.... We don't have mandatory voting like I believe y'all do in Australia....
You're correct - we do have mandatory voting in Australia at all levels - Federal, State and Local Government. There's supposed to be a fine and maybe even a prison sentence for those who don't vote, although I've no idea how rigorously non-voters are followed up by the Electoral office.
But even then there are inequities in how votes are tallied. We have parties doing preference deals, in which a minor candidate can allocate some of their votes to another candidate. Then there are donkey votes (number the slip straight down the page), deliberate non-voters (mark the voting slip so it's invalid) etc.
In federal and most state parliaments, there are two houses of parliament - House of Representatives, and the Senate (lower and upper houses modeled on the UK Westminster system just as there is in the US - Congress and the Senate) and sometimes the Representatives are loaded one way and the Senate is biased the other way. Sometimes a minor party holds the balance of power. And so on.
I doubt if it's possible to come up with a perfect electoral system.
However this doesn't mean the people who would make the best leaders are voted in. I think there are people out there who would be better national leaders but who are not even even interested in politics.
I suppose when it comes to debates about national interest, I'd have to fall back on a quote by an Australian politician named Sir Paul Hasluck.
Paul Hasluck - Wikipedia
To save me having to go digging around in my overcrowded bookshelf to find the book, and then trying to find the page, I'm trying to remember as much of the quote as possible without looking it up, so it may not be completely accurate, but here goes -
"The bedrock you have to reach in international affairs is the national interest. A country's national interest need not be without altruism, but if you loosen your tongue or unsheath your pen before you have gotten down to this bedrock, you may do nothing for society at large and at the worst bring disaster onto your own country."
Something like that - the point is that he was saying that for
every nation, the bedrock they need to reach when involved in international affairs is their own national interest.
Which is something neither Trump or Trudeau seem to remember when dealing with each other.
