Shouts from the desert

Yesterday I was expecting to have to look after one of the kids in the morning (at least), but at 6:40 in the morning circumstances changed, and 5 minutes later I was sending an SMS to David Havyatt, the local Democrats candidate, to ask where he could use me. At 8am I was on the Beecroft Public School booth, where I ran into Pierre, who I knew from law school. Pierre was helping out the Liberal candidate, although he is not a member of the Liberal party and is not somebody I would pick for sympathising with Liberal Party views.

Pierre revealed that Greg Smith had been recruiting barristers, judges and court staff to work on the campaign. Pierre is currently working as clerk to a judge of the supreme court, so he was among those targetted by Smith.

The Smith campaign had a ludicrous number of volunteers at Beecroft &emdash; at least twice as many as they could productively use.

After about an hour and a half working at Beecroft two more volunteers arrived, so David redeployed me to Epping North. I arrived to find a booth that was also swarmed by Liberal volunteers &emdash; again at least twice as many as could be productively used.

At this point I should mention the communal atmosphere among party and candidate booth workers. You might suspect that there is a lot of animosity among the competing workers, but there is normally none. No matter what the campaign was like &emdash; no matter how nasty &emdash; on election day the differences are put aside. Speaking policy is generally taboo unless a voter asks for a policy explanation. The workers know their differences, but they put them aside in support of principles of democracy. There were gusts of wind at some points yesterday that was blowing down signs &emdash; when this was happening, booth workers would pick up the signs of even competing candidates.

The Epping North booth was visited by Greg Smith, John Howard, and Maxine McKew, with Smith arriving first, then Howard, and McKew arriving shortly after Howard, so that all three were there at once. While there, the people manning GetUp's "bring Hicks home" booth tried hitting up the PM's security detail for signatures (unsuccessfully), the PM himself (twice, both times unsuccessfully), and the PM's driver, where they were successful.

On arrival the PM proceeded to greet, individually, all campaign workers from all sides. This is fairly typical behaviour for the PM, and the general rule of election day courtesy applies so that it is proper to accept the greeting and handshake offered. Only one worker &emdash; an ALP volunteer &emdash; refused.

While the PM and Smith were pressing the flesh, McKew lined up with the ALP booth workers to hand out how-to-vote material. Most voters did not even notice her at first, but occasionally one would walk past her, do a double-take, then turn around to tell her how impressed they were with her and welcoming her to the Bennelong campaign. Not a single person had a bad thing to say to or about her.

Smith was another story. Many voters were furious about the automated telephone calls made on Friday. One, escorting her elderly mother, whose mobility was limited, gave him an earful for disturbing the mother with not one, but two automated telephone calls. Even if the telephone is right next to you an automated telephone call is a significant privacy violation, but when getting up to answer the phone involves significant effort for the recipient it goes beyond rudeness and verges on bastadry, the second call pushing it clearly into bastard territory. To be fair, Smith's older brother (who is a doctor and so I will refer to as Dr Smith) was working the booth and the automated telephone calls were head office's idea and he (Dr Smith) had tried to stop them from doing it, however Greg Smith must have cooperated in it since he had to provide the recording that was used to make the call.

Another voter was extremely unhappy about the number of corflute posters of Smith stuck to telegraph poles in the area &emdash; a practice that the Prime Minister had condemned as illegal in the Bennelong campaign in 2004. When I pointed out to the voter that Smith was standing just a few metres away, he took some satisfaction in the prospect of telling Smith to his face about his feelings on the matter, and duly did so.

At this point a profile of the volunteers for Smith at Epping North is in order. Most of the volunteers were Young Liberals, but there were a few middle-aged and older booth workers for the Liberals. One of these was Greg Smith's older brother, Dr Smith, who describes himself as a bioethicist, which for the uninitiated is a doctor charged with responsibility for ethical decisions, usually as part of a committee in a hospital. Another was a barrister who was not a member of the Liberal Party, but relevantly shares with Greg Smith and Dr Smith their Roman Catholic beliefs. A third was a mother with grown children (although you would not have picked her for being that old) who knew Greg Smith through the Right to Life association. The fourth was also a Roman Catholic. Are we seeing a pattern here?

