Rudman's city: Only compulsory voting will get Labour seats on councils

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Local Government Minister Sandra Lee has had the ritual growl about poor turnout that people in her office have to perform after each local election. She has also come up with a possible solution, a system called single transferable vote.

Somehow, I think not. Whatever the merits of the STV method, I rather doubt that attracting new voters is one of them. One of the great turn-offs of the present system of local elections is being confronted with a long list of people about whom you know very little. STV would only increase the intimidation.

To be told that to cast a valid vote you now have to rate these candidates, about whom you know very little, in order of preference from one to infinity, is hardly going to encourage the poll-shy to join in the democratic process.

Even someone like myself, who for job reasons has the opportunity to be better acquainted than most with the city's aspiring politicians, baulked at the list of unknowns standing for the Auckland District Health Board this time round. I ended up picking just one, and that for no other reason than I knew the family name. To have had to rank them all would have been a farce, not a democratic process.

Of course the simple solution to the low-turnout problem is to adopt the widespread Australian practice of compulsory voting.

The Australians adopted it for parliamentary elections after a 1922 election turnout of 57.9 per cent. The improvement was dramatic. In 1925, 91.3 per cent of those eligible voted and turnout has averaged 95 per cent ever since.

In local government elections the rules vary - and so does voting behaviour. Queensland and New South Wales, with compulsory systems, average 85 to 95 per cent compliance. In South Australia, where voting is voluntary, it is a different picture. In 1995, just 17 per cent bothered to vote.

Alongside the South Australian record, last weekend's New Zealand average turnout of 47.8 per cent doesn't seem so bad.

But the average figure disguises a wide spread of voting behaviour, ranging from a low of 34.3 per cent in Manukau City through to a high of 76.6 per cent in the Chatham Islands. The figures I'm using are based on election night valid votes and parallel past patterns of local voting.

They show the trend for the poor and for Labour areas to be less likely to vote. They also show how local provincial communities, particularly in the South Island and presumably more connected to local affairs and politicians than we in the big smoke, are much more involved.

Buller, Grey, Banks Peninsula, Waimate, Central Otago, Queenstown-Lakes, Gore all had more than 70 per cent voter turnouts.

The under 50 per cents are a phenomenon of North Island cities and towns and anywhere north of Franklin District, with its 45.6 per cent. Auckland City did rather better than its neighbours at 42.2 per cent, with North Shore and Waitakere both around 37 per cent and Manukau even less.

Within Auckland City the vote varied widely, from 60.5 per cent for the mayoralty in the Hauraki Gulf Islands down to just 35.98 per cent in the Tamaki-Maungakiekie ward.

What to do? The last change in voting practices was imposed by the Government before the 1986 local elections. Cities such as Auckland were made to abandon the at-large system and to introduce wards. Postal voting was also introduced. The impact was immediate.

Over the four polls between 1974 and 1983, voter turnout had dropped in Auckland City from 43.7 per cent to 30.4 per cent. In 1986, thanks to postal voting and the ward system, turnout nearly doubled to 59.8 per cent. Three years later it dropped to 44 per cent. In the 1998 election it was up again to 51.4 per cent.

Auckland City's chief electoral officer, Dale Ofsoske, ascribes last week's poor turnout to a multitude of calamities - natural and otherwise. The terrorist attacks on New York and subsequent Afghanistan invasion, the Air New Zealand crisis, the school holidays and even the excellent weather get a mention. The big and obvious one he avoids is voter apathy.

There are those who try to put a positive slant on non-voting by arguing that it is in effect a vote against the system. But most non-voting, I suspect, is of the passive, couldn't-be-bothered variety. When more than half the potential voters just chuck the ballot papers out with the junk mail it is a worry.

Compulsory voting is the obvious solution but I can't see the present Government introducing it for fear of a backlash against all things compulsory. The irony is that it is the one certain way of getting Labour voters - the slackers when it comes to local elections - into the polling booths and on to local councils.