Assuming we don’t count Bird of the Year, last week was my first time voting in a New Zealand election. I’ve been here a while, but for reasons too dull to recount, I didn’t have permanent residence in time for any of the others. Anyway, it’s hardly up there with 1893, but it felt like a bit of a deal to me.

Enrolling and voting was commendably easy; all done and dusted in ten minutes, without even having to venture off campus. Choosing how to vote, though – there’s no set-up that can take the hard out of that. On top of the constituency and list votes, we have a couple of referendums to contend with as well this year. It’s not surprising that a lot of people are finding this a strain.

Over the past few weeks, I've been seeing and hearing quite a few people swithering about their referendum votes, or maybe one or other of them. That's healthy; these are complex and important matters, it's no bad thing to be a bit uncertain. I'm also seeing a few being tempted by various sorts of heuristics or default strategies. Again, fair enough, I can see the appeal. But having followed some other recent referendums pretty closely, like the Scottish independence referendum (the “indyref”) in 2014, or Brexit in 2016, I’ve also become a bit wary of these shortcuts and soft options, and particularly wary of how they can be used by interested parties to ‘nudge’ us one way or the other.

Risks on all sides

One of these has to do with risk. The idea seems to be that, if we aren't convinced that all our concerns have been addressed, or the safeguards of these particular pieces of law are quite as tight or precise as they could be, the safest thing is to say no. If we can’t quite decide, better go with the ‘safe’ option, and stick rather than twisting. 

It's not a silly idea. All the same, it's making me feel a bit uneasy, for a couple of reasons. One is that it seems to take as its starting point that where we are right now is 'safe' and change is 'risky'. 

We heard a lot about this in the run-up to the Scottish Indyref. While there were, and are, strong and certain Yes or No voters on that issue, there were also a lot of waverers, not quite persuaded by either side until the last minute. Again, that was entirely understandable; there was a lot of information to process, and a lot of questionable claims being bandied around.

The No campaign – those arguing for Scotland to stay in the UK – sought to capitalise on this uncertainty, by encouraging the unsure to vote to keep things as they are. This narrative reached its peak/ risible nadir with the “Woman who made up her mind” campaign advert, in which a stereotypical Scottish housewife lamented the difficulty of making a hard choice when all she really wanted was a quiet life. Famously, she called on her husband to shut up about politics and (in the line that begat a thousand tweets and memes) to “eat your cereal,” before ultimately deciding that it was all too scary and complicated and that she would just vote No. "It's not like we can change our mind in four years' time," she worried, wringing her hands anxiously while the camera lingered on pictures of her children. “They have to live with the decision I make.” 

The ad may have been widely derided, but the appeal of its message was easy to see. Hard choices are hard work, the future is risky and uncertain, who really has time to work through all that complexity? Better just to say no, and not take risks. 

The truth was, though, there were risks on both sides. Scottish independence was certainly risky, but as subsequent events have shown, so was staying with the UK. The same goes for Aotearoa in 2020. Decriminalising cannabis might mean more people using cannabis. But keeping cannabis criminal certainly has its own risks: of criminalisation particularly of poor and Māori youth, of pushing people towards dealers of harder drugs. 

The same goes for the EoLC Act. Opponents argue that it risks vulnerable people being pushed towards an earlier death. But the Act aims to reduce certain risks: of people dying horrible deaths, of living in fear of that prospect, of maybe taking their own lives while they still can or having loved ones break the law to assist them. 

However much we might want to find one, there just isn’t any truly non-risky option in these votes. It's up to each of us to weigh up the risks on each side, and there’s no easy way around that. A No vote doesn’t dodge that calculation, because a vote against one thing is invariably a vote for something else – either the way things are now, or the direction we’re heading in. Status quo bias might make sense is the status quo is really good, less so if it’s not.

