As you can probably tell, although I was born in England, I'm living in Australia, the state of Western Australia to be precise. I've been here approaching 5 years as I write this and, don't tell anyone, but this is the best place on earth. However, like I suspect everywhere else colonized by mankind, life is inflicted with politicians and politics.
To English eyes, Australia has a strange political system. When they talk of the commonwealth here they refer not to Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II's Commonwealth, but the Commonwealth of Australian States; New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, Queensland, Southern Australia, Western Australia and the territories of Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory. Quite what the difference between a territory and a state is I'm not sure. They all are, or their inhabitants are, subject to some extent or another to Australian Federal Law and Federal Taxes. However they all also have their own parliaments and set their own laws and taxes and have their own qualification and licensing systems.
Australia is a democracy and voting in elections is compulsory for Australian citizens. Not only compulsory but enforced and fines handed out if they don't vote. Like most democracies, things seem to have shaken out to just two real parties that have any real chance of getting into power. Here they are the Liberal Party (Conservatives by English standards) and Labor who are, well, Labour. Except it is (mis)spelt Labor. I think it is actually slightly more complicated than this, in that the Liberal party is also referred to as The Coalition - of Liberals and Nationals apparently.
However the twist comes in the way the voting is done. The voting is for a person who will represent a particular party, but then they have to list all the others in order of preference. This is known as a preferential voting system. In this system, if I understand it right, if the winner hasn't got more than 50% of the vote, the one who lost most is discounted and those votes redistributed according to preferences. This process is repeated until someone gets more than 50%.
Now the flaw I see with this is that not only do you have to vote no matter how bad the line up of candidates is, but if you do find someone you are happy with it may be that your vote ends up putting into power the very mob you didn't want under any circumstances. Compulsory voting does ensure a level of engagement by the population but who is to say the individual voters actually pay anymore attention than in a non-compulsory system. It would be interesting to analyse the number of (deliberately) spoiled votes in both systems and compare exit polls to try and ascertain how many people actually made a decision or just followed historic decisions or those of partners.
The voluntary voting system has produced some dramatically pathetic voter turnouts in the UK as reported in the last few elections. Perhaps a better solution to both systems would be voluntary voting that has to be repeated until a fixed percentage of voters actually turn out. Perhaps this would produce politicians who actually have to engage with their electorates, who develop policies that the majority of the population want and care about. Just an idea, but I don't think either current system does those things currently.