Opinion: One week federal election campaign long enough for voters to decide

WHEN Henry Tudor ran against Richard III, the campaign only took a few hours and a winner was announced before sundown after Richard was killed with an axe.

DEMOCRACY has made the transfer of power so time-consuming that many us look back fondly to simpler times when election campaigns were considered a frivolous pursuit.

When Henry Tudor ran against Richard III on Bosworth Field in 1485, the campaign only took a few hours, and a winner was announced before sundown after one of Henry’s more active staffers killed Richard with an axe.

Today we are hampered by all this politically correct nonsense where any suggestion that Bill Shorten should simply raise an army and slaughter the Coalition on a windswept field in Eden Monaro would be howled down as more evidence of a patriarchal dominion maintained through gender-based violence.

COVERAGE: Follow the campaign trail here

Yet, gazing across the bleak landscape of six more weeks of this campaign, the less complicated world of 15th century Britain does possess a shimmering allure.

Which brings us to Derek Brown, 43, an intelligent, plain-speaking Queenslander who works as an electrician at a central Queensland mine, and who does not advocate a return to settling leadership battles with crossbows.

He just wants a one week federal election campaign.

Derek is one of thousands of Queenslanders who have their own thoughts on how to run this country – views not routinely aired in the mainstream media or even social media because of time constraints involved in making an honest living. Often those ideas have merit, like Derek’s one week election campaign, which political purists might decry as an affront to the democratic process, but which ordinary taxpayers might see as a way of saving $197,646,219.

That’s precisely the Australian Electoral Commission’s costing of the 2013 election.

In 2001 it cost $105,830,037, and back in 1969 Australia went to the polls using some spare change found under the cushions of an old Canberra couch – $1,425,075. We could cut expenditure to 1969 levels if we settled for a stump speech on the ABC, an internet site to peruse policies and a modest travel itinerary.

“One week is long enough to look at the policies and if you don’t know what the major parties generally stand for anyway, you’re a goose,” Derek says.

Originally published as Opinion: One week federal election campaign long enough for voters to decide