immigrants, and it's going through, in the same parliamentary sittings as the immigration restriction action, right? So it's basically saying that people who are colored and have been born overseas are not gonna be able to vote.

Even if they get res- And most of them are not gonna have residency anyway, but, um, there would be, you know, there would still be some who did. To go back a step, the colonies all had franchise acts, and Aboriginal people were not disen- were able to vote in New South Wales, Victoria, and in South Australia, and they did vote. Uh, it wasn't compulsory for them to vote 'cause it wasn't compulsory for anybody to vote. When South Australian women got the right to vote, South Australian Aboriginal women got the right to vote, okay? So they're not disenfranchised in those states and they never are disenfranchised in those states. 

Section 41 of the Constitution said that in moving to the new Commonwealth, nobody who could already vote could lose their vote. Now, it was worded in such a way that it was sort of ambiguous between whether that meant the category of people who could already vote shouldn't be disenfranchised, or whether individuals who couldn't vote shouldn't be disenfranchised. It was put in because South Australian women already had the vote. The referenda that were gonna be happening in each colony on whether the new Constitution would be accepted, because South Australian women had the vote, South Australian women would be voting on that. If there wasn't some sort of guarantee that they would get the vote in the new Commonwealth, the fear was they would vote against it, and it was any state, or any colony, I should say, voting no would veto the whole system, right? So it was put in there really as a guarantee to the South Australian women that they wouldn't lose their vote. So it was put in, if you like, as a category vote, and there was some discussion about it and, in the convention and whether or not this meant that, uh, Indigenous people would be excluded from voting, would it have any impact? And the people who raised that question were assured that it wouldn't. However, when the bill is brought by the Barton government and it starts, the debate starts in the Senate, effectively, he can't get it through an amendment, uh, because it would give the vote, because Aboriginal Australians, people, uh, were not excluded from the vote. And so it wasn't really contingency, uh, and it, he, I mean, O'Connor who was, um, seeing the passage of the bill through, drew the conclusion, you know, he couldn't get the bill through, so he had t- he had to give in on that particular clause or they would have no Franchise Act at all.

Um, and it's, the debate is pretty unseemly. There's a mixture of arguments. One of the things that they were worried about, that some of the people were worried about was they actually didn't know how many Aboriginal people there were. This was, uh, this is relevant to the one about the population and the census, which has now been interpreted as saying Aboriginal people weren't counted in the census because people thought they were just, you know, like kangaroos or something, they didn't count. But it actually had to do with how the electorates were going to be divided up, and because in Queensland and in areas in large parts of Western Australia and in large parts of what was then South Australia, they had absolutely no idea how many Aboriginal people were there. So it was, it was complicated, but there's also just straight up racism that you can see coming through in the debates. Um, there's still at that time massacres going on, you know, particularly up in the Kimberley. So, and the West Australians are dead against these people, you know, Aboriginal people having the vote. 

But what, one of the things, you know, that's interesting is, uh, he's not called Justice Higgins then, Henry Bourne Higgins, who becomes famous later because of the Harvester Judgment, which is a great move for egalitarianism, says, well, he votes against it because Aboriginal people are not literate, they're not civilized, so how would they be able to cast a, an informed vote? And then the exclusion is actually only of people where a full bloods or where Aboriginal blood predominates, I think that's the wording.

Um, so, but what happens then is, you know, it's left unclear, people, so Aboriginal people who are already on the electoral roll, they can't be taken off because of the Constitution, so they retain their vote. They can still vote in the state elections, but they essentially fall out of the political system. The electoral offices who are prob- you know, interpret it in a sort of, a more racially exclusionary way. So, and Aboriginal people don't necessarily understand themselves in terms of how much blood they've got, but in terms of their sort of kinship relationships. So they stop, if you like, engaging, it's hard for them to get registered, and so when in, I think it's 1963, there's a parliamentary inquiry into what's happening with Aboriginal people and voting, they find that actually it's been pretty shocking that lots of people who had the right to vote didn't know, for example, in the state elections, that electoral offices are refusing to register people who should be able to vote. So I don't think it's contingent. I think it was a result of the way in which Aboriginal people were seen by, like, large majority of the Australians and the fact that the frontier was still live and violent in Queensland and West Australia.

WALKER: Right. That's very important context. I agree it's not contingent, but that actually wasn't gonna be my example of contingency with respect to Aboriginal people.

BRETT: Oh. Right.

WALKER: So, the interesting example, potential example of contingency is, so Aboriginal people then finally get the vote in 1962, and I read in your book that it's possible they could've got it about four decades earlier if the right High Court challenge had been mounted, but it's just that nobody noticed this or bothered to do it.

