Weekend polling also sets it apart from the US and UK. From the sausage sizzles to voters turning up in budgie smugglers and bikinis, the electoral experience is quintessentially Aussie. The writer David Malouf, during his 1998 Boyer Lectures, neatly distilled the ­essence of Saturday elections. “Voting for us is a family occasion,” he observed, “a duty fulfilled, as often as not, on the way to the beach, so that children early get a sense of it as an obligation, but a light one, a duty ­casually undertaken.”

Small wonder that Australia’s way of doing things has won international acclaim. “Australia has succeeded in creating a culture of celebration around elections as full-community affairs,” wrote the influential Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne jnr and Miles Rapoport, a Harvard academic, in their 2022 book, 100% Democracy. As well as emulating the spirit of Australian democracy, they hoped that America would ape its model of compulsory participation. “The United States adopted the secret ballot after Australia tried it first,” they wrote. “We should do the same with universal voting.”

Another American admirer is the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. “There are many institutional aspects of your model which I think other countries should emulate, among them mandatory voting,” he told me during a recent visit to Sydney. “We spend so much money getting out the vote, that sort of spending gives power to those who contribute,” creating a system of “one dollar per vote” as much as “one person one vote”. Preferential voting he also finds attractive. “If the United States had had that, Trump would not even have been on the ballot. And our system gives undue influence to the extremes.” Compulsory voting is a safeguard against polari­sation. Elections become less of a base-mobilising ­exercise and more an appeal to the middle, with all the moderation that implies.

“We’ve been world leaders with the secret ballot ­compulsory enrolment and compulsory voting,” says Tom Rogers, who is also rightly proud of the statutory independence of the AEC. America, where states set their own electoral rules, has no equivalent body. But each wacky letter that arrives in his in-tray, and each new conspiracy theory that percolates online, reminds Rogers that he cannot let down his guard. According to the Washington-based watchdog, Freedom House, Australia has slipped down the global democratic rankings. In the body’s 2024 Freedom in the World report, Australia ranked 17th on democratic health. Between 2017 and 2019, it had ranked sixth. Some of the slippage is explained by Australia’s tough pandemic lockdowns, which were seen to have infringed on personal liberties. But, at a bare minimum, Australia should strive to ­remain a top-10 democracy. Ideally, it should become the paragon nation. The democracy sausage needs to ­remain as succulent and nourishing as possible.

“The challenges facing democracy are of an unprecedented scale, speed and complexity.” In her first interview since becoming head of the Albanese government’s Strengthening Democracy Taskforce, Dr Jeni Whalan makes no bones about the enormity and immediacy of the threat: “We’ve had this period where there’s been a privilege of complacency, where we’ve taken our democracy for granted. That time has passed.”

As the inaugural report from the taskforce pointed out when published in July, anti-democratic sentiment has risen because of the overlapping effects of misinformation, political polarisation, citizen discontent with the trustworthiness of governments and heightened geopolitical tensions. “The challenge is all of the challenges combined,” says Whalan, a Rhodes scholar with a doctorate from Oxford, who would likely have made it on the Australian sailing team at the 2004 Athens Olympics had not injury forced her early retirement from the sport. “We have spoken of a constellation of challenges. And there is no one challenge that’s bigger or a greater priority than the others. It’s the way that they interact, and present new difficulties.”

Civic education is a key weapon in the armoury, even if it sounds like bringing a pillow to a knife fight. The Museum of Australian Democracy, housed at Old Parliament House, is a vital bastion. More than 350,000 visitors pass through its doors annually and via digital outreach its educational programs attract an even larger audience online. “They don’t just reach kids of school age,” she says, “but all generations. It is a really crucial component.”

Disinformation experts set great store in what are called inoculation games. The Australian-made Cranky Uncle app developed by John Cook, a University of Melbourne scientist who is also a talented cartoonist, will never emulate the global impact of Bluey but it is seen nonetheless as a pacesetter. Centred on a generic “cranky uncle”, a know-it-all family member who claims to be better informed than the world’s leading scientists, it has helped counter climate-change denialism and vaccine misinformation. Now available in 13 languages, it has been downloaded by tens of thousands of users globally. “In this dangerous information environment, we need to build new tools to build resilience in our communities,” says Whalan. “We need our research community, our scientists, at the forefront to design some of those solutions and interventions.”

[]The Cranky Uncle app aims to counter dangerous disinformation.

The country’s long tradition of democratic innovation could end up being its superpower. “The strength of Australian democracy didn’t happen by luck,” she says. “It happened by very careful design. From the secret ballot to the enfranchisement of women, from correcting some of the mistakes of our democracy, such as the shameful disenfranchisement of First Nations people, to the design of integrity reforms in the 1970s and ’80s, which is globally renowned among policy wonks. These didn’t happen by ­accident. They happened by hard graft … Every generation has found a way of doing it. So it’s our time now to rise to that challenge.”

Whalan sees other home-field ­advantages. Here, there has not been the same “democratic backsliding” evident in other advanced nations, such as America. There is not the same societal atomisation and collapse of communities – the “bowling alone” syndrome identified at the turn of the century by the Harvard academic Robert D. Putnam. Rather, the clubability of Australia, and the strength of civil ­society, is a valuable resource, even if in recent years there have been signs of ­fragmentation and fraying. Says Whalan: “Throughout history it’s been organisations like the Country Women’s Association, the RSL, the community choirs and so on. These go to our democratic way of life, not just the formal institutions and processes and legis­lation and laws. It’s the things in our day-to-day lives, and our culture, in our shared identity. I’ve got a new appreciation of how important that is.”

