Swinging

The bogan, when asked, will tell you, in no uncertain terms, that it is a ‘swinging voter’, and not simply because it allows for jokes about fucking your wife. For once, the bogan will be entirely accurate in its self-assessment with regards to politics. Indeed, little does the bogan know this, but the word bogan is utterly synonymous with ‘swing voter’.

Well, perhaps not only synonymous, but also potentially antithetical. There are two distinct types of bogan voters; all of whom are fiercely, proudly disengaged from the political process. The first is the bogan who, unaware of its distinct lack of political awareness, will simply vote for the party that its parents did, slavishly following the team it was raised to support, proudly spouting the talking points of their respective leader: “We’ll Stop the Boats”/”They’ll Bring Back WorkChoices”. The other is more insidious.

While many non-bogans consider themselves to be swing voters, this is actually not the case. Most ordinary people, while telling themselves that they have yet to allocate their precious democratic right to one or another party, they actually have a longstanding, rigorously constructed internal political philosophy, a prism through which both major parties’ policies pass. They pretty much know who they’re voting for, but don’t want to admit that they’re really as dyed-in-the-wool as the next blinkered suburbanite. These people are not swing voters, and it seems that the Rooty Hill RSL and Broncos Leagues Club are infested with these decided undecideds.

The swinging bogan, however, has no such internal political compass. Functional political illiterate that it is, it views political promises from its presidential candidates through only two filters: “what’s in it for me?” and “how likely am I to get it?” On polling day, the bogan’s vote is a limp dick in the wind, aimlessly wafting in whichever direction proffers the least resistance, hence the watching of bogan bribes that we have undertaken. Generously, the bogan waits until the very last moment for completing its swing, allowing our prospective and putative leaders ample time to fashion appropriate enticements to follow one how-to-vote card over another.

Walking into the booth, the bogan pauses, and reflects over the various policy pronouncements that were brought to its attention during the various 90-second news pieces on 7 and 9 news, and the occasional foray into the highbrow news services offered by the 7pm Project. It looks at the green slip, and ticks the box for ‘Liberal’. It then looks at the monstrous swathe of paper that represents the senate ballot. Confronted and confounded by the sheer size of the thing, the bogan, in an effort to hedge its bets, ticks ‘Labor’, then folds up the ballot and stuffs it into the box.

Wither it swings left or right in the winds of its feckless political imaginings, one thing is for certain. The bogan will not vote Green.

Please, stop the votes.