Labour of love
Remember the first time? That moment when your adulthood was more than a licence to drive and a drive to get drunk—it was when you first became visible as a citizen. You were no longer someone’s son or daughter but a constituent—a politician’s friend or foe. You had a voice and a responsibility to make it heard. You had a passion and belief in democracy; informed decision-making based on lifestyle—an end to terrorism, lower HECS fees, and less red meat—then six weeks of sifting through the rhetoric to find after all the ballot papers had been tallied the bewildering truth … nothing’s changed. Broken-hearted, one such 18-year-old was heard to say: ‘I feel like such a jackass, next time I’ll just donkey vote’.
Papier mâché
While both parties promised to save the world, if not the forests, little attention was paid to the environmental cost of the election itself. In preparation for polling day, the Australian Electoral Commission utilised 45,500 ballot boxes, 155,800 voting screens and 13,900 recycling bins. The cardboard castles of October 9 comprised some 525 tonnes of cardboard.
The AEC informed Eureka Street that prior to the 2004 Federal Election, all polling booths were returned to a central AEC storage for possible reuse. This year, things are different. Any booth that has been used will be sent to a recycling plant. Unused booths will be stored for future use.
In metropolitan areas, an AEC truck will take the material to be recycled to a local depot. In regional and remote areas it is the responsibility of the Divisional Returning Officer. The officer is instructed to dispose of any used material ‘sensitively and locally’. This may mean that it is taken to a local recycling plant, or distributed to local playgroups or schools, where the booths may indeed become cardboard castles in a school play.
Eureka Street is also looking into figures for the numbers of sausages sizzled on the day. In addition to sausages we expect to find massive expenditure on pork rolls and pork chops given the pork barrelling of the preceding weeks.
One liners
When Samuel Beckett was once asked to write the lyrics for an opera, he offered a one-line libretto for the soprano: ‘I do not want to sing tonight’. At election time, he might be asked to write the same script for other professions: speech writers, for example, economists, and political commentators. And no doubt, caught