When I was studying for my bachelor of arts (back when people willingly went into debt to become experts on Jacobean literature), I was pretty opinionated. I loved getting into political discussions with anyone who’d engage. This mainly involved regurgitating the content of newspaper commentary pages to my grandparents and quoting articles about the failures of mutual obligations policies to creeps with darting eyes on public transport (the joke is on you, eccentrically dressed man who just wanted to sit near a human female).
This election day, every politician in the country will be filmed gnawing on some unidentified meat in limp white bread.
Since I’ve had kids and life experience, I’ve left hyper-engagement behind, choosing instead to cultivate a world-weariness that matches my character-actor face. Humanity keeps pumping out novel cruelties and down in the “anus of the world” (as Jerry Seinfeld once said) we are prisoners to inertia. It is dispiriting to care too much. These days, I pay attention only when I have to vote. The entry-level Australian democratic experience – standing in line, quietly mocking the independent who’s a little too into “commonsense gun ownership”, and eventually casting your vote – is also where the democracy sausage rears its ugly, sausagey head. I hate them, and I want you to hate them too.
Before I go too deep, I should declare a potential conflict of interest: my parents – relics of the original hippy era – raised my siblings and me as vegetarians. At school, I had to bring my foil-wrapped vegetarian sausages on sausage sizzle days. The idea of sausages being remotely celebratory, given their link to a very ’90s brand of exclusionary regional Australia, has never sat quite right. But honestly, even without that particular trauma, I’d still hate them. I get that to some, the democracy sausage (democrausage?) is a quintessentially Australian tradition – but to me, it’s inauthentic, low-key jingoistic and flat-out gross.
Let’s start with the basics: the democracy sausage began organically enough. Australia’s paper of record (Wikipedia), dates the formal usage of the term to around 2013, though it probably predates that. Incidentally, 2013 was also the year Tony Abbott became prime minister – a very funny joke for democracy to play on us all. But as soon as the term entered the lexicon, it became something politicians were expected to do, something commentators would analyse, something meant to prove their egalitarian chops (vale Malcolm Turnbull).
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This election day, every politician in the country will be filmed gnawing on some unidentified meat in limp white bread — a gesture so thoroughly co-opted by political theatre and marketing that it may as well have been developed in a lab.
There is something jingoistic about the democracy sausage too. At its core, it’s an attempt at patriotism – a “hey, isn’t it great that we all have to vote?” kind of thing. But patriotism is, inarguably, something that Australians have never figured out how to do well. We lack the wide-eyed earnestness of Americans, and we don’t have a royal family we’re emotionally invested in. The Australians who do wrap themselves – literally or figuratively – in the flag often hold views about national identity that range from muddled to genuinely terrifying.
The sausage is an attempt at off-label patriotism, but it is grounded in the mythology of a whiter, simpler past. Sure, sausages are cheap, and that’s meant to make them feel “egalitarian”. But Australia, by and large, isn’t. Also, they look and smell disgusting.
