Aussies downplay a lot of things, some Aussies anyway. They pretend they don't care, don't know, haven't worked hard on something, aren't affected etc. In some

Aussies downplay a lot of things, some Aussies anyway. They pretend they don't care, don't know, haven't worked hard on something, aren't affected etc. In some ways this is exactly opposite to Arabs. Voluntary voting in the US has one strange effect: politicians no 1 goal is to get "their" group to vote. Each side has a relatively fixed (and roughly equal) group of voters. Most of them stay home. The side that gets their group voting, even at the expense of a few defections, wins. That creates weird politics. However, that is not the case everywhere. In lots of places the paradigm is a fixed group (possibly a minority) of voters who shift alliances more easily. A multiparty system encourages this. I suspect that most defectors are actual abstainers, not defectors.