feeling like a monday...
I hate automated learning. I just spent 40 minutes on one of those "welcome to our company, let us put you through the spiel of 'don't be a dick when working for us' which you can quite ignore once you have enough whiteness, dickness, money, or power to do so, but you're just a peon and you could reflect badly on us, so sit down, shut up, and let us school you on the rules" training/learning things, and the damn system ATE MY RECORD THAT I'D DONE IT AND I NEED TO DO IT AGAIN.
--
After working the state election on Saturday, the conservatives got back into power. UGH. I don't like the conservative state leader, although I respect her acumen in keeping her head above water, but all her/her party's ideas are bad and purely capitalist/economically rationalist and they should be ashamed of them. Sure, they work for me, and I have enough money and agency that I can generally ignore the effects of them on me (or throw resources I have to deal with them), but they don't work for a SHITLOAD of other people.
Working the polling place (a small one - about 1600 voters) was good - I learned about how votes are counted, how to vote effectively, and also about the demographics of the sub-area and where I suspect less-conservative/progressive groups need to focus.
For those of you who don't know, Australia has mandatory voting - one of the few democracies in the world to do so. Yes, I know, 'enforced democracy' blah blah freeeeedoooom blah blah blah you've got DT as your presifuckindent so I'll take enforced democracy anyday myself...
Mandatory voting has its share of problems in terms of 'disengaged voters' and political cynicism but it means two things:
Since everyone has to vote, the process is made accessible and easy to undertake, including there being plenty of locations for voting (in urban/suburban areas, just about every local primary school is a voting location on election day), availability of postal votes, absentee voting (voting at a polling place which is outside your electorate), and ease of voting ID.
We ask for four details of voters: Name, address, birthdate, and whether they've already voted in today's election. They don't have to provide ID (although it helps rather than having to ask for name/address/birthdate), just those details.
The birthdate request is a recent change.
I explained that with it being common for adult children to continue living in the same household rather than starting their own, a birthdate would help ID whether it was John Smith junior or John Smith senior who was voting. (I am extremely good at finding a reasonable explanation for something, even if it's not the actual explanation.)
Most took the request well enough. A few commented on it but gave their birthdates anyway. The most pissed off people against it tended to be older women who felt that revealing their birthdates was offensive. I had a couple of slightly grumpy older woman who asked why but declared their birthdates in the end, but one of the other people marking off voters got a fifty-something woman who threw such a complete tantrum at having to give her date of birth that they had to call in the voting centre manager to deal with her.
The next two dozen or so people in the queue gave their birthdates quite meekly.
But there's no elaborate requirements for identification, and because you get a fine if you don't vote, everyone has an incentive to vote and not get put off by someone telling them, "you can't vote here/you're not authorised to vote/it's another day for voting". So voting levels are around 95%. Of course, some of those are "informal votes" or "donkey votes" but ultimately, the levels of actual, real, valid votes put in is 90%.
Can you imagine how different the world would look if more countries had 90% of their population voting?
Okay, so you might still be looking conservatism in the face, because hey, old white people refusing to give up power and backed by old white Rupes Murdoch and his media empire of brainwashing, plus the indifference/disengagement of plenty of voters, but...
At least it wouldn't be 25% of your population claiming that 90% of your population wants this.
--
The other thing that mandatory voting means is:
We're more at the mercy of the status quo than we are at the mercy of extremists. Which presents its own set of problems, but at least it's not all people who are "concerned" about "losing their way of life", by which they mean new people are coming by with new ideas and they feel threatened by it.
There's a high degree of voter disengagement in Australia - particularly among young people. It's only grown worse as the 'centre party' (Labor) has become more conservative, to the point where they're basically seen as 'Liberal (LNP/Conservative) Lite'. The Greens (more environmental, progressive, social justice oriented) take the social lefties, but economic rationalism and the influx of people from countries which don't traditionally have an emphasis on social justice mean Labor's struggling in the present political scenario. They should have won the state election easily, instead, they're way behind.
I saw an interesting point made by a friends husband or brother on Sunday when it was clear just how badly Labor was losing by, which I know many people reading this will disagree with: that when Labor cast aside the Christian core to their social justice - including the strong labor unions/right to have working rights of the 1st half/middle of the 20th Century from which Labor took their base - they didn't find anything with enough backbone to replace it. They didn't bother with Christian religiosity/dominance (which the conservative party did), and which is now seeing conservative Christians digging their heels into the conservative party in the same way that the GOP is reaping the benefit of the Dems abandoning a spiritual core to their social justice push. It's not a concept that many people are comfortable with - the idea that the God is not just a punitive God but a just one, whose outworkings may also include the implementation of human justice in this world as well as spiritual justice in the next, and that Christians should champion the rights of those with less power in this temporal world over those with more power in this temporal world - even if those with more power are ourselves.
