Mon 12 Nov 2007
Kybrook Votes
Posted by jangari under Indigenous, Kriol, Languages, Linguistics, Politics
[3] Comments
In a brief section on a post a few weeks backed, I mentioned than Kybrook Farm, where I did my fieldwork, was going to be the first community in the country to vote in this year’s federal election. Today, it seems, was the day, as the mobile polling booths, 21 teams, begin rolling out in remote areas. By election day, there will have been 245 remote polling booths in total.
After the debacle of the census last year, in which entire communities of thousands of people were apparently ignored, it’s encouraging to see that the Australian Electoral Commission is doing what they can to ensure that everyone gets a vote.
Also encouraging is that the AEC is hiring some ‘linguists’ to assist with interpreting. I only hope they know that linguists don’t necessarily make very good interpreters. But I know that Kybrook has at least one fully qualified interpreter in three levels of Kriol, which is more than sufficient for the entire community.
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December 1st, 2007 at 4:50 pm[…] to Labor in remote communities was enormous. The remote polling booths (which I mentioned back here) returned primary vote numbers consistently in the high 80s. In Wadeye, where vanquished former […]
November 12th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Yes, that’s one of the things that opponents of compulsory voting forget. If we’re legally obliged to vote then the electoral commission has to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to vote. In voluntary votes this is not necessarily the case, for example in the republican referendum in 1999 the AEC didn’t make a great effort to ensure that everyone could vote so a lot of people (especially those outside the larger centres of population) missed out.
November 12th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
They’ve had to work extra hard this year with the early cut-off date as well. I can’t help but get the impression that the AEC has been in some part resistant to the anti-democratic tendencies of our current Federal Government.