Do you recall this?

BRETT: Yeah, no. Well, I think the point there is that in the 1920s, there was an Indian man who was, um, not able to vote, and he took- he challenged the legislation 'cause he's a member of the British Empire, right? Now, London is very edgy about the Indian, I mean, Eh- London doesn't basically like Australia's restrictive immigration policy. It said that the British Empire was colorblind. You know, there's a lot of well-educated Indians who speak English, you know, so it's very edgy about it, and so when it looks like this case is going to go all the way to London, and I guess to the Privy Council, the Australian government gets very edgy because it thinks, "Well, if it gets undone for Indians, it'll undo the whole of our sort of color bar inside of the legislation." So they make an exclusion for Indians. Indians are gonna be allowed to vote. Maoris had already been excluded because they were regarded as being higher up the sort of evolutionary civilization, you know, 'cause they had a sort of recognizable village-based society that was sort of recognizable to Europeans.

So one of the articles I was reading said that if there'd been a lawyer, uh, and active Aboriginal organizations or lawyers who might have been able to take up the case, they might have been ab- they might have been able to mount a challenge, partly because of the ambiguity of what Section 41 meant or that was in Section 41. But it shows, I think, again, I don't think it's contingency so much. I think it shows the rather marginal position that, um, Indigenous affairs had in the thinking of the political elites.

Like, I read, um, um, Paul Hasluck's, uh, Shades of Darkness, and I know he's got a bad reputation as an assimilationist, but he writes... He was a young journalist in the 1920s and '30s, and he's, you know, when Aboriginal people on some of the missions in Western Australia are essentially starving, you know? They're... Traditional society has been disrupted. The missions are existing on charity. The government doesn't care, you know? So he's talking about just how marginal they were in terms of the thinking of, as I said, of government and political elites.

WALKER: So how inevitable was Australia's adoption of compulsory voting and preferential voting? Because, you know, on the one hand, our majoritarian political culture would seem to make their adoption more likely, but on the other, as you show in the book, so often these decisions were driven by very cold and cynical political calculations.

BRETT: The compulsory voting one was not driven, I don't think, by, I mean, cynical... People had been arguing for it for a long time. Labor had been opposed to it because it thought that if you had compulsory voting, it would compromise the secrecy of the ballot. That's what they were worried because you'd have to have postal ballots. You'd have to have postal voting for all the sick and the old and infirm, and for people who lived a long way away. And so how could you be sure that those votes were secret? That was... So that, they kept opposing it. The bureaucrats were arguing for it because we... In 1911, we got compulsory registration, and I think it's at that point, once we get compulsory registration, and it's compulsory, and it's, um, permanent. Like, in some countries, you have to register every time there's an election. You know? You don't, you don't just get on the electoral roll and stay there. Whereas here, you get on the electoral roll, and you're there forever. You know? Um, so the bureaucrats... So we had that. We had compulsory permanent registration, if you like. So I think at that point, compulsory voting becomes inevitable.

WALKER: Right. And until that point, it's been a problem for labor because if compulsory voting wasn't coupled with compulsory registration, that would disproportionately favour the liberals, and the reason-

BRETT: That's what they thought.

WALKER: That's what they thought. Yeah and they're thinking-

BRETT: But the bureaucrats want compulsory registration. Yeah, the bureaucrats because they do all this work, right?

You know, and there's Oldham, and he's got this big office with all these filing... They've got all these filing card systems with the electorates, and then when somebody moves, they take their card, and they put them in the other box in the electorate.

And he gets really annoyed that they have to cha... You know, they do these, um... Those of you who are old enough to remember, they used to do habitation reviews. Somebody from the Electoral Commission would come and knock on your door to find out who lived in the house, who was on the roll. You know, so he thought that the onus should be put on people to let the electoral offices know when they, when they moved, you know? They'd put all this work in. So it's partly, you know, that compulsory voting would make the work... Would get more benefit out of it. You know? It's a sort of… You know, and they're very proud of their role. And now it's even easier 'cause it's tied to your motor registration 'cause people always change their motor... They're more worried about their cars than their votes. They take the trouble to change.

WALKER: So this is the automated roll updates that came in under Gillard?

 BRETT: Yeah.

WALKER: I wanna kind of shift now to talking about the South Australian innovators, and then we'll, we'll move to audience questions. 

