Some people wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this - voting in Australia and immigration

The really great thing about music is that it can be interpreted by anyone in any possible way that they want to. I’ve been working the last few hours and I just noticed that Kelly Clarkson’s A Moment Like This was playing on my iPhone.  The moment I realised the song was playing was when the chorus begun,

“some people wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this.”

And although this is actually strictly a love song, I think it really fits what I’m blogging out from a personal point of view today.

Yesterday was Election Day in Australia where citizens could go to the polls and have their say on the running of the country. I am not yet a citizen, which I’ve been blogging about on and off for the last, oh God, it must be coming on 8 years now.

More specifically I’ve been blogging about the plight of New Zealand citizens in Australia and our inability to access democracy. After being frustrated for a week or so, well more frustrated than usual, I decided to turn that frustration into a marketing campaign. I was going to go to the polling booth and Town Hall in Sydney and hand out flyers fighting for people to campaign for our right to a voice.

Well I got as far as Town Hall and handed out three flyers before a few things happened.

1 – I had made a typo in my flyers so had to chuck them out. They simply couldn’t be used. I could have continued using them but I’d rather the message be correct and lose the money and promote the wrong message.

2 – When I tried to hand out the flyers very few people actually cared. People just weren’t interested in hearing about democracy. It was of no interest to them. People were incredibly apathetic. Of course because this issue is so important to me I wasn’t having any of that, “I’m not interested” business. I said, “how would you feel if you couldn’t vote?” and it was actually at that moment that they listened and were appalled about the issue. Whether or not they do anything remains to be seen.

3 – I was told by someone from the Katter Party to talk to my Prime Minister to which I said, my Prime Minister is Malcolm Turnbull. I think this was actually the comment that offended me the most because I am not here in Australia temporarily. This is my permanent home, so to tell me to talk to my Prime Minister, well you might as well have just told me to go back to NZ.

I think this is the fundamental issue. People genuinely don’t realise that New Zealand citizens are not here temporarily, that it’s actually a permanent move for people and you can’t fully integrate into society if you can’t participate in democracy and have the right to vote.

Adding insult to injury, Prime Ministers John Key of NZ and Australia's Malcolm Turnbull met, a few days out from the election and they didn’t speak at all about the lack of a parliamentary representation in parliament. It wasn’t brought up once. The only channel that actually ran a story was New Zealand’s TVNZ, but Prime Minister John Key was not interviewed, and they missed the message.

Now this Katter Party Volunteer said that NZ should be part of NSW and I agreed. It won’t happen though.

4 – I overheard while handing out flyers (for a political party – the tables turned and I was recruited to a political party) that someone was just going into the polling booth to have their name checked off. You have no idea how much that infuriated me.

5 – Tonight while watching the election coverage both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten talked about standing up for people without a voice. I’m sorry, but unless you’re an immigrant (though some are only immigrants in law and not in practice – my Australian ancestry goes back to the Convicts but skipped a generation) you have a voice and you have representation in parliament. If you can’t vote then you have no representation. You have no voice You have no say on policies that affect you. New Zealand citizens access roads, Medicare and many such as myself actually go on to set up businesses. Yet are excluded from the most important thing in Australian democracy, not just Australian democracy, but Western democracy.

6 – A few people said while I was handing out these flyers, why don’t you become a citizen? You know you can have dual citizenship, to which I replied, that’s not the issue. The issue is the length of time it takes, that you have to earn over $53,900 per annum for five consecutive years (this policy was introduced in February 2016 and is the entire reason I set up my business in the first place – I needed extra money to actually qualify, and I'm only 12 months into my time).

It’s not fair to tar all immigrants with the same brush and say we’re all just here to take advantage of Australia and rort the system. But unfortunately all immigrants are tarred with that same brush and that means the genuine ones forgo their rights and must suffer in silence because nobody will listen and they have no representation in parliament.

Now just to go a little bit further, can you imagine having democracy and being a citizen in one country and then you lose that right to vote – I’m so passionate about democracy that was part of why I went for a holiday to NZ in December last year – to maintain my right to vote in at least one country, but in many ways it’s wrong that I can vote in New Zealand when I don’t live there. The only NZ policy that really affects me is around student loans.

It’s unreasonable for the mainstream political parties in Australia to say they want to represent the public when they then ignore the plight of contributing members of Australian society who don’t have a voice.

I’d like to put into words what losing your right to vote is like but it’s actually so impossible to explain. It’s like one minute you are a contributing fully functioning member of society and the next you’re not, the next your views don’t matter, the next you can't do something that other people just take for granted. To put it another way, on my 18^th birthday I joined a political party. That’s how important it is to me.

It’s fundamental to how we are as a society. Without a voice, and participation we don't have democracy. We have a dictatorship.

Parliamentarians are always focusing on how the poor are hard done by and how the poor don’t have a say, but it’s not just the poor. There are some things that money can’t, unfortunately, buy. If money could buy a vote I would’ve bought my vote today for $500. It’s an arbitrary number and a policy that must be introduced – if some NZ citizens have to wait at least five years to obtain citizenship then there should be the option to:

·      Prove you are committed to Australia

·      Have lived in Australia for at least 2 years

·      Can pass the citizenship test

·      Pay the $500 to vote in Federal elections, $300 for state and $200 for council elections.

It would be a mini temporary citizenship test if you like, a test only open to New Zealand citizens.

If you’re paying taxes and adding to Australia you should be able to have a say in how it’s run and not excluded and made to feel like a visitor when you've been here for several years - since 2008 in my case.

The mainstream media today ran a bunch of stories which basically in a nutshell amount to, “we don’t care about democracy,” and unless you’ve ever lost your right to vote you have no idea just how insulting that is.

And it’s wrong that so many people are apathetic when it comes to going to the polling booth and having their say because,

“some people wait a whole lifetime for a moment like this.”