..so, you line up for the democracy sausage*, cast a vote out of obligation, and call it civic duty. 

Democracy: now with onions... and mild despair.

I’m standing in line at a school I’ve never entered before, waiting to perform an act that is at once sacred and procedural. A nod to freedom and a quiet test of endurance. Everyone's polite. The kind of moment that makes you vaguely proud to be Australian, even if you’re not sure what you’re proud of…

There’s a guy a few places behind me, trying to be funny, but mostly just loud. He cracks jokes, too many, too often. At one point, he says, “They’re all the effing same anyway,” and a few people laugh. Not because it’s clever, but because it’s easier than disagreeing.

And maybe he’s voicing what most are thinking, or at least feeling. That this whole thing is pointless. That we’re here to tick the boxes, literally and metaphorically, while trying not to think too hard about it. We’re voting, sure. But are we choosing?

Inside the gym, it's brightly lit and echoey. Fluorescent lights reflect off the polished floors, but not the overabundance of cardboard. It's ordinary. Familiar. The kind of space you walk through without wanting to be noticed…

The AEC volunteers smile the kind of smile you only get from eight hours of civil obligation. They’re all dressed in AEC purple. A calculated neutrality, or so it claims. But it’s hard not to notice that it’s also a visual blend of red and blue. A soft-spoken nod to the two major parties, mixed down into something inoffensive. It says balance. It whispers: nothing will change too much.

I take my two sheets and move to the booth.

House of Reps? Easy. I voted 1 for my first preference, and gave the lowest number to my least preferred, then backfill from least liked. A small act of alignment.

Next. Senate? God help us…

The paper unfolds like a picnic blanket. Thirty-nine parties. A smattering of independents. At the top: "Number at least 6 boxes above the line."

At least.

It sounds like freedom. Like choice. But it’s really a funnel…

The way it’s worded creates a psychological floor. This change came in under Malcolm Turnbull’s government in 2016. Sold as a reform to give voters more control, it replaced the old Group Voting Tickets (GVTs) which often sent preferences spiraling off in odd directions. But what replaced it wasn’t exactly liberation. It just moved the manipulation up the chain from the parties to the ballot design itself.

And for most people, that floor becomes the ceiling. They pick six and stop. It feels safe. Efficient. Like they’ve done their civic salute.

But who are those six?

Not the fringe candidates who actually match their values. Not the micro-parties you haven’t had time to research. No, almost always, the major players get the top slots. Out of habit. Out of brand recognition. Out of fear that voting differently might mean wasting a vote.

This is how the duopoly perpetuates itself. Not just through policy or advertising, but through subtle emotional engineering. Through ballot design. Through the pressure of the queue behind you. Through the whispered mantra: at least six.

So you scan. You spot a name you know. You number them early. Maybe one you hate gets a six, just to fill the quota.

But here’s the trick: everything you didn’t number? That’s treated as less preferred than your six. Even if you hate them more. Even if you didn’t mean to elevate them. The system fills the gap with your silence.

It’s not rigged (sorry, Australian Magadonians!). It’s worse than that. It’s quietly coercive.

That’s the real ritual of Australian democracy. You walk in with intentions. You leave having contributed to the very thing you were trying to resist…

This election wasn’t just about housing or climate or cost-of-living, not directly. 

For me, it was about tone…

Peter Dutton, for all his hardline positions, seems like a remarkably quiet man. He may be stoic, controlled. He seems rarely to raise his voice, we may never know. His power comes not from bluster, but from restraint. A kind of steely stillness that dares you to flinch first. Very Queensland cop…

Albanese, by contrast, is the one with emotional cadence. He leans into his vowels. He lets his pitch rise. Sometimes he quips, sometimes he gets rattled. He fumbles and recovers with human flourishes.

It’s easy to mistake Dutton’s calm for authority, and Albo’s animation for volatility. But in this campaign, it wasn’t about who shouted. It was about who signalled stability. And the deeper irony? It was Albanese’s openness, his choice to de-escalate, not perform dominance, that came off as steadier.

Even when Dutton lost, like really lost, seat and all, Albanese didn’t gloat. When the crowd heckled Dutton’s name during the victory speech, Albo asked them to stop. He modelled something different.

That mattered…

And then there was The Voice.

Even after the referendum had come and gone, Dutton kept it alive, dangling it in front of the media, warning that Labor might sneak it back in through the side door. There was no plan for that. But it didn’t matter. It played well. It kept the culture war simmering. It gave him something to punch at. And maybe more than anything, it gave him cover.

Because the tactic wasn’t new. It was classic strongman projection. Raise the alarm about trust, secrecy, backroom deals… while quietly stepping around your own.

