Very glad to have grown up in a society that still seems to ostensibibly respect democracy and the rule of law, I was delighted to visit the Australian Embassy in Tokyo and partake of democracy manifest in the form of a snag.
The bleak, wet day (eerily reminscent of my native Melbourne) was the backdrop to consular officials serving democracy sausages as Aussies flocked to the embassy to vote ahead of the May 3 federal election.
I’m very grateful to the Embassy staff for putting on the sausage sizzle, and got to spend a lot of time chatting with some friendly Aussie voters.
It was also a delight to see the Australian Embassy boldly displaying its solidarity with Ukraine, maintaining Australia’s outstanding record of standing by its friends.
According to the Embassy, the term democracy sausage was coined in 2010 through the Snag Votes website that listed and mapped polling stations in Brisbane that were offering sausages in bread with onions and sauce. Democracy sausage was voted the word of the year in 2016. Now, the democracy sausage has become a symbol of voting and civic duty in Australia.
It’s kind of ironic that democracy sausages originated in Brisbane, the same city where the democracy manifest arrest occurred, as it is the capital city of the state of Queensland, which was run for decades by a corrupt politician referred to in some parts as the Hillbilly Dictator and remains Australia’s stronghold of Trump-like populism.
It was my first democracy sausage, and the snags were pretty decent, with some herbs and spices.
The bread could have been a bit fresher.
Onions were also decent. Not bad for 300 yen apiece.
And all-in-all it was a great luncheon and wonderful debut for the new Big Red, named in the Australian way because she is almost entirely blue. (Just as redheads are almost invariably known as Bluey in Australia.)
