Cape Talk

Thought through and the modeling that we all can agree with and trust in terms of should there be curtailment and what the impact on various sectors that that's been included in the calculations. Jani Stradom, thanks for talking to us, CEO at Agri Western Cape. To go back to local government elections and low percentage polls and so on, several people have contacted me, and it's something that comes up a lot. Shouldn't we like Australia and Brazil and other countries? Only about 20 of them.

have compulsory voting. And there are significant arguments against them. Some of them are philosophical. Like, if you have the right to vote, should you not also have the right not to vote? So voting is a moral choice, not a compulsory obligation. That's the philosophical argument. In the U.S., they have a freedom of speech argument. I don't like any of the candidates. You are forcing me to choose someone I don't like.

You are impacting my freedom of speech choices. And then there are the practical. You know, Australia, for example, they hardly ever follow up on anybody who didn't vote. These Brazilian elections, 20% of the people who were eligible to vote didn't vote. And nothing's going to happen to them. And if you are going to sit in place a system that follows up on everybody, the amount of infrastructure that you need to maintain in order to make that

Work is that worth doing? Soley sent me a message, he spends quite a lot of time in Switzerland and says that in one particular canton, Schaffhausen, that gets the highest voter participation because residents get charged for failing to vote without a valid reason. But what they get charged is 120 rand. So that's one of the other arguments against compulsory voting: that it discriminates.

Against the poor, because that 120 Rand for a poor Swiss, if there is such a thing, is a considerably greater burden to bear than a wealthy Swiss who goes, I don't want to vote. 120 Rand, please. You know, I spend that on bubblegum before 8 o'clock in the morning, so I don't care about that 120 Rand fine for not voting. But the poor person, for whom that 120 Rand is a significant amount, they get disproportionately burdened by it. So it's not as simple as saying,

Let's have compulsory voting because there are, I think, substantive arguments against it. John Maytham on Cape Talk, it's four o'clock. Streaming countrywide on Prime Media Plus on DSTV, channel 885, and across the city on 567.