So, in your book, Catherine Spence, the, you know, incredible innovator of sort of a form of what she called effective voting, a form, effectively a form of proportional representation. She moved to... Her family moved to Adelaide, I think, when she was about 14. She was one of our electoral innovators. Um, so in the book, she comes back to Adelaide in 1894, after 20 months of traveling, and she arrives back on the eve of women getting the vote in South Australia. And in her diary or autobiography, she recalls being at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893 and being greeted multiple times by people saying, "You're from Australia, the home of the secret ballot." Do you think that was actually true? It just seems implausible to me that, um, we would be... Maybe that just reflects my- my historical naivety, but that's, uh, that struck me that we, for a time, were sort of synonymous with the secret ballot to foreigners.

BRETT: Well, she's probably- Well, it was called the Australian ballot, you know, um, because we invented the polling, you know, the, um, segmented polling booths, and the idea of the ballot paper, which, where you ticked off who you wanted. So... And it was called the Australian ballot, but also, she's probably mixing amongst political reformers. So it wouldn't have just been somebody in the streets, you know, saying "Where are you from? I'm from Australia. Oh, the home of the secret ballot." It would've been at political meetings and things.

WALKER: Okay, so there's a bit of selection bias. That makes sense, but yeah, it's just interesting that, um, that when you came down-

BRETT: Can I say something about preferential voting before we go to-

WALKER:  Yes.

BRETT: Because I've been thinking about this more recently since the last election when all those teals got elected. When I wrote the book, I was really focusing on, uh, the benefits of compulsory voting, but I now think that preferential voting is also more, is more important than I realized, because when it started, it was a result of farmers' organizations being worried ab- wanting to have their own party, but being worried that in three-corner contests, they would split the non-Labor vote and Labor representatives would get in, and this had happened in a couple of state elections. So they basically pressured and pressured the nationalist government of Stanley Melbourne Bruce, which is effectively, you know, a Liberal government, to bring in preferential voting, and you can see. So what- what's happening there is a particular identifiable interest group is able to get itself represented in the electoral system, and preferential voting has, over the years, allowed...... you know, it allowed the DLP to exist, that didn't get representatives but it enabled it to put political pressure on. Um, it enabled Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party to exist. It's enabled independents to get in in various ways. And in the last election, it enabled- it created this big cross bench. And I see that as giving a degree of flexibility to the political system when there's very, you know, all sorts of problems with the political parties that we can think about. But if you think of, say, One Nation, which whether or not, whatever you think of their views, it means that that group of people who were feeling disgruntled for various reasons stay inside of the political system. They don't become a sort of marginalized group, they don't... They stay engaged. They see some, they... It's also the proportional representation in the Senate, you know, they get Pauline Hanson in the Senate. There's somebody who represents their views is made visible. Because the whole problem with a majoritarian democracy, the big, is h- how minority interests get represented and whether or not they just get smothered over. I think what's happening in Australia at the moment is that society is actually much, much more complicated, you know, complex socially and demographically in terms of, you know, things like religion and, in particular, and age differences, and a whole lot of features than it was in the early part of the 20th century. And I think that's one of the re- our preferential system enables a degree of flexibility to accommodate this increased social complexity.

WALKER: Would it be more accurate to say that that is the result of, of not so much the preferential system but proportional representation?

BRETT: I think it's both.

WALKER: Okay. Interesting.

BRETT: Yeah. And I think people have got used, like, you know, there's all this people throwing up their hands, "Oh, we're gonna have a minority government." I mean, effectively no maj- no government has controlled the Senate since the early-1980s. You know, so you could say there's been an effectively minority government in a way, in that they've had to negotiate. I mean, okay, the Senate doesn't control supply, it can't vote on money bills. But on all pieces of legislation, the government of the day has to negotiate with a range of people in the Senate. So if that shifts down to the lower house, it's not such a big difference, I don't think, um, from what we're used to. And I think that's also one of the things that play. I mean, the politicians obviously don't like it because it makes their... Well, the politicians from the major parties don't like it because it makes their job of governing, they think, more difficult. But they've got to do it in the Senate, so I don't see why it's much different.

WALKER: Mm. One of the interesting points you make in the book is just this trend in the seats in the House of Reps that now go to preferences. I think it's, might be in the kind of low tens several decades ago. By the 2016 election, it's 102 out of a 150 seats.

BRETT: Yeah.

WALKER: So, okay, question about the South Australian innovators. So, three of Australia's greatest electoral, pre-federation electoral innovators come from South Australia. There's William Boothby, who's responsible for the sort of bureaucratic model of elections- 

BRETT: Yeah. Developing impartial, having elections run by salaried public servants who were impartial.

WALKER: He also comes up with a couple of other practical ideas. One is using a pencil instead of a dipping pen, and the other is putting the cross on the ballot instead of drawing a line through the names of the people you didn't want to vote for.

BRETT: Yeah. He has the idea of putting the little boxes.

