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\u2019m in the latter camp). First of all, it\u2019s the only spot on earth that\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a tie for which the U.S. has no historic match, and that makes it sort of exotic and \u2014 well \u2014 cool. Another common element in Australian life centers around something at which we might look askance \u2014 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\u2019t 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\u2019 salaries. It\u2019s no surprise that each proposal touches on fiscal matters in one way or another \u2014 California is more than $65 billion in debt, with most of that supported through taxes, and there\u2019s nowhere near enough tax money to go around these days. Accordingly, maybe we\u2019re all feeling as though our votes are futile \u2014 special elections tend to be poorly noticed anyway, but calitics.com\u2019s Brian Leubitz wrote on April 28 that “[T]he turnout will be abysmal; perhaps we\u2019ll 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\u2019t 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 \u2014 which conceivably limits future deficits by increasing the state\u2019s “rainy day” fund and extends recently passed state taxes for up to two years \u2014 the rest of the proposals won\u2019t matter, because “the budget will explode. In effect, the task that the Legislature couldn\u2019t accomplish, saving the budget from collapse, is now somehow the voters\u2019 responsibility \u2026 [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\u2019t come up with solutions on its own. We didn\u2019t put those guys in office because we\u2019d always agree with \u2019em, 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\u2019t claim a viable democratic process with one person in five casting a ballot. That\u2019s like benching four of your five starters during a basketball game \u2014 Michael Jordan, after all, didn\u2019t 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\u2019t reconcile the arbitrary (and very private) nature of the judges\u2019 decisions. But a wholesale sit-out, especially at this pivotal point in California history, can\u2019t help but impact an already disgraceful situation of our own making. That\u2019s why in my wildest dreams, in which Sydney and Melbourne are frequent visitors, I\u2019ll sometimes find myself thinking out loud: Maybe Australia\u2019s on to something. \u2014 Martin Jones Westlin is editor of Downtown News, a sister publication of the Peninsula Beacon.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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\u2019m in the latter camp). First of all, it\u2019s the only spot on earth that\u2019s at once a nation and a continent; right away, that duality sparks fascinating visions of […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":726,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"11561","_seopress_titles_title":"Editorial: May 19 special election is no time to sit on sidelines","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[11593,11552,11561,11550],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299749","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-no-images","category-opinion","category-peninsula-beacon","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/726"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299749\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.sdnews.com\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}