It feels like quite unfortunate timing that my stint hosting @IndigenousX should coincide with the federal election finally being called.
I’m a Torres Strait Islander woman, who has lived and worked on Wurundjeri territory all my adult life. Despite holding a PhD in political science, and despite being employed as a lecturer in political science, I’m actually deeply uninterested in electoral politics.
My interest in politics is very much focused upon children. And, of course, children can’t vote. This is so even though they are very much affected by the decisions of politicians and policy makers every day.
The social and political theorist Nikolas Rose once wrote that childhood is the “most intensively governed sector of personal existence”. This is true for all children. And, we know that it is especially true for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children.
So, to me, electoral politics and election campaigns often feel like distraction from the real issues. Sometimes children feature heavily (very rarely Indigenous children), as was the case in the 2001 election after the “children overboard” affair. But just as often they disappear into the rhetoric of “working families” or “Australian values”.
I have little patience for it. In every election, so much is at stake for children. But we are not well practised at holding governments accountable for the effects their policies and decisions have, for better or for worse, on children’s lives. And elections can wield real, deliberate harm on communities, just as we saw in last year’s Victorian election.
To say that I don’t like election time is quite the understatement.
As just one of the 649,173 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders who were counted in the 2016 census , of whom more than a third are too young to vote, my vote seems to count for very little. Indeed, our vote, as First Nations people, counts for nothing as we are only able to represented as individuals. Even as individuals, we are not necessarily being asked to vote on the questions and issues that matter to us. Because 3.3% of a nation’s population are not in a good position to set the terms of debate in the first place.
The median age of Indigenous Australians is 23. The median age of Australians as a whole population is 38. That’s a huge difference of 15 years. That means that a much higher proportion of our population is below voting age than non-Indigenous Australians.
With shortened life expectancy, we also have, on average, fewer elections to vote in. And while we have been eligible to vote for decades, we have only been compulsorily enfranchised since 1984. It is in this context that we should understand the fact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are both less likely to be enrolled to vote and less likely to turn out. The 2016 federal election had the lowest voter turnout since compulsory voting was legislated in 1925, at 91%. And while estimating Indigenous voter turnout is difficult (there is no Indigenous identifier on either the electoral roll or, obviously, on our casted votes), in 2016 the Australian Electoral Commission suggested it was 52%.
And I understand why. Because there’s not an insignificant part of me that thinks of the Australian state as little more than the conjuring of white imagination. The other part of me knows that it is more than that: because I feel its power and effects every day. We can, in various ways, refuse to engage and turn away from the state, and we can contest its legitimacy on our land. Still, the state holds power that compels our engagement regardless: when we buy groceries, turn up to school or get sick.
Australian representative democracy cannot represent me in its current form. I am not a part of the constitutive foundation of the commonwealth of Australia. I am its loose thread. In this context, voting is not the privilege we are lectured about in classrooms but an indignity that has us choose between the lesser of racists. I feel this way even having studied, taught and written about politics in Australia for all my adult life.
There are a lot of reasons not to vote. But I’m going to tell you why I do, and why I think you should too.
My own reason is that as a child I felt deserving of a vote. I thought I should count. And I was excluded for so long. First, for six decades and then for 18 years more. On election day I turn up and I vote, because no one can stop me.
Every single day I turn up: I turn up to my work and to this country, uncomfortable, fraught and impossible as it is. I turn up to its children and to the lands and seas I hold in trust. I turn up so no one can tell me that my lack of interest is apathy. I turn up to complexity and grief and anger. I turn up when I’m meant to be playing silly games with my kids on holiday.
I turn up because, if I don’t, the racists have already won.
And you should too.
The electoral roll closes at 8pm on Thursday 18 April. You can enrol, check your enrolment or update your details at www.aec.gov.au.
• Trained as a lawyer and political theorist, Dr Sana Nakata is a lecturer in political science, an ARC Discovery Indigenous research fellow and co-director of Indigenous-Settler Relations Collaboration at the University of Melbourne
• Comments on this article will be premoderated to ensure the discussion stays on topic