WALKER: Right. But, uh, in the realm of electoral innovations, these are pretty big ideas. Um, the second is Catherine Spence, who's known for her ideas on proportional representation. And then the third is Mary Lee, who's one of the famous suffragists. So that's especially interesting given South Australia wasn't one of the most populous states at that point. Do you view that as just the result of randomness, or was there some kind of structural reason that meant we had this disproportionate amount of electoral innovators coming from South Australia?

BRETT: That's a good question. Look, I think it's probably that, the fact that it wasn't as populous. Um, there wasn't, you know, William Boothby starts running elections in South Australia in the 1850s, when they start having elections. And most of the men have gone to the gold fields. And he's a new immigrant, and he gets a job very easily. Um, but, you know, there's no upper class. There's no, uh, you know, so he, uh, but also there's no... So I think it's got something to do with the history of the settlement. It's settled by free settlers, so you don't have the anxiety around convicts that complicates things, I think, in New South Wales. But it's very new, and really, he turns to public servants to help run the election because there's nobody else, you know. Half of the men are in the gold fields. And the openness to women being elected, you know, to sorry, women getting the vote, is probably because the pastoral classes are not as entrenched or not as big. It's often, you know, there's a lot of advantages in smallness of scale, I think, in terms of, of innovation, you know. But it's not something that I've got a very profound insight into. Maybe there's some Adelaidians or South Australians here who can...

WALKER: Well, it is interesting that it was the only colony set up by an act of British Parliament, and as you say, it was a free settler society. So I wonder whether it just attracted a lot of sort of entrepreneurial, maybe even utopian thinkers, who self-selected into the new society? 

To be, I mean, before we started recording, we were talking about, so I brought along this book. This is by Catherine Spence, which is a utopian. It's called A Week in the Future. In 1888, she imagines time traveling from Adelaide to London and arriving in London in the year 1988, and she kind of visualizes London in that year. And so she's writing utopian fiction, and it just seemed like quite an exciting, interesting society. I wonder if there's just sort of something in the air.

BRETT: Yeah, and it was planned. You know, and, and so people had this sense that they were establishing new institutions. I mean, in a way, because Sydney starts as a convict colony, it, you know, that, it's a very different history. But there, there, I think there was probably a sense of a green fields that they could try things out.

WALKER: New horizons.

There's one other interesting historical connection here. Earlier, in our conversation, you quoted that line from Keith Hancock's book Australia, about Australians viewing their government as a vast public utility. Uh, Hancock spent some of his formative years in Adelaide. I think he moved... So he got a professorship at the University of Adelaide when he was 24 or 25.

And then he was there sort of from the mid-1920s through the mid-1930s. Australia was- The book Australia was published in 1930. So he was writing it in Adelaide. I wonder whether that same kind of milieu affected his thinking.

BRETT: That's interesting. Yeah.

WALKER: Just a thought.

Well, let's do some audience questions. So hands up if you have a question. Let's start with Gabe at the very back.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #1: Thank you. That was fantastic. Um, so a question to come back to this conversation we're having about the way that different electoral systems kind of play through to the, the character and the nature of the politics. I know this stuff can get a little bit deterministic. Obviously, it's not the only thing determining the nature of Australia's political character. But if you look at the way that proportional representation and the preferences work in Australia versus how presidential system in the US works or how the purely proportional representation systems work in Europe. We have this coalition governments which are very unstable and you have the development of these kind of norms, the corden sanitaire, that, that block out minor parties that have objectionable views. Do you think- what's the balance in Australia here, if you could kind of project through to the future? Like, what does our system mean for the rise of maybe movements more like the AFD on one hand, or the Teals on the other, and are we striking the right balance there?