Just days before the election, the ABC aired True Colours, a Four Corners investigation into Dutton’s financial dealings. It showed he’d failed to disclose his interest in his family trust, home to a web of childcare businesses that raked in close to $15 million over two decades. All while he was in cabinet. Along with a suspiciously timed sale just before the 2022 election.

It didn’t make a splash. But I reckon it left a stain…

Because when you spend your time warning the public about secret agendas, while quietly running one of your own…that catches up with you. Not always loudly. But it lingers.

Because this was a test. Not just of policies, but of tone. And voters, perhaps for the first time in a long while, chose a steadier hand. Not the one who stayed quiet, but the one who didn’t reach for the strongman mask every time things got serious.

Tone isn’t window dressing. It’s a signal. A primer for the kind of society a leader hopes to shape. And in that moment, when Dutton lost and Albanese didn’t gloat, maybe something subtle shifted…

So what happens when kindness becomes a mandate?

That’s a word that floated beneath this election. Sometimes spoken. Sometimes implied. 

Kindness. 

It wasn’t a slogan. It wasn’t plastered on flyers. But it was there. A kind of ambient message, humming underneath…

Albanese and his team leaned into it, not as policy, but as posture. An idea that leadership didn’t have to punch. That you could steer a country without needing to compare it.

Of course, it’s easy to mock. In politics, kindness is often treated like naivety with better PR. You bring it up and people roll their eyes. As if it’s a weakness. As if it’s a costume.

But the thing is, most of us want it. We might not say it out loud, but we feel it when it’s missing. We see what happens when cruelty becomes a currency. When every debate becomes a cage match. When fear is used like flypaper to keep us stuck…

Kindness isn’t perfection. Albanese isn’t perfect. He can be prickly. A bit dismissive. He tells people to just calm down, sometimes when they’re asking fair questions. But he doesn’t punch down. He doesn’t need to define himself by what he’s against. And maybe that’s what leadership looks like now, not flawless, but restrained.

We project our hopes onto that word…kindness. We want it to fix things. To clean up the mess left by people who couldn’t lead without swinging.

But it’s not magic. It’s just a choice. A tone. A repeated decision not to escalate…

And sometimes it misses. Sometimes it’s thin. But when it lands, when it holds the room instead of dominating it, it matters.

We all have potential stones to cast. Maybe what we’re really asking of our leaders is this: be the one who holds the stones, don’t throw ‘em.

It’s easy to think of elections as tests for politicians. For parties. For policies…

But they’re also tests for us. For our attention spans. For our values. For how much complexity we’re willing to carry before we default to habit.

After I’d voted, a guy came out just ahead of me, muttering to his partner, “What a load of shit that was.” Not angry, probably just sick of it all. Like he wanted it over with before it even began. My sense was: politics is a nuisance to him. A distraction from the footy. A brief detour between headlines. The kind of guy who gets his takes from the front page of The Advertiser and calls it balance…

Another guy, louder, was giving the AEC worker a bit of a hard time. “So, you get paid to tell us to join the line all day hey?” He grinned as he said it, like he’d just invented satire. The worker smiled back, gently, like someone used to taking hits that aren’t really jokes.

These weren’t villains. Just voters. Like the rest of us. Tired. Distracted. A little defensive about not knowing more. A little ashamed to care too much…

Because caring takes effort. And effort feels expensive these days.

Voting isn’t just about who we want in power. It’s about who we’re willing to overlook. Who we’re willing to sideline. Who we decide is “close enough.”

Most of us vote under time pressure. Emotional pressure. Peer pressure. With half an eye on the queue behind us and half a heart still unsure…

And that’s okay. No one gets it perfect. But it’s worth asking: what kind of citizen do we become when we treat our vote like a chore?

Because maybe the real question isn’t “who won?” but “what did we just co-sign?”

You don’t get feedback when you vote…

There’s no sound effect. No score. No narrator saying, “Nice work, democracy complete.” You fold your paper, slide it into a box, and walk away. Alone.

Which is maybe the point…

Voting isn’t a moment of applause. It’s a private thing. You enter with assumptions and leave with none of them tested. You don’t know if it mattered. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

But you did it. You stood in a queue. You made decisions. You carried the weight of all you didn’t know, and still showed up…

And that’s something.

Even if it felt thin. Even if it didn’t fix anything. Even if your vote was drowned in a sea of others. You were there. You acted. You tried.

And if there’s any hope in all this, any real, grown-up, hard-won hope, it’s that the next time we vote, we might do so with slightly clearer eyes…

Not because we believe it’ll change everything. But because it just might shape something…

Even if all it shapes is us… and maybe next time, when we line up again, pencil in hand, sausage in the other, that’s the only question that matters: not which party deserves our vote, but which one best reflects the kind of kindness we want to see.

Or maybe we just have mustard next time.