Blue Sky Democracy, Part 4: Giving permanent (and temporary) residents the vote

In part 3, I looked at the first big idea: increasing the size of Parliament because there’s too many voters for politicians to represent.

Now I’m going to go the other way. Let’s expanding the franchise to include millions of permanent (and temporary) migrants who don’t get a say over who to represent.

I’ll never be able to make the case for this as clearly and concisely as Joo-Cheong Tham did in Inside Story, so read that and come back to me.

Done? Good.

Joo-Cheong Tham and I are in lockstep on this one: for a vast swathe of our population, our “democracy” is indistinguishable from autocracy, being denied the right to have a say over who governs them no matter how long they’re here for or how much they contribute to their local community.

Simply, “once migrants have resided continuously for twelve months in this country and intend to continue living here, they should be considered members of this country and entitled to a say in its political processes”.

This is part of the “democratic boundary problem” that’s troubled democracy scholars for the last decade, in the face of declining trust and the legitimacy crisis. The boundary problem looks less at who’s included and what they do, but rather on who isn’t. This focus on alienation, both formally from the franchise and in practice from the levers of power, explores how someone can be subject to politics while being disconnected from the bits that keep it legitimate.

About 8% of Australia’s population — roughly 1,750,000 people — are permanent residents or New Zealand citizens with residency rights. Another 7% are temporary migrants, many living and working here for years.

With the path to permanency harder to access and nearly 30% of permanent residents never naturalising (and that rate still dropping), that’s four million million Australians who will live here for years, put down roots, and never get the right to vote. Is it any surprise that trust is dropping?

One simple change, one simple line in the Electoral Act, would fix this overnight.

You’re here, you’re planning on staying here, you deserve a vote.

This isn’t unprecedented. Those original debates over franchise in the 1900s put that the only thing that should make you eligible to vote is being an adult resident in the Commonwealth for more than six months — at least if you were white. Even now, across Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia, anyone who owns (and in some cases merely occupies) a “rateable property” is eligible to vote in local government elections.

Our closest neighbour, New Zealand has granted any permanent resident who’s lived there for more than twelve months the right to vote since 1975 (including an awful lot of Australians — a right we don’t reciprocate).

New Zealand’s experience has found that, while enrolment and turnout rates are lower among enfranchised permanent residents than citizens, the mere right resulted in “greater participation of resident voting in local elections if they have the right to vote in national elections, and that participation of residents in the electoral process increases as their length of residency increases, suggesting a trend towards greater engagement over time”.

The argument against this is that citizenship is important, and the right to vote is a key pillar of citizenship. Citizenship is, by this logic, a trade-off: an intentional act of allegiance in exchange for protection against deportation and inclusion in the body politic. While citizenship formally entitles someone to more protections, the difference in practice is minimal.. My personal opinions about citizenship aside (it’s silly and shouldn’t exist), a connected cosmopolitan world has changed how people perceive and value citizenship.

Let’s consider the flipside briefly. Australian citizens are eligible to vote in elections for up to six years after they leave Australia, provided they intend to return (although in practice that’s impossible to enforce). Citizenship doesn’t grant an unqualified right to vote though — unlike places like Italy and France with whole overseas electorates, elected by people who maybe never even visited the “home country”.

Our system has a tail, where you can retain your right to vote as long as you intend to return to Australia. The vote is still tied to a grounded connection to the community.

Enfranchising residents would also allow them to vote in state elections (a function of the joined-up roll managed by the AEC that most states are party to), all local elections (solving the problem of inconsistency across the country), and vote on referendums. It would not, however, allow them to stand for election at a Federal election. Section 44(i) remains unchanged and would continue to prevent dual citizens or non-citizens for standing for election.

With one, simple change to the Electoral Act, we’ve enfranchised over three million Australians and given them a proper say over who governs them — helping embed them in their communities and build that social cohesion Scanlon and the Press Gallery are always so worried about.

In part five, we’re going to explore our third big idea: fat juicy Democracy Dollars.