BRETT: I'm not very good at thinking, uh, projecting into the future. I mean, it seemed to me, say over the last few decades, where we've had majority governments in the lower house, and, but which, who have to get their, which have to get their legislation to the Senate, that's been a really good balance. Because... But on the other hand, it's made the House of Representatives a bit of a rubber stamp, and it's turned it into this sort of bear pit, you know, it's very un-edifying. One thing I've been thinking about is, you know, what's going on with, I mean, in a way, it's a, the Senate is part of a revival of the Parliament. And it was once the case that the political parties had much bigger memberships relative to the population than they have now. And they represented more interests, more views. And they had within them, um, particularly within the Labor Party, much more lively debates, where, you know, conference was where policy was made. Now, again, in the Liberal Party, they had these forums, though the leader always had the final say over the policy. But it seems to me, you could- that they, that the parties operated, if you like, as aggregators of interests, to bring, so that they could simplify things, they'd come to some decision, consent, there'd be consensus formed inside of those political party forums. That seems to be- as the party's membership has shriveled, and they've become hollowed out, and they're mainly mo, they're made up more of political operatives than they are of ordinary people, they're not really functioning in that, as well in that, in that way. And so I think that's one of the things that you can see has happened with the Teals. I mean, it's, it's clearly they, they represent, in many ways, the moderate members of the Liberal Party, who've been pushed out by this focus on leader control of the party, which has narrowed the, the range of the debates within the, within the political party. Uh, and the Greens, I think, represent, t- to some extent, I mean, the, you know, people from the left of- who would have once been captured by the, by the Labor Party. So, if that starts, if that, um, argument and debate starts to happen inside of the Parliament, uh, I don't think that's such a bad thing. You know, maybe that's one of the things that's happening with the emergence of all of these independents. Now, we're gonna have to see, I think, how, how things play out. I think one of the things that I find quite encouraging is that the Teals, who are all really middle-aged, intelligent, professional women, uh, who don't seem to be as, um, prone to insult people as the people in the parties are, and who seem to ha, be, be trying to raise the, the level of, of, of parliamentary behavior and debate, but we'll have to see how, what happens at this next election. I mean, they may, uh, it may be a flash in the pan, and they, um, they may all disappear, or they, or they, or it may expand. Things are certainly shifting. I mean, and I, and the balance has to be, in a way, reestablished at different times. But I think you're right. I mean, we don't, we're not, we're not gonna go to a proportional system in the House. So, we'll have, we'll have, I, I don't think we'll have coalition governments either. I mean, we've got a coalition on one side.

WALKER: Okay. Let's go just in front of Gabe there.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: Hi. Thank you very much for the discussions. Um, they've been very interesting. I was just wondering, um, to, if we're gonna entertain a hypothetical for me. Say instead the gold rush doesn't happen, and there's just the South Australian copper rush of the earlier period, and that's all that sustains, um, Victorian, or sorry, Australian immigration. Is, under that circumstances, New Zealand more likely to have been admitted to the, um, the nation of Australia? Would, would that have dissuaded their concerns about being overwhelmed by us dirty, dirty Australian voters, um, overwhelming their political preferences?

BRETT: Look, I don't actually have a view on that. It's not, it's not something I've thought about. I mean, I think it would've been quite hard to have New Zealand in the federation just because of d- difficulties of communication. I mean, it was hard enough with Western Australia, you know? You can see with the distance there, and there was a strong secessionist... I mean, West Australia only voted into the federation because of the influx of Victorians for the gold rush in Kalgoorlie. And in the 1930s, there was a very strong secessionist movement. So I-

AUDIENCE MEMBER #2: They successfully voted to leave, but then they wanted to join, um, the UK.

BRETT: Yeah, but the British Parliament basically wouldn't accept their petition, and it went nowhere. But, so I, I just don't think, given sort of communications, I mean, you know, the New Zealand representatives would have to have gone across the Tasman to sit in the federal Parliament. Uh, uh, so I don't think practically it would've worked even if there hadn't been a gold rush.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: Thanks very much. So, just so you know where I come from, um, I have such strong confirmation bias on compulsory voting, I find it extraordinary that other countries don't have it.

BRETT: Yeah, we, it's what I think.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #3: I think the flip side... So, one comment, one question. The flip side of the right to vote is the social obligation to vote. And so it's a very small cost to go and vote, and I think people focus always on, "Uh, it's my right not to vote." But you have a social obligation to actually go and, you know, cast your vote and, uh, for the, for the country. Um, so my question is, are we in any danger of losing compulsory voting?

BRETT: Look, I don't think so. There was, um, when John Howard was prime minister, and so th- Nick Minchin was the pres-, uh, chaired the, um, Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, and he was a fierce opponent of compulsory voting. Um, th- uh, getting back to your interest in South Australia, the strongest m- um, arguments against compulsory voting have been put by people from South Australia. Seems to be where there's a little nub of people. 

Now, John Howard said he didn't support compulsory voting, you know, on sort of liberal grounds, small liberal grounds. But he wasn't gonna... But Australian pe- it was very popular in Australia, and he wasn't gonna do anything about it. He was clearly... It was not something he was gonna spend political capital on. So, I don't think so. Like, there's no push, I don't think. The National Party is very strongly in favor of compulsory voting, so that's a stabilizing factor inside of the coalition if there happened to be some sort of more hard-edged libertarians in, um, opponents to compulsory voting. And I think when, that, um, what's happened in America with Trump has made people much more conscious of the benefits of compulsory voting than they were before. Like I got asked to write this book after Trump was elected, uh, because people started saying, "Oh, couldn't happen here 'cause we've got compulsory voting." And Michael Heywood, who was my editor at Text, said to me, "Well, you know, Judy, I've got no idea why we've got compulsory voting. You know? I'm an educated person. Um, could you write a book on it?" And I said, "Oh, I don't think there's a book in it."

