Matthew Abraham: SA risks stumbling toward zombie democracy

Voters acting like dazed extras in a zombie movie risk saddling the state with a “ridgy-didge zombie democracy”, political commentator Matthew Abraham argues. He says all it needs is “an ‘elected leader’ who is an autocrat”.

Zombies. They’re the gift that keeps on giving.

Right now, South Australians are innocently stumbling toward the March 21 South Australian election, like dazed extras in the shlock zombie movie Shaun of the Dead.

The war with Iran that is consuming the Middle East is a planet away in terms of air miles, but right next door to our everyday lives, posing a real threat not just to petrol stocks, but grocery prices, inflation, home loan interest rates, superannuation nest eggs, you name it.

Most voters are understandably more worried about petrol gauges than the horrors buried beneath the record field of 388 House of Assembly candidates chasing our votes.

It’s a ridiculous number, clobbering the tally of 240 wannabe MPs who put their hands up at the 2022 state election.

Three hundred and eighty-eight this time round. Who are all these people?

The real and present danger is that South Australians wake up after polling day finding themselves in a Down Under version of a zombie democracy.

The Human Rights Watch describes a zombie democracy as an empty democratic ritual.

This election has felt like that from day one.

The organisation says a growing number of autocrats “still hold periodic elections since their people have come to expect them, but they do not even pretend that these empty rituals are free or fair”.

“The result has been the proliferation of what might be called ‘zombie democracies’ – the living dead of electoral political systems, recognizable in form but devoid of any substance,” it says.

Does this sound at all familiar?

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A ridgy-didge zombie........

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