Is anyone still voting?

Shock, horror. People are refusing to vote. With only ten days left for voting, not even 5% of Wellingtonians have voted in the local body elections, Radio NZ reports.  

How can that be? asks the inquisitive reporter and seeks answers from an academic instead of looking at the voting papers themselves, because that is what they learnt to do at journalism school. And the academic from AUT comes up with some excuses – the Queen’s death has confused people to a degree that they forget what a Mayor is and the long weekend has disrupted people’s routine. Local body politicians continue the series: people forget to empty their letter boxes or there aren’t enough post boxes to put the completed voting papers in. Or it is the fault of the people who do vote. That particular argument goes something like this: the voters are mostly older people who are homeowners, therefore candidates pitch their campaign at older homeowners, therefore young people feel there is nothing for them, therefore they don’t vote. So somehow those who do vote are the reason why others don't vote.

No theory is too bizarre when it helps avoid the elephant in the room: there is a complete absence of ideas, resulting in no choice at all. Wellington may be an extreme case, but the three front runners for the Mayoralty have spent so many hours in various ‘debates’ agreeing with each other that most people will feel that it really doesn’t matter who gets in. They all promise to fix infrastructure, pay lip service to fighting climate change and improving public transport, and are worried about housing. Everyone knows that nothing will change no matter who wins.

Not even the outlier candidates offer an alternative. One is an anti-vaxxer, another wants to build a six-lane highway underneath the entire city, the rest of them are ‘common sense’ pro-business neo-liberals who think the market will fix everything. The most hotly debated topic was predictably the building or not building of another hundred meters of cycle lanes. Yawn.

I don’t know if I am getting cynical, but it seems that this time around it is worse than ever. Local body candidates have always had a habit of asking for votes on the basis of how many years they have lived in the area and that they “love this city”. But didn’t some of them sometimes offer a glimmer of ideas or policies?

We just had months of climate change-induced disasters, yet out of the 30 mayoral, city council and regional council candidates in my booklet there is one (1!) who proposes anything concrete - to include emissions from the airport in the carbon calculations (they are currently not counted because most of the CO2 is emitted outside of Wellington). The others remain silent about what exactly they think should be done.

There is of course an argument for negative voting. Instead of voting for someone you agree with (because there isn’t one) you should vote for the lesser evil in order to keep the climate change deniers, the anti-vaxxers and Aaron Gilmour out. It is sad that one now feels compelled to vote for that reason alone.

Peppertree