And, uh, but then I said I'd do some research. And then I thought, "Well, actually, there's a longer story that compulsory voting is the end of," and so I got a book. But you notice now, and I don't think it's just because of my book, the compulsory voting gets mentioned quite often in, um, op-ed pieces about, about Trump and what the risks are for Australia of that sort of political earthquake, because it's seen as a stabilizer. You know, because one of the things that happen, if you haven't got compulsory voting, then the parties have to get the vote out. That becomes a crucial matter for if you want to win the seat. And so that encourages the political parties to focus on highly emotive issues, often to do with religion and sex, that will get the vote out. Whereas with compulsory voting, the people who are not... You get the moderate middle, if you like, or the people who are not that interested in com- in, in politics have to vote. And they've o- and the theory is that they will often cast a sort of a more sensible, level-headed vote. When I was, um, studying, I did an undergraduate degree in politics and philosophy in the late 1960s. And one of the essays I remember, articles I remember reading, um, as an undergraduate was called In Defense of Apathy. And it was saying, you know, like, you wanna really involve everybody mobilized and, you know, in- active in politics, look at Germany in the 1930s. You know that actually a bit of, a bit of apathy, people not thinking that politics is the center of, of their life is actually quite a good thing. You know? So, I think we're... It's okay at the moment.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: I am wondering if you have a comment about the role of apathy, but also that colliding with an escalation of misinformation and fake news.

BRETT: Yes. This is all pretty new, so I haven't really done a lot of thinking about that. Uh, I don't know how that collides with compulsory voting, really. You know, like, it would be a problem if we had compulsory or voluntary voting, if that makes sense.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #4: Yeah. I mean, this is where I was turning my mind to, because, I mean, I might be a bit idealist, but I assume that, you know, when people go to vote, they at least put some thought into it, even if it's the barest amount of thought. So... And that's what I thought was always a positive of compulsory voting, that you're sort of forcing people to have a, some engagement or some sense of their social obligation. But if the quality of the content that they're getting when they have that, even if it's the smallest amount of engagement is less, do they col- do they collide?

BRETT: Yeah. No, and I, I think... Look, what happened in the past was when people went to vote, they may not have been following the debates or the issues at all. They had an already formed political identity, "I'm Labor." You know, "We're for the workers." You know, "I, I've always voted Liberal." It was sort of like voting for football teams in a way, you know, like, and people who vote for the National Party, particularly have very great deal of loyalty. So it was part of their sort of a deeply formed social identity, often passed on through the family, um, and through where they lived, the suburbs they lived in and that sort of thing. Now, that has loosened, that's changed a lot over the last probably 50 years. I mean, if you look at all the surveys, the number of what were called, you know, rusted-on voters who always voted... Like, my father voted Labor every election, lower house, upper house, state, federal, you know, never voted for anybody else. I change my vote around, you know. Um, I vote differently sometimes in the state and the federal, I vote differently between the upper and the lower house. Uh, so I would be seen a- then, I would c- be in the category now of a swinging voter. Like, when I was studying politics back in the '60s, swinging voters were airheads. You know, they were people who knew so little about it that they just, you know, picked something out of the air. So you're right, that the fact that there are fewer people rusted on, who will just be following the party line, does mean that there'll be more people vulnerable to misinformation.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #5: I'm interested in going back to where you started the conversation, which was, um, I think the political philosophies that, uh, were in play when Australia was, um, drafting its constitution versus the US, the sort of, um, Lockean and, you know, Hobbesian, um, social contract in the US versus, um, the Bentonite in Australia. And I think, um, one of you mentioned that that, uh, generated greater trust in institutions in Australia than what you see in the US because of, um, because of that. And, and, um, I guess my question is, it's... And I've heard Joe talk before on other podcasts about it's kind of locked in time because of the constitution that exists. My question is, what do you think it's like now? What do you think our political context is now and how that influences where our, uh, political electoral systems might go next?

BRETT: Well, I mean, what all the surveys show is that there's declining trust in our political institutions. I would see this historically as probably linked to the increased inequality that there's been over the last decades. Um, like, equality was sort of highest... Andrew Lee's written about this quite well. You know, equality's highest, like, after the war and from about basic with... since neoliberalism. You know, the, that since the '80s, inequality's been increasing. And so not as many people feel that the, that the society is, is giving them a fair go. And so the political institutions are, are, are, are sort of an obvious, um, target of blame. The shift to neoliberalism, you know, did unleash a lot of increased productivity and wealth, but it's also made the society more unequal. And I think that makes a society harder to govern. The increase... The more it becomes unequal, the harder it becomes to govern.

