As your fellow citizen I feel like it is my duty to encourage all y’all to be enrolled to vote, and you can do that here; oevf.aec.gov.au. Failure to vote means two things; firstly that you will get fined $50.00 and secondly that you immediately lose the right to complain about who wins the election.

Doing your homework as a voter is paramount to ensuring that you are voting with personal integrity, and it doesn’t take long to have a think about what issues you believe need to be addressed by the powers that be. Utilise various (preferably non-biased!!) informative resources online to get a clearer idea of which parties are pushing which agendas, and you can hardly go wrong. I am personally immediately put off by parties that use smear campaigning tactics – I feel that in any arena, you should never have to blow out another’s candle to make your own burn brighter. This kind of attitude is below the belt and only speaks volumes about the party endorsing the slander, in my opinion.

Therefore I (naively, some might say?) try to pay more attention to political parties who air their manifestos openly and without too much fanfare … parties that come across as dedicated teams who genuinely wish to help their fellow man, as opposed to parties with ambiguous promises who play hardball in the media. Are these wistful Utopian ideals? Definitely! But we absolutely deserve to hope for the best possible society we can build.

Luckily, for those of you as clueless about politics (some may say I am) and who actually want to try and cast a meaningful vote, there is an on-line tool called Vote Compass (http://www.abc.net.au/votecompass) that asks you questions about various socio-political issues to help you identify where your loyalties should lie. According to Vote Compass (or as I like to call it, Scrote Compass) I should be voting for Greens – which is nice of them to suggest, but seriously I have no idea who to vote for. At the end of the day, it’s just down to the lesser of several evils vying for control of the country, right? And that is also something that gets me out of bed on a Saturday morning after a big night of dancing up in Geisha, which can never be a good thing!

I believe that the only true way for us all to progress is for humans to treat each other with respect, kindness and compassion, and politics just don’t seem to support that – so I’m what you might call fairly apolitical. What can I say, my vote is for freedom and equality for all and there don’t seem to be too many parties completely pushing that … probably because there’s no money in it!! Politically jaded? Who me? Never! Don’t forget to vote, guys!