Saturday was election day in Australia and Audrey made it into the Guardian's election blog - focusing on the gigantic senate ballot paper which we all had to fill in.
It was my first time as a voter in Australia. Australia has compulsory voting which means you are fined if you don't go and vote and choose instead to just sit around in a pub and grumble about the state of the economy (which is more what I'm used to people doing). It's a good system in that turn-outs tend to be around 90-95% (rather than UK local government elections which attract turnouts of about 25%) but bad when you see the state of some of the crack-pots who go and vote (often for other crack-pots) and thereby have something of a say in terms of who runs the country.
To entice people along many polling booths run a sausage sizzle and cake stall, meaning that politics becomes synonymous with the smell of a cooking sausage!
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