Australia, shared purpose
Compulsory voting
Australia has required citizens to vote since 1924 and turnout at the 2025 federal election was 90.7 percent of enrolled voters, a level no large voluntary-voting democracy reaches.
90.7 % of enrolled voters, house of representatives turnout, 2025 federal election, 2025. Australian Electoral Commission, participation in the 2025 federal election, retrieved 2026-08-27.
The move, and what it needed
Parliament made voting a legal duty with a token fine, paired it with automatic-style enrolment, Saturday voting and easy postal and early options, so the state removed every excuse at the same time as it imposed the duty.
Preconditions
- Cross-party agreement to keep the duty, since either side could repeal it
- An electoral commission trusted to run painless voting
- A fine large enough to state the norm and small enough not to embitter
Where else it has been used: Around twenty countries mandate voting and fewer enforce it; Belgium and Luxembourg are the closest working siblings. Where compulsion was dropped, as in Chile in 2012, turnout fell by tens of points within two elections.
Limits: Turnout under compulsion measures compliance, not civic desire, which is exactly the objection to filing it under civic participation; the record is here because the indicator's construct is participation behaviour, and ninety percent of a country voting for a century is behaviour, whatever its cause. The denominator is enrolled voters, and enrolment itself is near-complete only because it is also compulsory. The fine is small and enforcement light, so the mechanism is closer to a maintained norm than to coercion.
This record describes what Australia delivered. It is linked to Civic participation because no comparable dataset measures that capability. It does not affect the score or confidence.
More from Australia
7 other deliveries from this country.
Cooperative Research Centres programme
Australia's Department of Industry reported that its Cooperative Research Centres portfolio facilitated 304 businesses establishing research-focused collaborations in 2023–24, across 114 CRC and 190 CRC Projects partners, above the year's target of 248.
VET FEE-HELP, and its abolition
Australia's VET FEE-HELP loan scheme, introduced in 2008 to fund higher-level vocational courses, grew from fewer than 3,500 loans in 2009 to 196,108 in 2015, and was abolished and replaced from 1 January 2017 by VET Student Loans, which reached 53,892 students in 2019.
Australia's Treasury designed, Parliament legislated and the tax office began paying the JobKeeper wage subsidy just over five weeks after its announcement on 30 March 2020, and in its first phase it supported on average around 925,000 businesses and 3.6 million individuals each month before ending on 28 March 2021.
ASIC enhanced regulatory sandbox
Australia's government introduced the enhanced regulatory sandbox on 1 September 2020, letting firms test financial services and credit activities for up to 24 months without a licence, and ASIC's register lists 23 users, four current and 19 past.
Inland Rail, and its consolidation at Parkes
The Australian Government began building Inland Rail, a Melbourne to Brisbane freight railway, in 2018 through the Australian Rail Track Corporation, which passed delivery to its subsidiary Inland Rail Pty Ltd in May 2024; a verification report delivered to the infrastructure department in November 2025 reported the company's estimate at completion of A$45.6 billion (P90, Target scenario, estimate current as of December 2024) with completions finalised in May 2036, and the 2026-27 Budget then consolidated the project at Parkes and returned $4.4 billion in equity.
Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements
The Australian Government paid $3.1 billion to state and territory governments through the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements between 1 June 2018 and 30 June 2022, and the arrangements were activated for 49 disaster events that occurred in 2021–22.
New Payments Platform, the shared fast-payment rail
The New Payments Platform, whose payments the Reserve Bank of Australia settles one by one in central bank money through the Fast Settlement Service of its RITS system, settled a daily average of 3.6 million transactions in 2024/25, almost 19 percent more than in 2023/24, worth A$4.7 billion a day.
The same indicator elsewhere
3 deliveries linked to Civic participation in other countries.
Internet voting in national elections
Estonia has run legally binding internet voting since 2005, and at the 2023 Riigikogu election 312,182 votes, 51.1 percent of all votes cast, came in online, the first national election anywhere in which more than half the vote was digital.
SUS health councils, permanent public participation
Since Law 8.142 established them in 1990, Brazil's SUS has required permanent, deliberative health councils at the national, state and municipal levels, with users holding 50 percent of seats and health workers and government or providers holding 25 percent each.
Orçamento Participativo Portugal
Portugal's first national participatory-budget cycle drew almost 80,000 votes and committed €3.18 million to winning projects, which were written into the 2018 state budget.