No going back

Another thing we saw in the IndyRef was the appeal of avoiding irreversible decisions. One argument that seemed to have a fair bit of cut-through with some of those wavering voters was the idea that, roughly, "a no vote is for now, a yes vote is forever." “Independence would not be a trial separation,” warned Prime Minister David Cameron, “it would be a painful divorce.” Author JK Rowling, never one to baulk at a controversial opinion, made a similar plea: “Whatever Scotland decides, we will probably find ourselves justifying our choice to our grandchildren. If we leave, though, there will be no going back.”

Again, the appeal is obvious. Faced with uncertainty, there’s much to be said for avoiding choices that are irreversible. Except that, in the context of the IndyRef, the logic didn’t really hold. Leaving the UK may have led to irreversible consequences, but staying with the UK hardly meant avoiding them; two years later, and Scotland was being taken out of the EU, against the wishes of most of its population. We can’t say Scotland will never find a way back in, but it’ll be a long and roundabout route if it does. Good luck explaining that one to the grand-weans!

Can you get back to me later?

The implicit corollary of the ‘avoid the irreversible’ argument was that the other option was somehow reversible, or open to being revisited. Not sure about Scottish independence? Why not park it for now, and we – or maybe your children - can look at it again, somewhere down the line? And again, sure, I get it. Deferring hard decisions is a common human behaviour. In some circumstances, putting off hard choices until we have better information makes perfect sense. 

But again, on closer inspection, that logic starts to creak a bit. For one thing, a vote might be reversible, but its consequences may not be. We’ll get to choose a new Parliament in another three years (I can say “we” now, right?) But we can’t ignore the fact that, in the meantime, the policies implemented by the Parliament we choose this month will have an indelible impact on a great many lives.

Ditto the referendum results. The people whose lives – or deaths - are ruined by our choices will take scant consolation from the fact that other people, sometime in the future, might have it better. It might seem like a temporary decision for us, but for them it’s for keeps.

We should probably also be sceptical about any suggestion that we’ll be able to revisit these issues any time soon. Once the vote went against Scottish independence, that whole narrative of avoiding irreversible decisions was rapidly abandoned. There could be no re-run, we were told, no revisiting of the issue. “The people of Scotland voted decisively on that promise to keep our United Kingdom together, a result which both the Scottish and UK governments committed to,” Boris Johnson declared earlier this year. The question had been asked and answered, the subject was closed, it was time to move on.

 I’m no political Cassandra, but it’s hard to see our referendums playing out very differently. Does anyone really think a "No" vote in either will be treated as an invitation to come back with better, safer, more detailed proposals? It’s seventeen years since the last time Parliament got to vote on assisted dying, and as best I can tell, there’s never been a Parliamentary vote on recreational cannabis use. Aside from the protracted mechanism of getting new bills up and running, through select committee and all the rest of it, the political reality is that a referendum carries a stamp of political permanence that far exceeds that of a Parliamentary vote. When the People Have Spoken, woe betide the first politician to defy their instruction. 

 Reasonable people can reasonably disagree on all of those issues. I've done my share of arguing about them, but I can respect perspectives different from mine. If you think either assisted dying or cannabis decriminalisation are bad ideas, by all means vote against them. Likewise if you think these particular proposals for reform are genuinely bad.

 If, on the other hand, you’re just not sure, I do think you should be a bit sceptical of suggested soft options, of accepting the comforting idea that we can avoid risk or delay hard choices for later. In both referendums, we’re being asked to choose between different risks; as with the Scottish IndyRef, there’s no risk-free option on offer. And while it might be possible to imagine laws better than the ones on offer, they‘re not going to be on the table any time remotely soon. In the meantime, people are getting caught up in the criminal justice system, or with criminal gangs, or dying dreadful deaths. 

 Maybe you think those consequences are less bad than the alternative. Fair enough. But these are consequences that No voters should be willing to own, just as Yes voters have to own the risks in the other direction. 

 Vote “No” if you mean “No”, but there’s no dodging the risks and consequences either way. And “Not sure, maybe later” isn’t an option on the ballot paper.