WALKER: So is that bureaucratic and majoritarian culture becoming exhausted in Australia?

BRETT: Well, I think to some extent, it got... Much of it got dismantled by neoliberalism. I don't think it got exhausted so much as it... You know, for example, like the selling off of all of the state-owned utilities, because they're run by the government, they had... Now, they may have been inefficient and all sorts of, you know, and inflexible and everything, but they had in them at least some sense of social obligation. You know, the way the PMG had to provide telephone services as much as it could across, across the board. You know, that, that sort of thing. So, so I think it's under... That the majoritarianism and the egalitarianism are not working as well as they did. You know, I mean, because neoliberalism is basically an individualistic philosophy. It's shifting the way in which the resources of the society distributed away from government and towards markets, and that's left, uh, quite a lot of people vulnerable. And, and, um, and what's happened with property prices, which is, I think the biggest driver of the increased ineq- you know, one of the big drivers of certainly increased generational inequality, which... And it's been obvious, I would say, for a couple of decades that this was gonna happen and that, that it would have the consequences that it's having. And...... governments seem to have done nothing about it. I, which I, I, I find hard to, um, both forgive, but also to comprehend why they didn't do anything. You know, just, just in terms of self-interest, I mean, if you have... It was quite clear that the old age pension in Australia was always predicated on people owning a home. It wasn't ever gonna be enough for people renting. Th- Brian Howe said that in the middle of the 1980s when house prices started to go up, you know, governments are going to have to pick, you know, like, they don't know what to do now, so.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #6: Thanks, Joe. Thanks, Judy. Um, an actual consequence of preferential voting is preference deals. And you talk about the rise of three-corner races. Joe, you mentioned over a hundred of the members of the House of Reps now rely on second preferences to get over the line. I suppose, my hypothesis is that preference deals become this fundamental currency that's traded across states in very marginal seats. Do you have any thoughts on the rise of preference deals as an instrument for independents or minor party candidates?

BRETT: No, I don't really. I mean, I think what happened in the Senate, you know, was obviously a problem. Although, I thought that Ricky... What was his name?

WALKER: Ricky Muir.

BRETT: Ricky Muir was actually terrific.  You know? Like, I mean, I think there's... I've got, um, somebody, some of the direct democracy people, I think, you know, who say, "Actually, put ordinary people into a position of responsibility, and you'll get good outcomes." And I think that's what you saw. You know, there was all those jokes when he, wh- when he was first elected, but he actually took it seriously. And, uh, and, and he was quite good. So, no, I don't... I mean, I think... And the preferences, you know, the, uh, are usually pretty obvious. Like, the Greens are gonna preference Labor ahead of, of the Coalition. And I think if the Greens didn't, people wouldn't follow their b- How To Vote card.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #7: Thanks, Judy. Judy, you're a historian, and history's at its core about discovering and analyzing primary sources. Thinking about your career, are there any primary sources that you discovered that really excited you, or any collection that you're still hunting for that you're disappointed you haven't found?

WALKER: Oh, great question.

BRETT: Oh, that's a hard question. Look, the primaries, the main, the main primary source I used was actually the parliamentary debates. Um-

WALKER: For this book?

BRETT: Yeah, for that book. And the book I've just finished, where I use primary sources, is a, uh, is, it's still in the political activism, you know, th- sphere. It's a biography of the second wave feminist activist Beatrice Faust, who all the young people here won't have ever heard of. Um, she started the Women's Electoral Lobby. But she was born in 1939, the same year as Germaine Greer. And, uh, she... But she doesn't go overseas, she stays in Melbourne. And she gets... She's very active in the Abortion Law Reform Society in the 1960s, when abortions are still called illegal operations. You know, they're not talked about when the, uh, public discussion of sex is very constrained. I think one of and, and in terms... And so I did have... Uh, she died, and she didn't leave a literary executor, but I, uh, for complicated way, got access, you know, got her papers, which are sitting on the floor of my study. And that's been, you know, so like, large amounts of correspondence and diaries and things. So, that's been a much richer parli- primary resource, um, primary source resource than this, where I just basically used the parliamentary debates, and some newspapers. I mean, Trove is terrific, you know, because like it was... I could see that farmers associations were meeting and all, and voting, and, and putting forward motions supporting compulsory voting, you know, right through the early part of the 20th century.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #8: You suggested that the three, the three main keys to our voting system work quite well together. So that's compulsory voting, your preferential system, and the Independent Electoral Commission. Have you got some thoughts into the future about how that could be improved on for Australia, and maybe how technology, like voting from home, might have an influence on-

