Australia enjoys lots of buzz about its total greatness, from both seasoned visitors and those who admire that wonderful place from afar (for the record, I’m in the latter camp). First of all, it’s the only spot on earth that’s at once a nation and a continent; right away, that duality sparks fascinating visions of a brawny public spirit and government machinery. Second, the British founded it as one giant penal colony, with the first of those opened in 1788, which means that today’s native, non-Aboriginal Australians are descendants of people with supposedly criminal pasts. The tie that binds may be a dubious one, but at least it’s a tie for which the U.S. has no historic match, and that makes it sort of exotic and — well — cool. Another common element in Australian life centers around something at which we might look askance — mandatory voting. Nobody throws you into the Coral Sea if you fail to cast a ballot on election day, but you can eventually be subject to a series of fines and, in extreme cases, a jail sentence. Even as we puzzle over this state of affairs, we must acknowledge that for better or worse, its effect yields a definitive public consensus on the issues. And this hasn’t hurt. Australia enjoys a much higher standard of living than its Asian neighbors, and the Mercer Worldwide Quality of Living Index routinely ranks cities like Sydney and Melbourne among the best in the world. On Tuesday, May 19, California will hold an election on six propositions, whose topics range from changes in the budget process to lottery modernization to mental health funding to elected officials’ salaries. It’s no surprise that each proposal touches on fiscal matters in one way or another — California is more than $65 billion in debt, with most of that supported through taxes, and there’s nowhere near enough tax money to go around these days. Accordingly, maybe we’re all feeling as though our votes are futile — special elections tend to be poorly noticed anyway, but calitics.com’s Brian Leubitz wrote on April 28 that “[T]he turnout will be abysmal; perhaps we’ll get 20 percent of registered voters to vote. If the voters tell the Legislature to go to hell, nobody should be shocked. These voters are the most active and the most partisan. On the right, they can’t stand taxes, and on the left, well, they have a heart and cannot stomach the thought of additional cuts.” Leubitz also said that if the voters fail to pass Proposition 1A — which conceivably limits future deficits by increasing the state’s “rainy day” fund and extends recently passed state taxes for up to two years — the rest of the proposals won’t matter, because “the budget will explode. In effect, the task that the Legislature couldn’t accomplish, saving the budget from collapse, is now somehow the voters’ responsibility … [W]hy must the voters do the heavy lifting that the Legislature has failed to do?” I know the feeling. I used to live in Ventura, at a time when City Council continually foisted deadlocks onto the public for a vote when it couldn’t come up with solutions on its own. We didn’t put those guys in office because we’d always agree with ’em, damn it; we put them in office to lead us through good times and bad. Their persistence in seeking constructive solutions on downtown growth issues and affordable housing might not have gained them a following, but at least the democratic process would have worked. And you just can’t claim a viable democratic process with one person in five casting a ballot. That’s like benching four of your five starters during a basketball game — Michael Jordan, after all, didn’t win seven titles by himself, any more than we can expect a working consensus on the state budget, no matter how lopsided in either direction the May 19 result may be. The people who created this nation understood that forgoing a vote is also a means of helping shape a free society. I can relate. I choose never to vote on judgeships, for example, because I just can’t reconcile the arbitrary (and very private) nature of the judges’ decisions. But a wholesale sit-out, especially at this pivotal point in California history, can’t help but impact an already disgraceful situation of our own making. That’s why in my wildest dreams, in which Sydney and Melbourne are frequent visitors, I’ll sometimes find myself thinking out loud: Maybe Australia’s on to something. — Martin Jones Westlin is editor of Downtown News, a sister publication of the Peninsula Beacon.