Voting confusion - which party of last resort?

They didn’t know what to make of a “progressive” Abbott talking up a genuinely reformist paid paternity leave scheme, or a “right-wing” Gillard threatening workers who would breach industrial agreements with “the full force of the law”.

For middle class Laborites, of course, the choice was simple: vote Gillard, for the symbolic impact of electing our first woman PM (despite her barely nominal representation of feminist, secularist or leftist concerns). But clearly that symbolic impact had little political currency beyond the inner city.

For the same middle class Laborites, the kind of masculinity that Abbott represented was too last century, and too patriarchal, to warrant anything less than their disdain.

But if other voters couldn’t make up their minds about the major parties, it’s not because this was the first “superficial” election they’d seen.

It’s because they sniffed a con job in the wind.

Surely Gillard was disciplining unions on behalf of business sector interests?

Surely Abbott was pandering to small-“l” liberals, many of whom might otherwise have swung to Labor, by proposing to reform paternity leave?

Voters had never seen such cynical about-faces from the major parties before, which is why they were confused.

This is where Latham got me thinking: maybe political differences have become so twisted out of shape that to be compelled to vote for either of the major parties is to be compelled to endorse a lie.

Perhaps, then, for good political reasons and in the name of democracy, it was time to “vote” another way.

For Latham, of course, the other way to vote was informally, and it would appear he wasn’t alone in taking this for a legitimate alternative to voting affirmatively: current estimates put the informal vote as high as 5 per cent, or more than a third of The Greens’ vote. Nor should it be supposed that at least some proportion of The Greens’ vote (around 13 per cent nationally) wasn’t, as it might be called, de facto informal.

The Greens want to tell us that Australia made a conscious decision to vote for them on Saturday, whereas the uncomfortable truth may be that close to one fifth of the electorate couldn’t see anything worth voting for in Labor and couldn’t bring itself to vote conservative.

The wonder, I guess, is that it took Mark Latham to call it.

Sort of.