Civic Duty: Annabel Crabb is on a one-woman mission to make Australian politics interesting

Australian politics: it’s enough to make your eyes glaze over — especially if you’re a 10-year-old kid being forced to sit through a HASS lesson on how our unique parliamentary system works.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if there was a way to make people “marvel at the miracle that is the Australian electoral process” instead of rolling their eyes and running for the nearest exit?

Annabel Crabb is on a mission to prove that there is — she’s taking Aussie audiences along for the ride via her new series Civic Duty for ABC, and engaging the younger generation through her recently-released children’s book, There’s A Prawn In Parliament House: The Kids’ Guide To Australia’s Amazing Democracy.

“It took me about eight years to write the book — I actually started writing it when my eldest kid was going to Canberra on a school trip,” she says of the genesis of her most recent project.

“As I was writing it, I was like, ‘all these stories are so cool!’

“And then I started thinking it would also be cool if you could make a TV show about how unusual our system is, and try and tell some of the stories — then of course I got over-enthusiastic … and had to make it.”

Fast forward to now and that show is finally hitting screens. Those “cool stories”? Turns out Crabb, a self-confessed politics nerd, wasn’t just over-egging the pudding — they actually are pretty darn intriguing.

“If you sit people down and say, ‘hello, now we will have 45 minutes of Civic Education’, people will break their legs running away,” Crabb says.

“But if you start somewhere interesting, or with something that makes them go, ‘Oh!’ then you can kind of reel them in a little bit.”

And that’s what she does, beginning in the first episode of the three-part series with a tale about acclaimed author Lewis Carroll and the unlikely role he played in helping shape the way Australia votes. The stories get steadily stranger from there as she takes a deep-dive into what makes our system tick.

Crabb points out that our electoral system, and the way we vote, is wholly unique. For a start, there’s our independent electoral commission, preferential voting, the concept of the secret ballot (we invented that too, apparently) and how we are the only people in the world who hand out How To Vote cards.

We are also one of the few countries in the world where voting is compulsory and where we are fined if we don’t.

So how did it all come about? That’s what she’s exploring. “It all seems kind of normal to us, but in international terms, our system is pretty much what the platypus looked like to European arrivals,” says Crabb.

“There is so much about our system that is unusual — we were the first country in the world to establish a permanent independent electoral commission, which sounds like a really dry piece of information, but the story behind it is wild.”

Crabb takes a look at it all as the 2025 Federal Election gets underway, going behind the scenes at the Australian Electoral Commission, an institution she describes as “a beige behemoth, that — triennially — is obliged to orchestrate a fiendishly complex, half-a-billion-dollar exercise involving 18 million voters and 100,000 election workers, on a date that’s not confirmed until the last minute.”

With our historically ironclad two-party system looking increasingly shaky in recent years, and with the goalposts shifting dramatically during the last election, it feels as though this program, and Crabb’s book — which injects a little colour for younger readers — has come at just the right time.

“It has been a wild ride, and very difficult,” Crabb says of the process of bringing the series to fruition.

“But (the show) has brought together some absolutely scorching political and historical stories, and some unusual aspects of our story, and I hope (audiences) will find it a bit pride-inspiring, and confidence-inspiring in our system.

“But also leave room for seeing that we are also changing our system gradually in the way that we vote, in the way that we campaign and protest.

“Involvement in our democracy doesn’t begin and end with just voting — there are other ways people power works.

“I think that is why it’s so important for people to understand our system, and understand the way we can bring about change that is beyond just turning up, eating a sausage and scribbling on paper.”

Annabel Crabb’s Civic Duty starts on November 10 at 8.30pm on ABC and ABC iview.