“What do Austria, Australia, Belgium, Gabon, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Fiji, Singapore, Turkey and Uruguay have in common?” “People?” “Oh, come on Kevin!”

That was my friend Barney’s frustrated response to my attempt at being facetious.

“There are many things these countries can have in common, Barney.”

“So name one and be serious,” he warned.

It was election day in Australia so I reckoned Barney was alluding to an answer along those lines.

“They all have prime ministers?”

“Uh, I don’t know really, but that’s not the answer,” he told me.

With Barney, actually, he’s happier for you to simply say, “I give up,” because he really wants to tell you the answer, so that is what I said and he looked, momentarily, triumphant. “They all have a system of compulsory voting,” he informed me. “Every citizen must vote, come election day.” For good measure, he adds to my store of knowledge by telling me that Belgium was the first among all countries to embark on such a system.

In Australia, you get fined for not turning up to vote.

“If you’re not voting by post or if you don’t have a valid reason, you must turn up at the polling station. But once you do so, you don’t necessarily have to vote,” Barney said, “but if you fail to turn up you can get fined, sent to court and end up paying both the fine and court fee.”

So where was all this leading to, I wondered? It’s not as if I don’t know about Australia’s compulsory voting programme.

A group of elderly citizens were wandering over in our direction. I recognised Mrs X, Barney’s mother-in-law, now well into her 80s. The five other ladies with her would constitute some sort of peer group; they were all within a few years of each other. One of them had her pusher and walked with cautious care.

‘A charmer’

“Here comes my voting bank,” stated Barney in an undertone, “Quick, tell me, who do you want to win? [Tony] Abbott or [Kevin] Rudd? I can arrange the odds. You’ll see.”

He grinned. Presently, the five others were seated as Barney and I drew up more chairs. A brief round of introductions followed, “Mrs Y, meet my writer mate Kevin; Kev meet young Mrs Z,” and so on.

“Have you made up your mind, then?” I asked Mrs Y. “Oh, I don’t know,” she answered, waving a hand airily, “I think I’ll vote for the bloke with the silky blond hair. A charmer. Always smiling. And I believe he speaks Mandarin. Now imagine that.”

It soon became apparent that each of the ladies wasn’t interested in the least in politics, and hadn’t a clue as to who was who in the current political spectrum. They were all heading off to the voting station simply because they had to place an X somewhere on a voting sheet. Last time round, Mrs Lazenby, nearly 90 and short-sighted, wanted to vote for one of the candidates simply because he had her deceased husband’s name.

“This bloke — not her husband, the politician with her husband’s name,” said Barney, “was the last one you should have been voting for, so when I was helping Mrs Lazenby in the booth and she asked which one of them is George, I simply pointed to my own preferred candidate and said, ‘That’s him.’”

“Now don’t look aghast, Kev,” he chided me, “This isn’t the time to be judgmental. You yourself are anti-war, pro-refugee. Would you in all honesty have encouraged anybody to cast their vote for a politician with opposed views, if you could help it?”

I’m not sure how that was meant to be answered.

“Come on ladies, we better get moving,” said Barney. “We have an election to win. Let’s all rock up and X the right boxes, shall we?”

And away they all went, each only sure of one thing: There would be no fines this election.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.