Until Saturday, for the past five or so weeks, I spent most late afternoons and early evenings after work walking my local streets letterboxing a small summary of my basic policies along with instructions on how to vote in the 2013 local government election.
I ran for a Council seat in West Ward in the City of Bayswater. I ran on three simple issues – lower rates, tangible policies to address the crime wave impacting on my local area (I am a recent victim of a home burglary) and streamlining local council planning approvals processes.
Polling Day was Saturday and there is no denying this fact – I got flogged. I polled a whopping 380 votes out of 5,455 valid votes.
However, I take three positive outcomes from this campaign: It gave me a better understanding of my local area; it taught me a lot more about the people who helped me and also about those involved in grassroots politics; and more people voted for me than they did for Darren Brown.
Today, after hearing and reading about how it’s very distressing to some journalists in WA that the voter turnout was historically low and that the answer must be to force people to vote, I got to thinking about this issue of local council voter disengagement.
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