In the late afternoon, one of the voters had words with Dr Smith. She objected strongly to the automated telephone calls. She went on to line up, then got out of line to come back to have another go at Dr Smith before returning to the line. Then she left the line again to return to Dr Smith to raise another issue &emdash; she was extremely unhappy about Greg Smith's involvement with Right to Life and could never support a candidate who had taken anti-abortion views. And so the election day atmosphere was broken.

Dr Smith tried to defend the anti-abortion position to the voter, who by this point had turned to stride back to the line. That was not the end of the matter, however &emdash; one of the ALP volunteers turned to Dr Smith to take him to task over his brother seeking to interfere with her right to choose and a brief argument ensued before I intervened to point out that they were breaching election day etiquette against policy debates at the booth and getting them to acknowledge that there was no way either was going to be able to convince the other to change their point of view.

Not content to leave it at that, I then tried to explain to them why they would not be able to reach agreement &emdash; the outcome of the ethical question depended on base assumptions that at some point were a matter of subjective impression and not subject to proof or disproof. The ALP volunteer seemed to accept this, but Dr Smith responded that "that's not ethics." Pardon me, I thought &emdash; a bioethicist ought to have more than enough training in multiple schools of ethical thought to understand the way base assumptions affect the outcome on ethical questions. I actually have training in bioethics, having taken bioethics as part of my law degree specifically so as to get an understanding of the different schools of ethical thought in the context of the single sphere of ethics that poses the greatest ethical challenges there are &emdash; this gives the context for my surprise that a professional bioethicist would give such a response.

So I asked Dr Smith about the schools of ethical thought he used in deriving his ethical positions. His answer: "Eastern mysticism and Roman Catholicism, and Roman Catholicism has been the greatest school of ethical thought for many years."

The problem now of course is that while both Roman Catholicism and Eastern mysticism contain teaching on morality this is not the same as teaching on ethics although there is some limited ethical content in both. Moreover, it was clear that Dr Smith could not recognise that Roman Catholicism was a base assumption of the very kind he denied existed. There was no possible productive course here, so I let it drop.

But that exchange gave life to my worst fears regarding Greg Smith's suitability to act as a legislator in a nation where we must give people the right to their own viewpoints. Where we are unable to objectively resolve a conflict of interests we must give each person the benefit of making their own decisions within the full range of conduct that cannot be shown to be objectively wrong.

I had previously believed Greg Smith's background made him a significant risk that he was there to push a religious based moral agenda. The makeup of his volunteer team at Epping North was fully consistent with that probability. The response of his brother leaves it beyond any doubt. Resort to morality is a poor basis for reasoned argument, and if you have to resort to religion to justify your position &emdash; even when the resort is to religion as a base assumption &emdash; you have inevitably lost unless the other person shares that belief. If you confuse morals with ethics, and especially if you believe that your base assumptions are a truth that simply cannot admit of challenge, then when you fail to convince others of something you believe is indisputable you are going to look to the law to enforce your belief against them.

With a majority of the votes in Epping now counted, it is clear that Levine has not scored enough of the primary vote to make it to the final round, and so Smith will be getting the seat - Epping has just elected somebody to Parliament who wants to use the law to force them to abide by his religious views of morality &emdash; a kind of Christian Taliban.

The Epping vote in the Legislative Council is more promising, although the vote across the State is not. In 2003 the democrats scored 1.57% of the Legislative Council votes across the State, and on counting so far have scored 1.54% &emdash; statistically no movement at all. In Epping they scored 2.04% in 2003, and 3.05% in 2007 &emdash; a 50% improvement. The Balaclava, Beecroft and Epping North booths are stand-out results, with the Democrats scoring 6.47% of the Legislative Council vote in Balaclava, 4.47% in Beecroft, and 4.09% in Epping North.

Still, the statewide vote is insufficient to get a Democrat elected to the Legislative Council, and bodes ill for the Democrats' chances in the Senate race later this year.