But he’d been minister for the army from 1966 to 1968, when my mates and I were waking up to the wicked waste that was the Vietnam War. We cringed at the obsequious “all the way with LBJ” of the prime minister, Harold Holt, who had appointed Fraser to the job.

The sealer was that Fraser was elevated to minister for defence from 1969 to 1971. Birthday card or not, he was in charge of conscripting young men my age into the army that could, and did, send them to fight and sometimes die in a senseless war.

I was eligible fodder for conscription under Fraser’s period, and though my marble didn’t come up in the ballot, I was pretty angry about the whole damn thing.

We had to register at the age of 20, yet we didn’t get to vote until we were 21. Old enough to be forced into military uniform by lottery, but not old enough to have any say about it.

A lot of young people like me were straining to vote. We wanted a Gough Whitlam government because Whitlam had promised to withdraw all Australian troops from Vietnam, to end conscription, and to reduce the voting age to 18.

Plus it was plain embarrassing to contemplate waking up the day after the election to discover Australia still had the very silly Billy McMahon as our prime minister.

And so, when the 1972 election came around, I had my say at the ballot box, even though Fraser by then had quit the defence portfolio after a row with the then PM, John Gorton, and had such a grip on Wannon he’d never lose it, however I might vote.

Still, it felt good lining up on a Saturday morning in a crowd of people passionately wanting a say in their country’s future, whatever that might prove to be, before hurrying to the nearby cake stall set up by the good women of the local school Mothers’ Club, their tables overflowing with delicious sponges and Swiss rolls.

You need sustenance for the business of upending a government, and cakes sufficed, for sausages sizzling on newfangled gas barbecues hadn’t yet made an appearance at our polling booths in 1972.

The term “democracy sausage”, it happens, wouldn’t appear as a hashtag on social media until 2010, though it seems now to have been embedded in our culture forever.

Australia’s system of compulsory voting – and the sizzle of snags on a barbie – gets a very high proportion of us engaged in the democratic process, even if that engagement for some is limited to a few weeks or days leading to polling day.

We’ve heard the argument, tired now, that compulsory voting is a form of tyranny. It’s not, whatever libertarians might insist: it’s an elegant way of ensuring almost all of us find ourselves responsible for deciding who will – or will not – govern us for the next three or four years.

Loading

Around 90 per cent – and regularly more – of eligible Australians turn out for elections: close to the highest figure in the world.

The obverse is that in a few days, most likely no more than 66 per cent of eligible American voters will participate in the serious business of electing a president.

One of the candidates is promising to be an actual tyrant, unworthy of leading anything that calls itself a democracy, let alone that advertised as “the world’s greatest democracy”.

It speaks poorly that one in three Americans can’t be bothered to participate in the process that will decide on Tuesday, November 5, whether or not a would-be despot will lead them.

A two-thirds turn-out, as it happens, would be an unusually high one – US voter participation sat at not much more than a dismal 50 per cent for most of last century. It soared to a record 66 per cent in 2020, as voters roused themselves enough to elect Joe Biden over Donald Trump.

And now?

Would a democracy hot dog help?