I think I lost a little bit of my soul today... #ACTvotes

As I write this, I'm sitting on a gutter in the shade of a tree, resting legs that simply can't go further for a while.

I'm leafleting all of Gungahlin - a snippet of information explaining why I've moved on from my volunteer work with Gungahlin Community Council and am now asking people to vote for me and the Greens for the ACT election. Why I think I could do so much more for the community from this elected role than I could by continuing the rewarding but frustrating community role, shoehorned around a day job and a family.

But as the legs hit a wall, the mind also hits the realisation that a huge proportion of these leaflets will be discarded without a glance. More often than you'd expect discarded straight onto the footpath. And it's the same outcome for the leaflets of other parties too. (Much more so for some of them!)

And that's a little bit soul-destroying.


Not because of loss of a potential personal vote. But because I realise that this person who discards a leaflet - from whatever political party - will likely vote blindly on Saturday. Or perhaps based on a simple slogan they may have picked up. But far less likely on a considered knowledge of what each party is trying to achieve.

Yet it's also odds on that this person will find themself venting about whatever party ends up as the "government" on Monday, or Tuesday, or two weeks time, depending on the outcome.

How can they complain when they rejected the opportunity to avail themselves of information that the parties tried to share with them?

Do you abdicate the right to complain if you deride the opportunity to participate?

For sure there are a lot of people who treat elections seriously - especially so in Canberra over virtually anywhere else in Australia. But the disengagement ratio is so depressingly high. More so given the extreme negativity that we've seen at all levels of government in Australia in recent years. It's so much easier now to put your negativity out there with social media. Aided and abetted by mainstream media that hasn't come to terms with how to shape its own future, let alone the future of Australian democracy.

I don't know what the answer is. Nations unite against the adversity of a war. But how do you unite people against this adversity, a far more insidious malaise?

Come on legs. Another 500 homes to go today...