The fourth election in the history of the self-government of the Australian Capital Territory has come and gone, and the world now knows that Chief Minister Kate Carnell has surfed home on a huge foaming wave of Liberal blue. Clad in a flame red jacket she landed in the Tally Room before the adoring gaze of the media.
Your Canberra correspondent was there to watch her triumphant progress. My day began somewhat earlier, when I went down to the polling station at Campbell Primary School. The introduction of a new regulation has prohibited the posting or distribution of political material within a hundred metres of a voting point, so the local ALP and Greens were handing out how-to-vote cards at the shopping centre down the hill from the school, on the assumption that people would vote after doing Saturday morning shopping.
I followed the trail of discarded ALP and Green leaflets up to the school, where the cadets from the nearby Defence Force Academy were being unloaded from a series of buses. So green was the first shade in a colourful day, as the army cadets lined up and filed in. Apart from the school cake stall, it was a fairly restrained affair, free of the usual party workers and free of the consequent litter of discarded material.
Michael Moore, one of the original crew of colourful independents that made up the first ACT Assembly, was casting his vote, with a couple of television news crews to record the exciting moment. Michael's children, like mine, attend Campbell Primary, and he is a familiar sight. My daughter has a letterbox delivery run, as does Michael's son, and we heard that Mike had grumbled that his son was distributing election material for all of his opponents.
Personalities make up a great deal of the local politics. In a city of around a quarter of a million people, it's not hard to make a name for yourself, especially in such a politically-aware community as Canberra, where government is big business, and a change in policy makes the difference between prosperity or poverty for public servants.
Unlike the introverted former Chief Minister, Labor's Rosemary Follett, Kate Carnell has an exuberant, bubbly personality, packed into a tiny frame, and is a journalist's delight. Her creed is that of the photo-opportunity, and she is ever willing to put on a funny hat or pose for a special shot. Perhaps her finest moment was when she was photographed draped in the doorway of a Fyshwyck brothel. Or maybe when she had her head shaved for charity last year. Whether driving a bulldozer or being carried by the local football team, she is happiest when the cameras are pointing at her.
Her chief opponent, Labor's third leader in a year, ex-fireman Wayne Berry is a dour politician of the old school, without the charisma. Even the classic campaigning tactic of kissing babies is an exercise in mutual discomfort for both baby and Berry. He rejected the invitation to share the limelight of having his head shaved last year, perhaps wondering if anyone would notice the difference.
His grasp of economics is shaky, and in a polity mainly funded by the residents through high rates and a wide range of fees, there was keen interest in how he intended to pay for his array of election promises. His admission that he intended to keep rates and charges fixed and instead to delay repayments on the Territory's debt, a legacy of the previous Labor administration, was greeted with a good deal of dismay by voters who knew that one way or another the money to pay for both the promises and the increased interest bill was going to come out of their pockets.
The leaflets my daughter delivered last week were based on personalities. Because of the way that the ACT's voting system works, with candidates rotated randomly on ballot papers, it is virtually impossible to run a party ticket, such as you'd find in a Federal Senate election, where the candidates are listed in the party's preferred order. Here in Canberra, the party leader might be heading the column on one ballot paper, bottom on the next, and buried in the middle on a third.
In fact, because a candidate is more likely to be hidden in the middle of a list than occupying any position of prominence, individual candidates print up their own leaflets saying essentially "Vote [1] Bloggs, and number the rest of the party team two to seven." Only seven numbers are required on the ballot paper, this year containing 49 names, so this strategy is intended to gain votes for a candidate and keep preferences within the party.
The lack of a party ticket means that the voters can express preferences for individual candidates. And they do this with a vengeance. Poorly performing or unpopular candidates get the chop in favour of others within the same party.
So personality comes into politics to a greater extent than in the rest of Australia, a factor exploited by the Liberals, whose advertising material in the final weeks focussed heavily on Wayne Berry and his shortcomings. In fact, on a list of ten reasons to vote Liberal, number ten was "Wayne Berry". Voters were urged to vote for Kate Carnell, because the alternative was Wayne Berry.
