Long White Cloud

Plastic Lines has been silent for the last couple of weeks. Last week it was because the one contributing author was living it up in the NZ snow. Prior to that it was all about meeting the deadlines that had been brought forward a week. I am assuring myself that I will try harder, because I like writing in my blog more than I like deadlines.

New Zealand is awesome. Having been raised in WA, I have a strong aversion to the cold. To my mind, cold weather is completely inexcusable unless accompanied by hills with snow on them. The South Island of New Zealand may be moderately colder than Victoria, but with snow fields in abundance, it's justified.

We stayed in a pretty crappy hostel for most of the trip, which was populated by snow-bogans in their early 20s. We overheard a whole lot of conversations because we were separated from our neighbours by locked internal door, rather than a (more conventional) wall but I don't think we heard anyone discuss any topic other than the possibility of laid. One night, one of the dodgy heaters blew up in the next unit, which shorted out all our power such that we woke up freezing at 3am and couldn't do anything about it until the next morning. My point is that IT WAS STILL AWESOME.

To top off a week of awesome snow, bruises to prove how tough I am and cheap alcohol, we spent the last night at a wildlife park where I got to pat a dear, an eel and the ugliest pig I've ever seen and let a Kea nibble my finger.

The Kune Kune Pig - awesomely ugly

One of the great sources of entertainment for the week was cruising between the two local TV channels. We were completely astounded by how nice the cops were on their local reality-TV cop show ("I'll hold off processing this fine for not having your rego in order for 24 hours to give you a chance to pay it") and learned about the perils of giving people drivers' licences at 15 (I loved it when they noted that the drunk 16 year old driver asleep in the stolen car on the side of the freeway "already had a suspended licence").

Dodgy TV moment of the week, however, has to go to the racist guy hosting the morning TV program and his bitch co-host. The most cringe-worthy moments included:

- Him complaining about how "Asians just don't integrate" (literally, using that language);
- Him reading out a letter saying that "maybe there wouldn't be so many Maori people in jail if they just stopped committing so many crimes" then staring down the barrel of the camera and saying "couldn't have said it better myself".
- Her interviewing Ms New Zealand and nodding sincerely as they discussed how she didn't get through to the final 15 because the judges were all corrupt and the New Zealand government wouldn't give her enough money to take an entourage to Las Vegas.

It was jaw dropping stuff. Unfortunately it seems like the downside to living in an agrarian paradise is a few insular attitudes.

Equity and Compulsory Voting: a Framework

I live in a safe ALP seat in inner Melbourne, which means that once every three years I am overwhelmed by the sense that nobody loves me and the world is unfair. Sort of. Here’s an attempt to qualify my sense of disenfranchisement:

The Framework:

Assume for a moment that wealth has a certain ‘natural’ utility. That is to say, assume that we live in a ‘perfect’ free market economy, where you get to keep everything you earn (ie, there are no taxes) and the market includes perfectly fair pricing for all goods and services (ie, perfect competition). We assume that the only value of wealth in this economy is the goods and services that wealth it can be used to purchase. In the first instance, we assume there is no inherent social or political advantage conferred to those who are wealthy that could act to increase their utility. The utility of wealth is only influenced by consumption. In this respect, we can say that the advantage of wealth is “politically neutral”, that is, in case (1):

Actual utility = politically neutral utility

Assume that there are three levels* of wealth within this society, called A B and C, where A has the least wealth and C has the most. The utility associated with each level is standardised; that is, the score reflects what portion of politically neutral utility A, B and C can each capture. In case (1) we assume that everyone has a utility score of 1. Graphically, this looks like this:
Now we can start to overlay political assumptions. We will assume that political power has no potential to create or destroy wealth, only power to redistribute it.

Assume that under the current system, everyone at level A cannot afford to eat, everyone at level B eats and owns a car and everyone at level C eats, owns a car and a big yacht. Most poeple would share the view that we can make this system ‘fairer’ by redistributing some of the utility of the Cs to the As. This forms Case (2): fair redistribution.
Note that this does not mean A has more actual wealth that C, just that A has more actual wealth than they would in the "politically neutral" world, and C has less.

The extent to which you think redistribution (ie, tax) should take place is likely to depend on your political persuasion. Some people would argue that C should own a small yacht instead of a big one in order to give A enough money to eat. Others may argue that C should give up the yacht altogether and give A enough money so that everyone has enough actual wealth to own a car. However, the principle that some level of redistribution is "fair" is broadly accepted.

I would argue that case (2) effectively represents what governments want to achieve; though their precise starting point, methods and the extent of the redistribution may vary.

The Equity:

So, what’s the beef with compulsory voting?

The problem is that of the 150 seats in Australia’s lower house of parliament, only 20-25% are really in for a contest. These are the “marginal” seats – generally defined as those that would require a swing of less than 6% of the vote to change the sitting member

Marginal electorate politics wouldn’t be such a problem if the group of 20-25% marginal seats were randomly distributed. The problem is that they’re not. Marginal seats form a biased cross-section of the population. A quick look at the current map of national electoral zones (http://www.aec.gov.au/profiles/maps/national/aec-boundary-map-june-2010.pdf) shows that the vast majority of marginal seats are in the outer suburbs of major cities – basically, the people deciding the outcome of the election all sit within level B in our model.

Marginal seat politics means that there’s an incentive for politicians to stray from a political model of “fair redistribution”. The result is that in order to get elected you need to pork‑barrel marginal electorates. Under the assumption that political decisions don’t create wealth, just redistribute it, this means a political subsidy for level B at the expense of A and C. Perhaps due to the fact that the political class and their supporters typically come from level C, the bulk of the burden will usually fall on level A. Hence, we have case (3): the pork-barrel:

Based on our model, we're saying level A can go without food so level B can keep there car and afford to pay for the occasional rental of a big yacht.

This is an issue that’s intrinsically caught up with having a compulsory voting system. If voting was optional, politicians would have to campaign in all seats or face the risk of voters (like me) becoming so disenfranchised that they don’t bother showing up to vote.

PS – the PLNC is dead. My brain couldn’t cope with any more Murdoch papers and I figured I would invariably descend into election dross, anyway.

*I avoid using the word “class” because, as Australians, it makes us uncomfortable. I can only assume this comes from a national tendency to associate social classes with classes of wool, where being of a higher class is necessarily better. This is distinctly opposed to the British understanding, where being middle class is normalised and anything else has the connotation that you come from a dysfunctional family and you don’t work for a living.