Democracies will prosper or not in large part, depending on the way in which they're managed. In my view, and I think most people's, sensible people's views anyway, politics should be mediated at the center because you want to bring people together. I mean, the whole idea of a parliament is to bring people together where they can compromise and talk and understand that they don't have a monopoly of wisdom themselves and their political rivals may have a point or two to make. And that spirit of compromise is actually, I mean, it's human, it's part of our natural instinct. That's how families mediate issues. It's how small communities mediate issues. So if you believe that the way the best form of resolving issues and working out how to form collective action is to come together at the center, you've got to have institutions that encourage that.
Now in Australia, we have three features to our parliamentary democracy, which we've had for around 100 years, in fact. So there's no one alive can take any credit for them. The first one is we have compulsory voting. So we estimate, and there's a small fine if you don't vote. Wee estimate that 97% of Australians over the age of 18 are on the electoral roll, and they have a duty to be on the electoral roll. We know that about 93% of those enrolled voters vote at a parliamentary election. Australians like to vote. I had a totally voluntary plebiscite on legalizing gay marriage at the end of 2017. And it was totally voluntary. 80% of the eligible electorate voted, and I might say about 62% voted yes. So that was a good outcome. So that's one, compulsory voting. And that's important because it means you don't have to rush off to the fringe to get your vote out.
The second thing is we have what we call preferential voting, Americans would call rank choice voting. I think in Britain, yeah, they call it the alternative vote, but it basically means that if you have a, if you have four or five candidates, you number each box one through four or five. And then if no candidate achieves a majority, an absolute majority on their first preference votes, then you eliminate the candidate with the lowest number of first preference votes and distribute his or her preferences until somebody has a majority. Now, what this means is that if a party goes off to the extreme, a centrist can come, well, an independent can come through the center. And that's exactly what's happened with my party, the Liberal Party, which is the center right party in Australia. After I was defenestrated in end of 2018 or August 2018, my party moved further to the right. As is typical, as you will know, your real enemies in politics are in your own side, not on the other side of the chamber. And so the right became ascendant. And as a consequence of that, we had a number of what had been very safe, larger liberal seats became, were won by independents who came through the center, who were all smaller liberals, progressive on climate action, progressive on social issues and women. You could see there was sending a bit of a message to the, to my party. So that's a second feature.
And the third one is of course, which quite a few countries have, we have a independent electoral commission that draws the boundaries of districts. So we're not a, we don't have gerrymandering. And, you know, if you look at an Australian electoral map, you'll see that the boundaries run along main roads, railway lines, you know, river banks, you know, they're just, they're designed to, you know, make it easy for people to understand what electorate they're in. And of course, you know, represent the right apportionment of voters. So all of that has tended to make our politics come to the center.
Listen to the full interview here https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-center-must-hold-with-malcolm-turnbull-and-yair-zivan/id1686973843?i=1000661759286
The book The Centre Must Hold explores centrism as the radical approach to politics that drives forward progress and secures the foundations of liberal democracy. Far from being an arbitrary middle point between left and right, centrism offers a coherent set of political ideas, principles and approaches. It is about finding the most productive and effective balance between globalisation and local communities, civil rights and security, religion and democracy, free markets and protecting the weakest in society. It is a form of politics that encourages moderation; embraces compromise not as a necessary evil but as a core principle; believes in pragmatism; and engages proactively with the competing tensions that exist in running a country today.
The book is available here https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/The-Centre-Must-Hold/Yair-Zivan/9781783968909