packet of cigarettes. And how many absentees pay thefine? Sunday news-
papers entertain their readers with reports of the ludicrous excuses of
absentees accepted by electoral commissions. Indeed, how many citizens are
enrolled? Alternatively, an entirely different explanation would be that com-
pulsory voting has become an almost pleasant ritual into which Australians
have been successfully habituated.
Perhaps these explanations of the public’s complaisance miss something.
Church attendance was once compulsory in Australia, following the letter of
English laws from Elizabethan times. Compelling church attendance could
only ever be effectively pursued in an essentially religious society, and was
soon abandoned. Australians are commonly described as unreligious, but they
have a faith in the political. Perhaps they trail to the booth on account of that
faith.
8.5 The National Party
The enduring strength of a rural-based party in Australia—the National
Party—has been rightly judged‘unique’(Costar and Woodward 1985, p. 2).
Other developed countries have had rural-based parties, but none continued
to prosper into the second post-war generation. In the 1920s‘farmers’parties’
burgeoned in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, but in the post 1945
period all discarded their rural identity, adopted Centre Party monikers, and,
in some cases, underwent total ideological metamorphoses. In 1920s Canada,
a United Farmers Party reigned in some provinces, and the Progressive Party
had some successes at the federal level. But these elements ultimately sub-
sumed themselves within the Conservative Party, the Liberal Party, or the
New Democratic Party. In New Zealand a small Country Party existed from
1925 to 1935 before disappearing.
But Australia’s National Party endures. It and its earlier incarnations
(the Country Party, and the National Country Party) have provided one of
Australia’s prime ministers, and seven of her sixteen deputy prime ministers.
The party has, in the past, secured the premiership of Australia’s most indus-
trialized state; has ruled in its own right in the fastest-growing state; and on
occasion has won more seats than the Liberal Party in the largest state. Its
share of the vote has fallen significantly since the 1980s. But in spite of the
massive contraction of the relative importance of primary industries (from
about 25 per cent of gross domestic product in the years of the party’s origin to
only 2.5 per cent in 2013/14) one tenth of MPs elected to the 2013 House of
Representatives caucused with the National Party.
This persistence belies no loss of identity. Bitter electoral contests with the
Liberal Party continue at the national, state, and local level; in the hung
Australia’s Electoral Idiosyncrasies