I was sitting in a pub in North Melbourne when Treasurer Wayne Swan delivered his sixth budget. I was there with other 'wonks', Twitter tragics with a robust interest in politics, and we had purposely congregated to watch Swan sketch out the funding for Labor's big-ticket policies.
As strange as it sounds for normal people to be doing this on a rainy Tuesday night, it got weirder for me when I received a text from my sister. 'There must be hope', it said. The initial tally for the mayoral elections in my Philippine birthtown showed the opposition in the lead.
My sister added that people were scrutinising the numbers, which in the local context means they were watching for anomalies. It is an open secret that the incumbent engages in undemocratic methods to stay in office.
The juxtaposition threw me in many ways, such as by highlighting how much Australians take for granted that elections would be tamper-free. When I heard Swan being heckled in the parliamentary chamber at the start of his speech, I also realised democracy will always be an unfinished project.
As a mechanism for national self-reflection, representational democracy is still the best model we have. It is how our sense of identity and aspiration finds collective — and cacophonous — expression. The ideal endures despite the cacophony because silence is even more unbearable.
But reality often falls short of this ideal, especially in places like the Philippines where political dynasties have long had a stranglehold on government. Nearly all the names on the senatorial line-up in the latest elections are entirely familiar, fielded by families who have walked the halls of power for decades.
It is hard to tell whether this feudal state of things is sustained by grinding poverty or perpetuates it, but it is clear enough that it is a legacy of the colonial era.
The intersection of the Philippine revolution with the Spanish-American War swept Filipinos into a second period of colonisation under the United States. Spain lost the war and, after ruling for almost 400 years, ceded the Philippines to the US at the price of $20 million at the 1898 Treaty of Paris. The Philippines would not become an independent state until 1946.
The strata of society that flourished under Spain were entrenched when the colonial administration under William Howard Taft limited suffrage to those who could speak or write in English or Spanish, had a specified annual income,