BRETT: Oh, I think voting from home would be a terrible idea. Really terrible idea. Be- and, and I'll tell you why. Because voting is a, I mean, somebody talked about it as an obligation, it's a public act. And I think... I mean, I th- that... What I find when I go to vote is that lining up to, you know, with all of the other citizens, this motley collection of people, some of whom look really stupid and some look miserable and, you know, whatever, um, is actually very salutary. You know? That, that you have to... It forces you to think that, to, to realize you live in a society that's not just you and your family and your close friends, you know? It gets... That it's not a, that this is not a private act. But it's a public act in some ways, voting. So that's why I think voting from home would be terrible. 

Um, I think that the pre-polling, which I think it was three weeks before the last election, which I think's too long. But, you know, I mean, I have to say, I've used pre-polling. It's very convenient. Um, but at least, you know, you're going to a public place. I don't know about, um, computers. You know, it, it obviously it would help with the counting in the Senate. But there's something about the material, the materiality of voting, I think, that, that helps ground it in reality, which I think is really important. That it's not, you know, that... O- other, like voting at home, I think, would be really, really very bad.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #8: Outside of that technology space, but more generally, the question was, how could we improve on it?

BRETT: The other thing I think which would be an improvement, and New Zealand does, is I think that permanent residents should be allowed to vote. In this way, we've gone backwards. In the 1902 Franchise Act, the qualification for voting was, apart from the racial restrictions, was six months residence, continuous residence. So, you know, permanent residents pay taxes. And I, I find the way... So, I think that would be quite good. Um, it would, it would help integrate people, you know, 'cause some people don't take citizenship because of issues to do with, you know... I mean, I had friends living in Ireland who didn't take citizenship for years 'cause they would've had to give up their Australian citizenship. You know, that, that there might be reasons why, why people who are quite committed to, uh, to the, to a life here haven't become citizens. New Zealand gives permanent residents the right to vote, so there'd be that. On the, um, the funding of, of campaigns, uh, you know, it becomes quite... I mean, I certainly think there should be this automatic disclosure. And I think we'll just have to see how it pans out at the next elec- this coming election. No, it's not happening this election, is it? It's the next one, where the independents were all feeling that the restrictions on, on the funding for individual seats would harm independents vis-a-vis the larger parties, who, who, if you like, have big national budgets. But I don't have particularly well-informed views about that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #9: I actually have a question about fixed-term Parliament, sort of arrangements. Every other state now, um, and maybe all the territories, have fixed-term Parliaments, but the federal government has a three-year floating one. Do you see that as a positive reform, if we introduced a four-year fixed terms of federal government?

BRETT: Yeah, I think that'd be, I think it'd be good. It'd give, it'd give governments a little more time, you know, to bed their legislation down. 'Cause it feels as if, with this government, I mean, you know, a lot of time was spent on The Voice, but it's just like, it hasn't been there very long, you know? Like... Um, and it was just sort of hitting its stride towards the end of last year, and getting... And the legislation takes a while to form, too. Um, so I think that would be a good idea. And maybe with a, a, an already set election date, to stop, you know, the sort of speculation at the moment, where we're all waiting to see.

WALKER: What's been preventing us from moving to fixed terms already?

BRETT: I don't know. I guess somebody has to bring forward a bill.

AUDIENCE MEMBER #10: Thanks for a very interesting conversation. You've spoken tonight about the reasons why, and the effects of having a compulsory voting system, particularly around the design of the electoral system. And one of the reasons seems to be that it bends towards giving government a more representative mandate, in that you're getting the views of all those who are eligible to vote, as opposed to those who choose to or want to on a particular occasion. If the subset of people who want to vote is smaller than the subset of people who are eligible to vote, enrolled, and that is a subset of the people who potentially could vote, I'd just be interested to see if you had any reflections on the voting age, and the idea of expanding the franchise.

BRETT: Um, yes. I know there's, there's a bit of a push about t- 16-year-olds voting. I don't have strong views about that, actually, either for or against. I don't... You know, because, like, um, there's always, just w- with all your sets of things and subsets and... The electoral roll never catches everybody. Some people actually manage to stay off the electoral roll. And the turnout is never total, you know? It's usually in the low 90s, which is a hell of a l- that... So the low 90s of the people who are on the roll, which probably means it's in the high 80s of the people who would be eligible to vote, because some people will not be on the roll, you know? But no, I don't, I don't actually have a view about that.

WALKER: Please join me in thanking Judy Brett for a really fascinating conversation.

Thank you, Judy.