The Australian Federal Election is this weekend.<\/p>\n
Let me tell you who I won’t<\/em> be giving my first preference to in the Lower House this election.<\/p>\n I won’t be voting for Labor. Let me explain why.<\/p>\n I will probably never meet my local representative during this term. Who I will meet, over and over again, are the people who represent them; the people who they directly appoint; the people who are appointed by the systems those people put in place; the people who are appointed by the systems that those people put in place, and so on.<\/p>\n Do the politicians’ political leanings, pleasant demeanor or nice hair really impact me nearly as much as the feedback systems that they are capable of installing to ensure that the civil and public servants that I do deal with are competent, effective and compassionate?<\/p>\n How can I judge a candidate on these leadership skills? It is hard.<\/p>\n One way is to look at the behaviour of their volunteers. After all, if candidates are unable to instill the values of respect for the public, integrity and responsibility for their actions in the minds of their biggest fans – the volunteers – then how can I expect them to instill those values in the general population of the public service?<\/p>\n Now to the crux of the test. I have a sign on my letter box. It requests that I only receive addressed mail. It doesn’t use disparaging terms like “junk mail”. It is polite, and says “please”.<\/p>\n Yet, I repeatedly<\/em> received junk mail from each of the above parties.<\/p>\n I don’t want to hear sophistry rationalising why election material isn’t really “junk”; not only do I not use the term on my letter box, I want to support a party that is capable of considering the perspectives of others. There can be many legitimate reasons why I don’t want to receive such mail; I shoudn’t have to remonstrate; my wishes should simply be respected.<\/p>\n I am not complaining here about the copious quantity of posted election material I received. (The Liberal Party encumbent was responsible for the vast majority of that, but I didn’t track it as carefully this campaign.) I have at least some<\/em> defence against that; I can have posted mail redirected, or request that I be removed from the mailing list.<\/p>\n Maybe I am grumbling over something that seems petty. The stake here – my first preference vote – isn’t worth a lot in any case.<\/p>\n However, I simply don’t want to vote for a candidate that can’t even persuade their volunteers to think for a second about respecting the clearly explained wishes of the public. If their systems aren’t respectful of the public when their nearby staff are merely dropping off leaflets in the neighbourhood, I cannot trust them to have systems ready to run a government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I won’t be voting for Labor. Let me explain why.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[24,29,27],"tags":[181,183,182,98,180,179],"class_list":["post-447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cathartic-rant","category-influencing-others","category-thoughts-from-the-shower","tag-elections","tag-junk-mail","tag-management","tag-politics","tag-rant","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nI won’t be voting for Liberal.
\nI won’t be voting for the Christian Democratic Party.
\nI won’t be voting for The Greens.<\/p>\n
\nI won’t be voting for Liberal.
\nI won’t be voting for the Christian Democratic Party.
\nI won’t be voting for The Greens.<\/p>\n