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POLITICAL PARTICIPATION OF MUSLIMS IN AUSTRALIAPolitical participation should be considered as a spectrum: at one end, it means exercising one’s right to vote, while at the other end are more demanding activities such as standing for parliament. In the Australian context, where voting is compulsory, one measure of non‐participation at the early end of that spectrum is ‘informal’ voting.
2007 federal election. Federal electorates do not precisely correspond to local government areas; but comparing Tables 2 and 3 shows that these electorates map very closely onto the local government areas with the highest number of Muslim residents. Moreover, Arabic is among the significant language groups identified in these electorates. So, while the Australian Electoral Commission does not gather data on place of birth, cultural origin, or religion of informal voters (impossible in any case, given the secret ballot), it is possible to extrapolate very broadly from this data to suggest that areas with high numbers of informal votes are also, by and large, those with large numbers of Muslim residents. In Blaxland and Watson, for example, the level of informal voting is more than twice the Australian national average of 3.95% (Australian Electoral Commission 2007 election data). Australian Electoral Commission data from the 2007 election showed that the 10 divisions with the highest levels of overall informality were all located in Western Sydney: Blaxland, Watson, Chifley, Prospect, Fowler, Reid, Parramatta, Werriwa, Banks, and Bennelong. The informal vote count may not tell the whole story, due to the alternative strategy of intentional ‘donkey voting’ (numbering candidates in simple numerical order rather than order of preference). One possible explanation for such non‐participation is that lower levels of English language proficiency and educational attainment correlate with lower levels of knowledge about the Australian electoral system, leading to mistakes such as misnumbering or wrongly marking ballot papers. Another is dissatisfaction about the political options available. ‘A lot of people have that mentality: “Oh, there’s no point. There’s no difference. The government will never do anything for us. It’s a waste of time, I’m not voting.”’ A few respondents reported a view that voting is haram in the absence of Sharia law and government. These respondents had heard community members say: “Well, it’s not a sharia/halal government, so it’s haram, we shouldn’t vote anyway, it’s forbidden for you to vote.” And ...people ... write letters when they get fined, saying “It’s against my religion to vote” and [so] they get away with not paying the fine. And there’s Imams who actually push that line amongst whole groups of people. (Community leader) The Australian Electoral Commission’s analysis of the 2004 federal election and March 2005 by‐election in the seat of Werriwa—an unusually linguistically diverse electorate, with Arabic is the main language other than English—categorised informal votes into blank ballot papers misnumbered papers and papers using ticks, crosses and other invalid symbols. Werriwa’s vote in the 2004 federal election was 8% informal, and over 13% informal in the 2005 by‐election. In each case, around one‐fifth of the informal votes were blank.
Table 3: Top ten NSW electorates in terms of informal votes, listed against corresponding local government areas, showing a close correlation to local government areas in the ‘top 20’ in terms of residents identifying as Muslim. Source: Australian Electoral Commission and ABS 2006 Census data. There is, of course, no way of knowing what proportion of the informal vote was cast by which ethnic group. While Werriwa has four times the national average proportion of Arabic‐speakers, their numbers are almost matched by speakers of Hindi, Italian and Spanish, while numerous other language groups make up the bulk of the 41.68% of Werriwa voters who do not identify as English‐speakers. These data certainly do not suggest that the informal vote is higher among Muslims than among other religious groups. It does, however, point to the fact that language difficulties, which particularly affect recent migrants (some of whom are Muslim), correlate with unsuccessful voting. Directory: sites -> default -> files -> documents -> 01 2014 documents -> Ace abi catair customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements documents -> Mobile audio/video recording systems documents -> The south australian government gazette documents -> All public acts appearing in this gazette are to be considered official, and obeyed as such documents -> Union interparlementaire inter-parliamentary union 01 2014 -> Voices Shaping the 01 2014 -> Muslim Voices – Hopes and aspirations of Muslim Australians Centre for Muslim Minorities & Islam Policy Studies 01 2014 -> Editors: Kerry Download 16.24 Mb. Share with your friends:
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