Opposition leader and prime ministerial candidate Bill Shorten tasted Australian democracy while on a ‘sausage sizzle’ tour during parliamentary elections today.

As soon as the polls opened at 8am, sausages were tossed onto the barbecue.

“The sausage sizzle is a uniquely Australian variant of the barbecue and almost by definition a public event. No one would ever invite friends to a sausage sizzle at home,” Barbara Santich wrote in her book, ‘Australia’s Gastronomic Heritage’.

Even Twitter added a sausage emoji on #ausvotes hashtag.

“People are often disappointed if they go to a polling booth and miss their sausage,” said Annette Tyler, the creator of Democracy Sausage.

“Sausages are as important as ballot papers in Australian elections,” said Nick Adams, a Bondi voter waiting in line for a sausage roll.

According to Grant Castner, the owner of snagvotes, a website that maps all the sausage locations on the election day, there are 2,200 such stalls in 6,600 polling stations.

“This is a low estimate, but roughly, at least 600 sausages are consumed in each polling station,” Castner told dpa.

At Strathfield North Public School, west of Sydney, as voters queued to cast ballots, Shorten went into the canteen, shook hands with the volunteers, and tried a sausage sandwich.

“The good news if we get elected, while you do this (fundraising) we’ll properly fund the school, which means that this will be the cream on top,” said Shorten, who advocates for education and health issues.

“Tastes like democracy,” he said, with a sideways bite into his sausage sandwich that sparked immediate controversy.

“In an awkward moment that has generated significant amusement on social media, Mr Shorten showed he'd either rarely gone to Bunnings for breakfast on a weekend morning or just liked doing things a little differently to the rest of us,” the Sydney Morning Herald said.

“This Shorten sausage-eating situation is probably the lowest moment we have ever seen in politics,” Apoplectic Pedro (@pistollle) said in his Twitter account.

“If Bill Shorten can’t eat a sausage sanga properly how can he run the country? #ausvotes #labor #liberal #democracysausage,” Philip Grylls (@PhilMotivated) said.

- dpa