During any election, ask the average Australian what their preferences are, and they'll probably say, "For the election to be over!"

And everyone will laugh loudly, and then sigh heavily as we contemplate the futility of existence and the inevitability of death. But this depressive laughter hides a crucial truth: preferences are the key to our whole system of government. And yet recent surveys show that over 30 percent of Australians don't understand how preference voting works, and over 80 percent find the subject far too boring to discuss. So some education is in order if we are to fully realise what a blessing preferences are, and how we can make them work for us.

Preference voting is a democratic system designed to obviate the inadequacies of "first past the post" voting, by allowing the conscientious voter to not only mark down his or her favourite candidate, but to rank all candidates in their order of preference, in a process very similar to popular website ratemyrack.com, although with fewer meaningful consequences.

This has enormous advantages. For one thing, it means that even if your preferred candidate doesn't stand a chance, you can still officially ensure your vote goes to your second or third-favourite option and not your least favourite, thus securing a nice consolation prize. So preference voting is a bit like the Olympics, where you might be disappointed that the Australian is out of contention, but will be satisfied as long as the South African loses. Or motor racing, where you're cheering for a particular driver, but really you'd be happy just with a fatal crash. Unlike other systems, preference voting allows citizens to create that car crash.

Another advantage is that it empowers supporters of minor parties. Unlike in other countries, where a vote for a minor party simply draws votes away from the major parties, in Australia our system ensures that if you are stupid and naïve enough to vote for some scummy little party whose chances of winning an election are roughly on par with the likelihood of its candidates washing their hair, your imbecility does not necessarily hinder the democratic process, as you can still give your preferences to a proper party that wears ties. And so everybody is happy: the major party gets your vote, the minor party gets your attention, and you get a fleeting sense of having in some way contributed to the democratic process, which should clear up by the time you get home. Under the preference voting system, a vote for a minor party is never wasted, because the minor party's not going to get it anyway.

Naturally, as with any electoral system devised by earthbound men, there are flaws. For example, the preferential system does not provide any easy answers for those situations where the voter hates every candidate on the ballot, which, let's be honest, make up the vast majority of situations. This could be easily remedied by replacing the system of numbered preferences with one of letters, where "H" stands for Hate, "HL" stands for Hate Less, "DKWHI" stands Don't Know Who He Is, and "F" stands for Wilson Tuckey. Unfortunately, this kind of electoral reform has been put on the backburner by our current regime, along with the proposal to allow ballots containing scrawled anatomical obscenities to be counted as legitimate votes.

But by far the more high-profile problem with preferential voting is that of "preference deals" between parties, an issue which the news media has seized upon in the first week of the election as a way of killing time while waiting for the next ex-Labor leader to have a seizure or for Tony Abbott to grow fur. The problem is that Labor has done a preference deal with the Greens, raising fears of a government held hostage by Green agendas, like raising the mining tax rate or instituting a punitive tax on carbon or making everyone eat out of bins or something. You know what the Greens are like.

And Labor has form on this issue. Voters have still not forgotten 2004's three-cornered preference deal between the ALP, Family First and Satan, Prince of Darkness, which delivered Steve Fielding into the Senate despite his primary vote consisting entirely of members of his immediate family and a disoriented hen's night party. Labor has come to regret this preference deal over the years, as Fielding has proven to be less a valuable legislative ally than a sort of confusing avant-garde performance artist, pushing the boundaries of modern entertainment with his innovative mixture of fancy-dress and early-onset dementia.

Will they similarly regret getting into bed with the Greens? It's hard to say, Bob Brown, of course, is far less entertaining than Fielding - in fact, for a left-wing gay environmentalist, he has been doing a remarkable impression of a moderately-sedated conveyancer for the last thirty years - but that doesn't mean he couldn't be just as dangerous. This danger was eloquently pointed out by Senator Barnaby Joyce, who took some time out from his everyday duties of updating us on the state of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's relationship and promising not to have sex with Tony Abbott to warn that the Greens and Labor had formed an informal coalition which would usher in a nightmarish era of unrestrained leftism, where decent middle Australians would be laid waste by deranged emissions trading schemes and sinister gay marriages. It's always dangerous when a party sacrifices its integrity to become an extension of a larger party, simply to increase its own power and perceived relevance, warned Joyce, National Party Senate leader.

But the crux of the preferences issue isn't really about partisan politics; there is a principle at stake. Whether you support Green policies or would rather not be forced to live in mud huts and take heroin by a Communist dictatorship, the point is that the ability of political parties to do deals of this sort runs a serious risk of disenfranchising the ordinary voter, and right now we have little recourse.

Oh yes, pundits say, you could simply choose your own preferences, as is your right, rather than allow the parties to dictate to you, to relieve you of your democratic responsibilities in a grotesque masquerade of what our electoral system was originally conceived as. You could simply take your little pencil and decide what order to number the boxes yourself.

Well, if a pundit ever says that to you, slap his stupid face for me.

Because maybe that's how they do elections in Iran, or China, or… I don't know, Angola or something. It's not how we do it here. Because if there are two things utterly alien to the Australian psyche, they are wastefulness, and unnecessary work. And if we were to pick our own numbers, thus rendering completely useless all those nicely-printed how-to-vote cards that the parties worked so hard on, and expending needless emotional and mental energy on the selection process, we'd be guilty of both. The politicos went to the trouble of drawing up these cards; what ingrates we'd be to ignore them. There is democracy, and then there's just plain rudeness.

Besides, are we really expected to number all the boxes on the Senate paper, which this year will feature over 1600 candidates and be printed on de-commissioned RAAF parachutes? Are we really supposed to stand in that little booth for half an hour, agonising over whether we prefer the Australian Falconers' Party's or Citizens United For Sexier Lollipop Ladies' vision for the nation? Have those supposed "pundits" ever heard of RSI? Have they ever heard of apathy?

No, once these preference deals are done, our preferential fate is sealed. A vote for the Greens IS a vote for Labor. A vote for Labor IS a vote for the Greens. A vote for the Nationals IS a vote for people who smell a bit like wet sheep. That's democracy in the 21st century, and we all have to lie back and get used to the fact that these days, "preferences" simply means the inability to choose who you actually want, just another addition to the rich Australian political lexicon that gave us "Labor", the "Liberals","Workchoices" and "The Honourable Peter Reith".

So the lesson to learn here is that, when you're alone in that booth on August 21 trying to decide which flavour of politics to bestow your favour on, just remember: nobody cares what you think; don't get any ideas.

Ben Pobjie is a writer, comedian and poet.