The Nick Minchin-John Howard experiment has failed.
The vote for the constitutional convention was shamefully reduced to a bureaucractic function. It was like geting a new electricity connection or telling the bank you have changed your address.
I didn’t feel I was exercising my right to vote. My idea of exercising the right to vote means going to the local primary school — a public place — seeing other members of the public there, looking at how-to-vote cards and then being handed a ballot paper while others around are doing the same thing. In other words, it is a public expresion of a private right.
That way you get a sense of community, a sense of “”demos” about democracy. There is a sense of excitement and exercise about that.
Then there is the result. In a normal ballot, we all vote at once and the count (or least the bulk of it) is done that night. It is a snapshot, a statement of democracy. The people have spoken. The results go up that night on a huge board broadcast to the public at large. There is drama and excitement. It is the drama of democracy. I want to see the results posted on a great, big public whiteboard.
The penny-pinching Minchin-Howard system was quite the opposite. Such as system is fine and efficient for deciding the board members of the XYZ Club or the secretaryship of a union, but not as an expression of the public will.
It lacks a sense of unifying, contemporaneous public statement.
and statemwetn made together./
dribble of post… junk mail
My idea of exercising the right to vote …privary schools others..,.,
This a private expression and the right wa made mroe public by demaninf signature