Look, I never said that my faith is easy to undertake, let alone comfortable. It's a lot of challenging myself.
We have a federal election coming up next month and I'm questioning whether I'll do it again. It's a long day, and while the pay is good, it's not as good as what I get in the corporate job.
Also, I'm wondering if I wouldn't be more politically effective standing at the gates, handing out 'how to vote' leaflets at this location for the parties that don't traditionally do well with this electorate. Many of the people who turned up through this area are of Asian extract. They'd look at me as 'someone like them' and perhaps they'd consider voting differently to 'the traditional way'. The Mainstream Conservatives had people of Indian/Pakistani background handing out leaflets, the Heavy Conservatives/and the Racist Dogwhistle Party had white people handing out to white people. But both the people handing out leaflets for Labor (once Labor Unions now Conservatives Lite who are the only other party likely to be able to take power at a state or national level) and the Greens were both white, who were going to be less likely for Asian/subcontinental diaspora to think were interested in them.
My friend was handing out leaflets for the Greens, and she said that the vote improved by up to 5% when there was someone doing leaflets. I wonder if that would improve further in a region with cultural diaspora if one of the people handing out leaflets was of that cultural disapora.
An old schoolfriend who's been in the US for the last couple of weeks was talking about how she wanted to have a discussion around how the Labor Party and progressives could do better with each other and beat out the conservatives, if only they could leverage off each other instead of trying to tear each other down...
I wouldn't mind being in on that conversation.
--
The actual polling day was long.
We started a bit past 7am at the polling place, with an 8am opening. We closed the polls at 6pm, then spent the next 3 hours sorting and counting ballots. Our place was a small one - we opened around 1600 voting forms and didn't end up using them all. It was on the border of two electorates, though, so a lot of people had to be redirected to the 'absentee' ballot, even though they'd been told that they could vote for their electorate here...
We counted ballots until around 8pm, then spent an hour packing up the ballots for transfer to the local electoral office. We were out of the polling place at 9pm.
I have a friend who's the polling location manager in her electorate and apparently her staff didn't get out until 10:45pm and she only finished delivering stuff around 12:30am.
So, yeah, it's a LONG day...
--
Hockey game yesterday - Hornsby v Hornsby, largely the core of Team 1 + core of Team 2 with Team 3 scattered all through both. I was put on the field with the Team 2 lot, although they're still making decisions.
However, I'm starting to think I'd be very frustrated in Team 3 this year - unless they end up putting me in a position out of my comfort zone, and even then I'd still be frustrated. I did get paired with a lot of Team 2 players (as my inners/wing) yesterday, so that's relatively promising...
Ah well. I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks. Our first game is the 7th April...
--
After working the state election on Saturday, the conservatives got back into power. UGH. I don't like the conservative state leader, although I respect her acumen in keeping her head above water, but all her/her party's ideas are bad and purely capitalist/economically rationalist and they should be ashamed of them. Sure, they work for me, and I have enough money and agency that I can generally ignore the effects of them on me (or throw resources I have to deal with them), but they don't work for a SHITLOAD of other people.
Working the polling place (a small one - about 1600 voters) was good - I learned about how votes are counted, how to vote effectively, and also about the demographics of the sub-area and where I suspect less-conservative/progressive groups need to focus.
For those of you who don't know, Australia has mandatory voting - one of the few democracies in the world to do so. Yes, I know, 'enforced democracy' blah blah freeeeedoooom blah blah blah you've got DT as your presifuckindent so I'll take enforced democracy anyday myself...
Mandatory voting has its share of problems in terms of 'disengaged voters' and political cynicism but it means two things:
Since everyone has to vote, the process is made accessible and easy to undertake, including there being plenty of locations for voting (in urban/suburban areas, just about every local primary school is a voting location on election day), availability of postal votes, absentee voting (voting at a polling place which is outside your electorate), and ease of voting ID.
We ask for four details of voters: Name, address, birthdate, and whether they've already voted in today's election. They don't have to provide ID (although it helps rather than having to ask for name/address/birthdate), just those details.
The birthdate request is a recent change.
I explained that with it being common for adult children to continue living in the same household rather than starting their own, a birthdate would help ID whether it was John Smith junior or John Smith senior who was voting. (I am extremely good at finding a reasonable explanation for something, even if it's not the actual explanation.)
Most took the request well enough. A few commented on it but gave their birthdates anyway. The most pissed off people against it tended to be older women who felt that revealing their birthdates was offensive. I had a couple of slightly grumpy older woman who asked why but declared their birthdates in the end, but one of the other people marking off voters got a fifty-something woman who threw such a complete tantrum at having to give her date of birth that they had to call in the voting centre manager to deal with her.
The next two dozen or so people in the queue gave their birthdates quite meekly.
