I think it’s safe to say that I’ve officially got the post-election blues.

ACTA, TPPA, Skynet, Video Surveillance Bill, Denniston, Durban and the demise of the Kyoto Protocol, the Ross Sea, same sex marriage, beneficiary cuts, education, deep sea oil drilling, fracking, corporatisation. There’s a long list of things that have already been pushed through or that are looming, and I just can’t make myself find the energy to fight. I’d honestly want to just go and live on an island somewhere, but aside from the prohibitive cost, the fact that we’ve already irreversibly fucked the climate makes that a really shitty idea – just look at Tuvalu and the Christmas Islands and similar countries.

I know, intellectually, that there are still ways to fight. But they seem to be a combination of utterly pointless and ridiculously difficult. Submit on bills? That went well for Video Surveillance, only 1% of submissions supported it. Vote? Well, we got a higher Greens result, but there’s nothing more to be done on the matter until 2014 and right now nothing could convince me that by then many of these fights will have been lost – particularly those regarding saving species from extinction that are not only an important part of the ecosystem but biologically distinct on a massive scale, like our frogs that are the closest thing left to species that lived over two hundred million years ago. My hopes aren’t high for the toothfish, either, which is the reason the government vetoed the conversion of the Ross Sea into a marine reserve – they’re a long lived, slow maturing species, and people like to fish them.

Some people suggest that if anyone is unhappy they should join a political party and get active, but this costs money and presumes that people who are unhappy should want to join a political party, have the time to be active in a political party, have the skill set appropriate to working in a political party, and have the means to support themselves while being active in a political party. I don’t have any money spare to join and sorry, but someone with social phobia is not a good fit for active involvement in politics, even backstage. There’s a reason I blog.

And yeah, there’s that. Even that’s something of a time sink though – to write you need something to write about, which means you need to be keeping on top of current events, either through the utterly mediocre mainstream news or, if you want to really hit what’s going on, through other methods. Often those other methods involve seeing what other people are blogging about, and then you’re getting into territory which is being needlessly repeated, unless you happen to have some kind of unique, fresh perspective, which is unlikely – and even if you do, you need to have that unique perspective often enough and loudly enough to build up a steady readership, otherwise you’re just talking into a huge, crowded room full of other people talking, only those other people are already well-known and have people paying attention to them. It requires relentless dedication and, again, time, and most of the people you do reach are going to be of a similar frame of mind anyway.

All this of course is one reason why Occupy is important. Unfortunately I really haven’t been present there much – I think I’ve stopped by once or twice since Holly got sick and then had to be put to sleep, because right now it’s just too emotionally draining to deal with. The honeymoon period is over there, too, and I have my own shit to sort through before I can be of any use to them.

It seems the “word on the street” is that the solution to what happened last night is for more people to participate in democracy. It’s hard to argue with – low voter turnout tends to favour the right, and if you look at the numbers it was actually pretty damn close. Yes, National got an unprecedented percentage of the votes, but the further right wing parties were utterly gutted, while the left-of-Labour parties saw their numbers soar. On a purely right-vs-left level, the right scraped through.

A few short months ago, something called the “Video Surveillance Bill” was being debated. It was opened for submission, as is standard. What was not standard was the short window – a mere 18 hours. Despite this, a huge number of submissions were made, many of them by people who’d never made a submission before in their lives. Most of them had probably never even thought about it. It was a pretty huge event for the more in-depth expanses of democracy in New Zealand – the first steps beyond simply voting.

However, while 99% of the submissions were seriously opposed to the bill, for reasons that were nuanced and varied, it passed after National managed to get the numbers at the last minute – from Labour. Nor was this the first time. Prior to that, the notorious Skynet bill achieved the same feat. Labour claims it would have passed anyway and they got the permanent disconnection removed from the table. The truth is that the permanent disconnection was only removed for two years – after that, it will be able to be added back in under review if the bill doesn’t manage to decrease piracy. (Which it won’t. It’s a ludicrously feeble attempt that doesn’t address any of the reasons people in New Zealand actually pirate to begin with.)

So at least twice in very recent political history (possibly three if you count the voluntary student union membership bill, which I know less about), highly unpopular bills passed because a major party ignored what its constituents wanted, even when those constituents used the tools put into place for them to have their views specifically made known.

Why, then, is anyone surprised that they didn’t come back for more?

Why are we blaming people for not participating, instead of blaming those who showed them it would have no purpose? Why are we tutting at “apathy” and not arrogance? Why are we lecturing the disenfranchised instead of the ones who made them that way?

This election was not lost by non-voters. It was lost by politicians. And if 2014 is going to be different, they need to admit that.

We’ve now heard that voter turnout was only 65% – the lowest since, apparently, the 1880s or 1980s (they said it once and people aren’t sure exactly what they heard, I think. a long time anyway!). EDIT: Someone’s just said that including specials it’s actually back up to 73%. So of course, there’s a lot of “shame on you” sentiment being thrown around.

Personally, I am sad about it. But at the same time, I can’t really blame people. People, especially young people, do not have confidence in the system. Labour’s been polling badly and have done bad on several highly public votes recently – video surveillance, Skynet, etc, where they were expected to vote against and then made dubious concessions and supported at the last minute. Though we’re not a two party system, they’re still the two major parties, and there’s been a lot of talk around me from people who don’t see any viable choices. If it’s a choice between the people you know hate you and the people who pretend they don’t but hurt you anyway, a lot of people will just say “well, fuck you both then.”

I got to the Heathcote polling station at about quarter to eight this morning and left about quarter past nine – thirteen and a half hour day. IT WAS AWESOME. Fairly early in the day the woman who was issuing Maori votes was feeling ill enough to be sent home and I was asked to take over, so I was sitting right by the door doing ordinaries for Port Hills and Te Tai Tonga. It was fairly busy – a steady stream of people all through the day, I issued 208 votes I think, most of the others did around the same or a bit less – in total, we had 1015 ordinary votes for Port Hills and about 9 for Te Tai Tonga, plus of course some specials, 69 from memory. On one of my breaks one of the enquiry officers came out too and was very complimentary.

From the votes, Ruth Dyson won the electorate – the advance and specials could potentially change that if they’re all for Carter, but she was ten or fifteen points ahead of him, so it’s really unlikely. It seems to be a fairly liberal electorate though – Greens had higher than the national average and Nats were lower.

Now it’s just a matter of whether Nats can govern alone – so far no, but we’ll see. Winston threw a wrench in the works of course, but sadly the lack of tactical voting in some electorates gave Nats some extra wins that could have been prevented. And we’ll see how Labour reacts to this loss. Hopefully they don’t blame the policies, because honestly most of their policies were pretty damn good. (A lot of them were taken from the Greens, of course.)

In conclusion.

FUCK YEAH GREENS.