There are not many events that flush all of us out from our homes and our holidays – that break up our routine, that connect people from different walks of life, religion and social class who just happen to share the same electorate.
There are great national gatherings – the Melbourne Cup, or huddled around a giant screen erected in town squares during the Sydney Olympics – but only one thing can really compel us to gather together, and that is a federal election. So many of us are self-selecting, and the groups we are a part of – on social media and in real life – are mirrors of us ourselves. But electorates often cross class and race lines, and every three years we can get a proper look at what each other looks like, of who we are, when we are forced to gather between the hours of 8am and 6pm in the local primary school. These are our neighbours.
In Sydney’s Newtown, at the Australia Street infants school, was a man with a ferret on a leash, and a woman wearing a Donald Trump trucker cap – non-ironically – that said “Make America Great Again”.
The scene a few kilometres away at Bondi, in the prime minister’s ritzy electorate of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, was a shock.
The Bondi Markets, normally a place beyond parody of chai tents and gourmet paleo dog biscuit treats, suddenly looks different when it doubles as a polling place. The hungover yogis in athleisure gear were for the first time on a Saturday morning outnumbered by “normals” – people wearing dad jeans and chinos with sneakers. Then there was the man in a nautical jacket strolling through the grounds of the primary school smoking a pipe. Only on election day could you smoke in a primary school.
How we look is not necessarily who we are. The man handing out Liberal party how-to-vote cards for Malcolm Turnbull was an Indigenous guy wearing combat trousers. The guy handing out for Labor was wearing a boater and an ironed T-shirt.
There was a woman, who looked close to 100, stooped over double, taken by a helper through the markets. At the kombucha stand, the crowds parted for her as if she was carrying food made from carbs. The queues were horrendous but no one minded when she cut in and went right to the front.
The kombucha crew talked about her with something approaching awe: “Did you see that really old woman?”
Yeah, old people do still live in Bondi.
In Willoughby, on Sydney’s high-income North Shore, soccer mums and grannies were handing out cards for GetUp. Not a political party but the left-leaning activist group GetUp.
“I really care about direct activism and moving away from the main parties,” said Sue Ludder, a North Shore resident who was handing out materials for the group.
This is not an angry election. You see it most closely at polling booths where the troops on the ground handing out voting cards operate like mini flash mobs, enveloping voters before they enter.
They are comrades of sort. The weather is cold. The work is boring. There are peaks and lulls, and some people barrel past you like you’re not even there.
So the volunteers talk among themselves. “Mostly about policy, we’re talking about policy,” said one campaigner who was handing out for the Arts party.
The presence of GetUp and independents in the conservative Liberal stronghold of Willoughby dwarfed Labor (when we were there at 8:30am, there was not a single Labor volunteer at the polling place).
The most gregarious of the volunteers were Luke Freeman and Russell Webber from the Cyclists party.
“Most people just barrel past us but some people stop for a chat, which is good,” Freeman said.
Webber didn’t like his party being associated with Tony Abbott, who is the politician most people associate with cycling.
“He’s done nothing for cyclists! Plus he always cycles with heaps of security and has people with him.”
Freeman was wearing one cycling glove. “Is that the look your party are going for?” I asked. “No, my hands are cold,” he said.
At Willoughby, the party spruikers resembled a genteel discussion group, with different parties taking it in turns to do coffee runs from the cafe across the road. If the English political system is powered by tea, in Australia it’s lattes.
Not that any of the volunteers had given up the fight. If ever an election felt like hand-selling – each vote won from hard graft – it’s at this point. This is suburban, bloodless democracy in action.
“This has been a really boring election,” said one of the helpers at the cake stall. “But thank God. When you look at what’s going on in the world, all the anger.”
My Uber driver, a semi-retired textile merchant in a Jeep Chrysler (rating 4.9) drove me across the Harbour Bridge from a polling booth on the North Shore to one in the trendy – but more culturally diverse – inner west. He loves Andrew Bolt and is a Liberal voter but his previous member, Joe Hockey, disgusted him: “That picture of him smoking a cigar, after he said that people who are poor don’t drive – that was terrible.”
People and communities are complex. We’re all a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The great thing that unites us in this great democratic exercise in queuing is the sausage. If you can’t bear to talk politics, you can talk food.
Marcel Tacuri voted in south-western Sydney at Hammondville primary.
“They have great sausages,” he said. “I asked them to do a double. I got two skinny sausages with onion and tomato sauce. It was very nice and hot – I don’t like it when the sausage is not hot – and only $4.”
His wife had recently had her cholesterol checked and was avoiding processed meats, “but had a little bit of the bread”.
Maybe she should have had a sausage in Newtown where former political staffer turned sausagemaker Chrissy Flanagan is selling sausages with the tagline “the meat is not the mystery”.
Guardian Australia had a $10 sausage from the breakfast menu. Bratwurst made from pork shoulder on a bed of charcoute (a French dish of sauerkraut, onions, juniper berries, mustard) with dill in white roll.
Australian democracy is not feral. The edges and electricity that British and American campaigns have touched in recent months have not been seen in the mainstream here.
We show up to vote, patiently and in large numbers. We are not angry, there are no assaults at polling booths, or conspiracy theories that the pens we use might be rubbed out by corrupt officials. Australian democracy is gentle and steeped in homely ritual. We like lattes and sausages and cake stalls. We’ll turn out and volunteer for a party that supports causes we’re passionate about (Guardian Australia spoke to many first-time volunteers who were supporting single issue campaigns, including the Science party and the Arts party).
We’ll marvel at the people we see and meet in the queues at the polling station, and maybe for a short while see our communities in a different light, as neighbours who could become friends.