But how can that contend with modern-day threats posed by artificial intelligence? “It’s the way that AI ­connects to the challenge coming from social media and digital platforms. It connects to foreign interference. It connects to declining public trust in institutions. It’s the connections between these challenges that makes it alarming, but which also requires a more joined-up, cross-sector approach in the solutions space.”

To keep pace, the Albanese government has promised to develop “Democracy 2.0”, an ambition outlined in a speech by the then home affairs minister, Clare O’Neil, at the Museum of Australian Democracy on the day after Donald Trump survived an assassination ­attempt in Pennsylvania. This modernisation program includes new legislative powers to hold ­digital platforms to account and updated regulatory settings to govern AI, striking a balance between its potential for good and propensity for harm. A new technology ­foreign interference taskforce, known as Techfit, has already been established to ­combat bad international actors. The National Anti-Corruption Commission was created in 2022 to deter and detect public officials ­acting unlawfully.

During the September sitting of parliament, the government will introduce its long-awaited electoral reform bill. Its proposals will include donation and ­expenditure caps on political donations, to protect the system from what the special minister Don Farrell has called “the growing threat of big money in politics.” At the last federal election, Clive Palmer spent $123 million in support of his United Australia Party – although it only ended up with one Senate seat in Victoria. The delayed reform package is also expected to include a “truth in advertising” measure to crack down on misinformation in political ads.

O’Neil claimed Australia could show the rest of the world how to “survive and thrive”. She even ­echoed the messianism of Labor prime minister Ben Chifley, asserting: “This is Australia’s light-on-the-hill moment.” Her speech, however, was also a reality check. It cited worrisome survey data from the Australian Public Service Commission showing that only half of Australians believe democracy is on the right track.

“Nigh on a decade,” says Jeni Whalan, “the research has been pointing us to a decline in trust in institutions of all kinds, a sense that young people didn’t care about their democracy as much as older generations, a sense of disenfranchisement and entrenched inequality.” Still, she ardently believes that in future-proofing its democratic system, Australia can call on old-fashioned virtues: the country’s pioneering and problem-solving tradition. “Many of the reforms have a wonderfully Australian pragmatism to them. They’re creations that underpin the lofty ideals of democracy but with this very Australian pragmatism and practicality.” But the dizzying speed of technological change, she concedes, is daunting: “The things that will be in place by 2040 are the sort of things we haven’t even thought of yet, that we cannot even begin to imagine.”

What makes this year of democracy so momentous is not just that so many elections are taking place – in more than 60 countries, half the world’s population is going to the polls – but that democracy itself is on the ballot. That’s certainly true in the United States. In India’s election earlier this year, the largest on the planet, the country’s secular democratic tradition was also under threat, which partly explained why its Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, failed to win an outright majority.

[]Democracy sausages on Voice referendum day.Credit: Oscar Colman

In contrast to other nations, Australia looks in pretty good shape. But the trend lines are worrying. The Albanese government’s grandest initiative in the ­democracy space ended in crushing defeat. In the 2023 referendum, the Indigenous Voice to Parliament did not even come close to getting the two majorities in ­favour to alter the constitution. From Peter Dutton’s attack on the integrity of the AEC to the slew of misinformation about the Voice, including that it could pave the way for land confiscation, the referendum was a poor advertisement for Australian democracy.

With the federal election looming, the democracy agenda, which can often feel abstract to voters, will become a lesser priority. In the recent cabinet reshuffle, Clare O’Neil, who describes herself as a “long-term ­democracy nerd”, was replaced by Tony Burke, who has now taken over the super-portfolio of home affairs and immigration. Given the degree of difficulty that comes with the immigration brief, safeguarding democracy is unlikely to be uppermost in his mind. Besides, at a time when tensions in the Middle East have raised community tensions here, promoting social cohesion has become more of a priority than democratic resilience, even though they are flip-sides of the same coin. In July, the Labor MP Peter Khalil was appointed the country’s first special social cohesion envoy.

Even commonsense proposals aimed at strengthening democracy come with risks. Take the plan to enact new truth-in-political-advertising laws. It could end up being counterproductive if the AEC is mandated to act as the referee. “The moment we start making pronouncements about what candidates are saying,” warns Tom Rogers, “that will really impact on us.”

At the end of this year, Rogers will also hand on the baton. This sentinel of democracy will end his watch. Already he is reflecting on the changes he has seen since taking over the AEC, at a time when it was reeling from the bungled 2013 Western Australia Senate election, when 1375 votes went astray. “If you had told me back then that we would have a defending democracy unit, the electoral integrity task force and the stop and think campaign, I would have laughed. It was so far away from our experience back then, when elections were just about the sausage sizzle with no thought of misinformation … But it’s a new era.”

Not everyone in Australian politics fully realises that, says Rogers, who recalls a conversation with a parliamentarian from a few years back. “Jeez, you’re lucky mate,” said the pollie. “It’s a church hall and a piece of paper. How hard can that be?”

“That’s the image,” says this old soldier, “and in some ways, that’s not a bad thing. But what’s missing is how democracy is really under threat globally. We’re managing that process in Australia in a really successful way, which is something which I think all Australians should be proud of. But, man, it’s complex.”