If ever there was a time in our post-World War II world where we have been attacked from all sides this federal Parliamentary term has been that, our lives swamped by the terrible trio of fire, plague and flood.

But where does a national poll in Australia fit into all of that?

In essence, this election will give us the forum in which to make tough yet simple choices.

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We could decide to hide behind our own convenient histories, behind the generational habits of voting the way we do because that's where we live and that's how our parents and their parents before them voted.

We could also go another way, where we get serious about making our voices clear on accountability, on not just whispering amongst ourselves about our hopes and fears for our children but actually do something about effecting change.

Such sentiments could be considered grandiose, as loose-lipped soliloquies of the chattering classes, if not for the reality of the enormously challenging, worrying times in which we now live.

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Party politics has instituted monumental change for our nation since federation, the vast majority of that for good.

But there is also no doubt we have been let down and taken for granted.

There were the Rudd-Gillard wars of the Labor years, where self-centred, ruthless partisan politics held sway.

There's been the Coalition years that followed, where so much promise has been desecrated through a scant regard for truth-telling and vision.

We know too well the spin of the brand of the empty soul is the politics we have somehow inadvertently embraced.

It does not matter whether you believe that securing worthwhile outcomes is a safer bet in the Indi-centred politics of a Helen Haines or in a Sussan Ley and her obvious commitment to the people of Farrer, unencumbered of her own party's divisions.

What counts is taking a stand by agitating through a carefully considered marking of a box on a ballot paper.

It's a simple yet consequential choice.

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