Ito Ay Manifestong Demokrasya: Elections, Political Culture, and Youth Power in Australia and the Philippines

Photo: Myk Miravalles on Unsplash

As if a tri-annual ritual, election season in Australia has brought forward the regular outpouring of veneration for our electoral system. This civic pride that we have in what can seem to outsiders as quite mundane, is of course well deserved. Pop-culture figures and commentators like Abbie Chatfield will proudly talk about just how preferential voting ‘means there’s no such thing as a wasted vote’.  Without a preferential (or what’s sometimes called ‘instant-run-off’) voting system, both Peter Dutton and Adam Bandt would have likely held the seats of Dickson and Melbourne.

That is not even touching on the other factor making Australian voting unique: compulsory voting. Despite the fact it is essentially a way the government can fine you that doesn’t exist in most other countries, compulsory voting remains incredibly popular. Emeritus Professor of Politics at Monash University, Paul Strangio goes as far as saying it’s, “a mainstay of an Australian democratic exceptionalism”.

Yet at the same time as the Australian system is lauded as visionary, it creates large blind spots. Emphasis on how unique, special, and exceptional this system is makes it hard to take lessons on democracy from other parts of the world, especially those viewed as marred by corruption and cronyism, or gaming the government to assist one’s political allies.

But democracy is a project of constant improvement, and following on from the Australian election, it’s worth looking to a country that held its own election only 9 days after:

The Philippines.

Hurdles to democratic representation in the Philippines

The Philippines is far from a perfect democracy. Under the Economist’s Democracy Index, the Philippines has spent more than a decade as a ‘flawed democracy’, scoring particularly poorly on the ‘functioning of government’ and ‘political culture’. The abuse of state resources and ‘vote-buying’, a process by which resources, financial or otherwise, are exchanged for votes, are consistent problems in Philippine elections, including in the most recent #Halalan2025.

Photo: Senator Risa Hontiverdos on Wikimedia Commons

#Halalan2025, which are the midterm-elections that occurred in the Philippines on the 12th of May, made worldwide news with some of its headline results. Former President Rodrigo Duterte, father of Vice-President Sara Duterte who is currently facing impeachment charges in the Senate, re-won the mayoralty of the southern city of Davao, beating his closest opponent by over 540,000 votes, despite currently being in the Hague following a warrant from the ICC.

The Duterte Youth Party-List, a political grouping running in the party-list system (intended to represent minority interests in Parliament), came second on the party-list results, only to have that result struck down by the Commission on Elections.

These kind of stories may give Australians a fair amount of disquiet about the state of Philippine democracy, but #Halalan2025 is not the only election the Philippines is holding this year.

Sangguniang Kabataan: Recognition of Youth Power

On December 1, a unique election will take place in the Philippines, the Sangguniang Kabataan (SK, Youth Council) elections. The smallest unit of Philippine governance is the barangay, a unit that can sometimes take in a number of streets or a couple of blocks. Republic Act 7160 (The Local Government Code), aside from setting up the modern system of the barangay, required that by law, each of the 42,052 barangays across the country have an SK. 

Voters between the ages of 15-21 are able to vote for candidates between the ages of 18-21 that will sit on a formal, empowered youth council. They have a set portion of the barangay budget to which they have sole discretion to use. They are elected in full council elections (such as the one happening on December 1st).

The SKs are of course not without their own controversy. They have been accused as a breeding ground for political dynasties, and failed at their main purpose, so much so that in 2016, the Republic Act 10742 aimed to reform and protect them from dynastic interference as well as  introduce some much needed changes.

But it is important to note, that despite all their flaws, the SKs exist and are composed of members appointed in open, regulated, and national elections, whichand that certainly counts for something. Trying to imagine the same kind of system occurring in Australia is legitimately difficult. Australian politicians have in the past lambasted young people in civic and political spaces as simply looking for ‘any opportunity to get out of school’ or that peer pressure and ‘[fitting] in with the crowd’ mean that young people would only be parroting existing political actors. Both quotes respectively are attributable to former Coalition MPs Keith Pitt (Nationals) and Craig Kelly (before his defection from the Liberals to the United Australia Party) respectively.

In his almost utopian work 2040, Australian filmmaker Damien Gameau dreamt up a similar idea occurring in Australia, but far into the future. Australia often ties itself in knots over the role of young people in our democracy, with half-hearted attempts at Youth Advisory Committees, political leaders lamenting school strikes for the climate as ‘too activist’, or the periodic discussion of lowering the voting age to 16. But this sense of youth activism and change is something the Philippines is deeply familiar with, with young people having played a critical part in the EDSA revolution that deposed former-President and dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and a continued role in contemporary political challenges. A country that has real experience of youth power may be more willing to provide formal structures for youth involvement.

Maybe the answer comes from a version of this system. Providing formal and universal structures of youth politics with independent decision-making power, and importantly, full elections, could offer a meaningful avenue for young Australians to influence national conversation. Pushing forward with ambitious ideas and legislation that attempt to create structures of meaningful youth power, even if they aren’t always perfect, is something that Australia can learn from a democracy born out of popular revolution. 

Pag-unlad: democracy is always a work in progress

There are likely many things that Philippine elections could learn from how elections are done in Australia. Preferential ballots, compulsory voting, and strong electoral transparency are only the beginnings of a list. However, views of Australian exceptionalism should not stop Australians looking for answers in unexpected places. Australians shouldn’t believe that they have nothing to learn from the conduct of Philippine democracy, or for that fact, any democracy. 

No democracy is perfect, and democratic governance requires constant innovation and adaptation. Despite the adage, there is no ‘democracy manifest’, in Australia or abroad,  there is only the hard work of democracy.