But there's no elaborate requirements for identification, and because you get a fine if you don't vote, everyone has an incentive to vote and not get put off by someone telling them, "you can't vote here/you're not authorised to vote/it's another day for voting". So voting levels are around 95%. Of course, some of those are "informal votes" or "donkey votes" but ultimately, the levels of actual, real, valid votes put in is 90%.
Can you imagine how different the world would look if more countries had 90% of their population voting?
Okay, so you might still be looking conservatism in the face, because hey, old white people refusing to give up power and backed by old white Rupes Murdoch and his media empire of brainwashing, plus the indifference/disengagement of plenty of voters, but...
At least it wouldn't be 25% of your population claiming that 90% of your population wants this.
--
The other thing that mandatory voting means is:
We're more at the mercy of the status quo than we are at the mercy of extremists. Which presents its own set of problems, but at least it's not all people who are "concerned" about "losing their way of life", by which they mean new people are coming by with new ideas and they feel threatened by it.
There's a high degree of voter disengagement in Australia - particularly among young people. It's only grown worse as the 'centre party' (Labor) has become more conservative, to the point where they're basically seen as 'Liberal (LNP/Conservative) Lite'. The Greens (more environmental, progressive, social justice oriented) take the social lefties, but economic rationalism and the influx of people from countries which don't traditionally have an emphasis on social justice mean Labor's struggling in the present political scenario. They should have won the state election easily, instead, they're way behind.
I saw an interesting point made by a friends husband or brother on Sunday when it was clear just how badly Labor was losing by, which I know many people reading this will disagree with: that when Labor cast aside the Christian core to their social justice - including the strong labor unions/right to have working rights of the 1st half/middle of the 20th Century from which Labor took their base - they didn't find anything with enough backbone to replace it. They didn't bother with Christian religiosity/dominance (which the conservative party did), and which is now seeing conservative Christians digging their heels into the conservative party in the same way that the GOP is reaping the benefit of the Dems abandoning a spiritual core to their social justice push. It's not a concept that many people are comfortable with - the idea that the God is not just a punitive God but a just one, whose outworkings may also include the implementation of human justice in this world as well as spiritual justice in the next, and that Christians should champion the rights of those with less power in this temporal world over those with more power in this temporal world - even if those with more power are ourselves.
Look, I never said that my faith is easy to undertake, let alone comfortable. It's a lot of challenging myself.
We have a federal election coming up next month and I'm questioning whether I'll do it again. It's a long day, and while the pay is good, it's not as good as what I get in the corporate job.
Also, I'm wondering if I wouldn't be more politically effective standing at the gates, handing out 'how to vote' leaflets at this location for the parties that don't traditionally do well with this electorate. Many of the people who turned up through this area are of Asian extract. They'd look at me as 'someone like them' and perhaps they'd consider voting differently to 'the traditional way'. The Mainstream Conservatives had people of Indian/Pakistani background handing out leaflets, the Heavy Conservatives/and the Racist Dogwhistle Party had white people handing out to white people. But both the people handing out leaflets for Labor (once Labor Unions now Conservatives Lite who are the only other party likely to be able to take power at a state or national level) and the Greens were both white, who were going to be less likely for Asian/subcontinental diaspora to think were interested in them.
My friend was handing out leaflets for the Greens, and she said that the vote improved by up to 5% when there was someone doing leaflets. I wonder if that would improve further in a region with cultural diaspora if one of the people handing out leaflets was of that cultural disapora.
An old schoolfriend who's been in the US for the last couple of weeks was talking about how she wanted to have a discussion around how the Labor Party and progressives could do better with each other and beat out the conservatives, if only they could leverage off each other instead of trying to tear each other down...
I wouldn't mind being in on that conversation.
--
The actual polling day was long.
We started a bit past 7am at the polling place, with an 8am opening. We closed the polls at 6pm, then spent the next 3 hours sorting and counting ballots. Our place was a small one - we opened around 1600 voting forms and didn't end up using them all. It was on the border of two electorates, though, so a lot of people had to be redirected to the 'absentee' ballot, even though they'd been told that they could vote for their electorate here...
We counted ballots until around 8pm, then spent an hour packing up the ballots for transfer to the local electoral office. We were out of the polling place at 9pm.
I have a friend who's the polling location manager in her electorate and apparently her staff didn't get out until 10:45pm and she only finished delivering stuff around 12:30am.
So, yeah, it's a LONG day...
--
Hockey game yesterday - Hornsby v Hornsby, largely the core of Team 1 + core of Team 2 with Team 3 scattered all through both. I was put on the field with the Team 2 lot, although they're still making decisions.
However, I'm starting to think I'd be very frustrated in Team 3 this year - unless they end up putting me in a position out of my comfort zone, and even then I'd still be frustrated. I did get paired with a lot of Team 2 players (as my inners/wing) yesterday, so that's relatively promising...
Ah well. I guess we'll find out in a couple of weeks. Our first game is the 7th April...