"As part of Year 10 Politics and Legal Studies, Ms Black and Mr Petrie’s classes researched, prepared and delivered a mock election representing the actual Australian political parties.
In small groups, we learnt about campaign strategies, policies, federal and state voting systems and the inner workings of a political party during the lead up to an election.
Prior to the assessment, we produced pamphlets, fliers, posters, baked goods, stickers, ‘How to Vote’ cards and presentations highlighting our policies.
We researched on some current real life world issues and created policies and campaigns for issues like equal pay for all, COVID-19 relief, Indigenous rights and protecting our environment which we then presented to the class. This was a great experience because it helped us to understand how an election worked in real life, taught us how to vote and how the votes were then counted.
On election day, we proposed our different policies, beliefs and party values. Some parties used incentive as a campaign strategy by bringing in lollies, stickers or cupcakes. Afterwards, we all received twenty-one vote cards, so that we could have a more realistic vote count and have the opportunity to adopt the real life voting system. After counting the votes carefully, one class realised that the Greens Party would have been elected into the 'Siena electorate', with the Liberal Party finishing second, even though the Liberals were leading after the first round of vote counting. We really enjoyed developing our campaigns (researching policies and beliefs etc.), learning how elections worked behind the scenes, understanding the voting and counting systems and finally, acquiring knowledge on the real policies of Australian parties within our government."
