I'm not an Australian I'm a Kiwi but I live in Australia, Although I cannot vote because I am not a citizen.
The Australian electoral system is an incredible complex one and it seems no one here understands it. Yes people are required to vote and can and are fined if they don't. Funilly enough as I understand it, it is not illegal to be unregestered to vote, you only get fined if you are registered to vote and you do not. Their is no official option to cast a vote for none of the above but it can be done by casting what is called an informal vote, ie you stuff up the ballot paper some way.
They have this strange thing in the electoral system that I do not really understand called preferences and that is the reson why the labour oppisition and liberal led coalition government ended up with 100% of the vote. It works somehow by redistributing the votes for canidates who do not get in, to canidates that do. Sounds very dodge to me but their you have it. You can specify you preferences yourself so say your prefered canidate doesn't get in then your vote will go onto you 2nd choice and so on. If you do it this way you might have to chose up to 20 alternative choices to recieve you vote. Their is also another system where the preferences have been worked out before hand by a political party and you can just vote to go with that choice be it for the libs or labour or whatever. That looks after the canidates for the house of representatives. That is the house from which the prime minister is selected. As I said it is very complicated. It gets worse. Australia has a bicarmal system so their is the house of representatives and the senate. Both have seperate polls although I think they are held at the same time but the rules for polling are differen't. The senate is polled using a proportional system. Of course that is not the end of it. Austrailia is also a federation so all the states also have their own state parliment. That is another election each for Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Austrialia, and Western Austrialia although these elections are all held at diferent times and only concern people who live in those states. The state system is also unicarmel so their is only a house of representatives for each state. This is all off the top of my head from when I did a polsci course years ago in uni in NZ so could be very wrong.
