Parliamentary Union (Atkin 1969). Travelling in rural seats to polling booths
could be arduous, and potential voters would demand various forms of assist-
ance from candidates. And, as political scientists stress, political engagement
is typically weaker in the hinterland than in the city. It is not surprising that
the National Party remains in favour of compulsory voting; and psephological
studies predict it would be significantly damaged without it (Jackman 1999;
Chong et al. 2006). In any case, Labor in 1914 was diffident about the new
law, and its unconcern proved justified; Labor romped home in the election
of 22 May 1915. Federal Labor smartly adopted compulsory voting for
its ‘General Platform’, and legislated to compel voting in constitutional
referendums.
But it was not under Labor that compulsory voting in federal elections was
instituted. It was brought about in 1924 under a Nationalist-Country party
government, by means of a Private Members’Bill, which was passed after a
brief debate in which only back-benchers spoke (Gow 1971). This truly furtive
introduction of compulsory voting at the national level makes its motivation
harder to gauge than if the legislation was both resisted and championed. But
the very fact of its bipartisan support speaks clearly enough. Compulsory
voting will appeal to slumping political parties, as much as‘compulsory
buying’will appeal to slumping businesses. And both of the larger parties
had slumped in the preceding election: Labor votes fell from 811,244 in 1919
to 665,145 in 1922; the Nationalist Party from 860,519 in 1919 to 553,920 in
- Parties were henceforth relieved of‘getting out the vote’, and even the
Liberal Party (or at least its organizational structure) remains in favour of
compulsory voting. A further common interest in both major parties with
regard to compulsory voting arises from the possibility of it reducing the size
of the typical swing, and the consequent reduced uncertainty about the haul
of seats: this will occur if each party has a certain bloc of voters who, whenever
disappointed with‘their’party, will not vote at all if allowed to not vote, but
will never switch to the other party if forced to vote. (For empirical evidence
see Andrews, Fry, and Jakee 2005.)
And yet it would be wrong to depict compulsory voting merely as an
expedient response to post-war circumstances. In 1905, Prime Minister
Deakin, with the crushing defeat of his Protectionist Party in 1906 perhaps
already apparent, avowed compulsory voting would serve‘as a great safety
valve’for Protectionists and Labor (Reid and Forrest 1989). By 1914 the
legislatures of the Commonwealth and all states but NSW had considered
compulsory voting bills. Indeed, there had been numerous enactments of
compulsion across the world (John and DeBats 2014), reflecting a mood rather
than any partisan calculation. The mood was Progressivism. Thus, a classic
Progressivist politician such as Franklin Knight Lane—appointed by Theodore
Roosevelt to the Interstate Commerce Commission and Woodrow Wilson as
Australia’s Electoral Idiosyncrasies