On Election Day Sausage Sizzles

After several weeks of hard campaigning from all major parties, it’s finally here: today is election day in the ACT.

Now, this isn’t a post where I run my political colours up the flagpole, hoping for a salute. Nor is this a serious discussion about politics in Australia at the moment. I’m a sociologist, not a political scientist, although the two disciplines are kissing cousins.

What I am going to write about is how ardently I love election days. Tune out now if democracy soap-boxing isn’t your thing: I’ll forgive you. Today, of all days, I’m feeling magnanimous.

I love election days not because I want to see the least-worst team get up, or because I have a non-sexual crush the dude who does the ABC’s election analysis (What can I say? I’m both impressed and fascinated by someone who can work a graph)

What I really love about election day is the sausage sizzles.

Election day sausage sizzles are not like Bunnings sausage sizzles that happen every Saturday, or the church-fete ones that usually have an accompanying cake stall (fairy cakes on polyester trays! Oh my!). Election day sausage sizzles are special, because, unlike a normal sausage sizzle, you won’t see the following:
• Pushing;
• Shoving;
• Grizzling from the sweaty person behind the hotplate;
• Moaning about the queue; or
• Angst about spot-holders.

Instead, what you will see, at an election day sausage sizzle, is:
• Patient waiting in line;
• Stepping aside for old folks and people with small babies;
• Cheerful BBQ cooks;
• Pleases and Thankyous;
• No talk whatsoever of politics, but, rather, pleasant conversation about the weather; and
• Tasty, tasty sausages, with onion, if you like it, and self-administered lashings of all the sauce you could want.

So what makes election day sausage sizzles different from the normal slap-some-processed-meat-on-a-hotplate?

I think it’s this: we all know that, by voting, we’ve done a tiny something that, along with the tiny somethings of everybody else, will amount to a huge something - to our government.

Although our government isn’t perfect, every time I flick to the World section of the paper, and read about Syria, or Zimbabwe, I am so grateful that our huge something, our democracy, is made up of all of our tiny somethings.

Of course, no-one talks about this in the queue for sausages at the local primary school. But we all know what we’ve just done, and we all know why we’ve done it. And it’s knowing that which, I believe, makes us behave at our best, and our most civil.

Or, perhaps it’s too much of an effort to be rude on a day when the sun is glorious and our noses are full of the sweet, sweet smell of frying onions on a hot BBQ.

Happy democracy everyone.