What kind of answer do you reckon you’d get if you asked any young people today “who are you voting for in this council election?”
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“How in the hell should I know?” most likely.
Local council slips under the radar in a big way for us lot, this mudslide of idealistic, politically clued-in troublemakers who’ve only just come of age these last couple of years, and I’m going to try as best I can to articulate some explanation, but not necessarily a defence, of why.
There’s a general consensus in regional communities like Griffith that this, whatever this might be, is what needs to be done.
In a way that’s the blessing of local government - a machine where all the cogs and gears and moving parts run in sync and what needs to happen happens.
Whether it all goes that well in the end depends on your council, but the principle still stands.
The thing is, when it comes to fired-up young’uns who’re politically-minded enough to care about elections beyond backing uncle Joe or being legally obliged to turn up, that blessing turns into something of a curse.
Think about it - the youth of today, for better or worse, is concerned with ideology, with “big ideas” and changing the world, or else with putting together youth clubs and doing community outreach this-and-thats.
Their concern is not zoning.
To the politically-minded youth, there’s just no discernible reason to participate in an election where there’s no significant difference between any of the candidates, and where the fruits of their participation will not be felt in any big way.
So we pull out, we scratch doodles on the bottom of the page or we drop it blank into the ballot box, or else we number it one-to-eight and someone gets lucky.
The perception of how things go after that, and how closely this mirrors the actual state of things is probably a matter for debate, is that about a quarter of who’s left votes based on their intimate and far-reaching understanding of local government procedure and the socio-economic state of their community.
And for the rest of them it’s a popularity contest.
They’re all fundamentally the same candidate, outside little quirks here and there for flavour, so vote for the one who’s the friendliest, blokiest bloke.
Now all that sounds very dreadful and apathetic, but, at least so far as I’ve found, it’s true.
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Email the editor, Declan Rurnega by emailing editor@areanews.com.au.