The lack of how to vote cards at the polling stations served to highlight personality. Without an official party how to vote card, most voters were forced to rely on their memory when selecting which candidates to vote for. If a candidate was not memorable, then the chances of his name getting a first preference were small. The voting instructions in the booth itself told the voter to number from 1 to 7, and further numbers were optional, so many voters simply started at the top of their preferred party column and went 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 straight down. The net effect of this was to distribute votes equally within a party, because the order of the names within a column changes from ballot paper to ballot paper.
The real work for me began when voting ceased. I had volunteered as a scrutineer for one of the independent candidates, and I was keen to see how the nuts and bolts of counting votes worked.
I performed my duties diligently for my man, but there wasn't a lot I could do with the scant handful of votes he received, and my main interest lay in observing patterns.
Very few voters troubled themselves to number every single one of the 49 boxes. The overwhelming majority confined themselves to following the instructions and listing 1 to 7 candidates in order. A significant minority went beyond the first seven, but lost heart somewhere around a dozen.
The Liberals, ALP, Greens and Democrats all fielded full teams and thus had full columns of seven candidates. Most voters simply followed both the official and party instructions, by giving their favoured candidate first preference, numbering the remaining party candidates in order and leaving it at that. A few dodged around a bit but favoured one party and a few were all over the place.
I couldn't help but notice that there was a significant leakage of preferences away from Labor candidates to the Liberal Kate Carnell. Time and again I'd see a voter put a Labor candidate first, Kate second, then return to the Labor column for his remaining preferences. But by and large, the Labor votes were pretty uniform for all candidates, with no one name receiving much more than another.
Over on the Liberal side of the counting table the story was quite different. The ballot papers piled up against Kate Carnell's name, leaving the remaining Liberals pretty sparsely supported. By the end of counting, Kate's votes were a mountain in comparison to every other name on the paper. Out of the 2 400 votes in the booth, 980 were personal votes for Kate Carnell, and the next closest was Michael Moore, with 180. The Green's Kerrie Tucker received 90 votes and everyone else pretty well ran dead.
I quickly worked out that, on this booth's figures, Kate had received three quotas in her own right, thereby electing herself and the next two most popular Liberals, Attorney-General Gary Humphries and Speaker Greg Cornwell, by the look of her preferences.
No other candidate in the booth was even close to a quota, so preferences would be crucial in working out who got eliminated early and who got up. By totalling the votes for a party, it was possible to make an educated guess that of the seven seats in the electorate, there would be three Liberals, two Labor, and two minor parties, probably Michael Moore and Kerrie Tucker.
The Democrats had done reasonably well, achieving half a quota. In a Senate election the Democrats can usually expect to get a flood of preferences from other parties, mainly the Greens, but here they would only get a trickle from the few voters who had either crossed party lines, or gone beyond numbering seven candidates.
By fielding full teams, the Greens and Democrats had pretty well ensured that there would be no exchange of preferences, a combination of party greed and voter laziness that robbed them of two members. Across the whole of the ACT, the two parties had gained three quotas, but because their votes would be exhausted before leaving the party column, only one of the 34 Green and Democrat candidates was likely to gain a seat, the Green's Kerrie Tucker.
The tally room down the road was my next stop, and this was a riot of colour. The Electoral Commission's Phil Green, wearing an orange and purple vest, presided over the affair, dominated on one side by huge blue screens showing the vote tally, and on the other by the lights, logos and cameras of the television stations.
The rising tide of votes showed clearly the wave of personality. Kate Carnell was surfing high above all the rest, more than twice as high as fellow Liberals Brendan Smyth and the genial Bill Stefaniak. One time football star and sitting member Paul Osborne was doing well, and Wayne Berry had around a quarter of Kate's vote, which was pretty good, considering.
Kate wasn't slow in claiming victory. Red jacket blazing, she smiled brilliantly. "Canberrans wanted to have a party," she began, "a party with a vision, and a vision they could afford!"
It was turning into a party, all right. Jubilant Liberals cheered and waved placards, and despondent Labor followers grumped and wandered away. Kate Carnell appeared at Berry's side for the ritual handshake, but he turned away as a photographer captured the moment for the front page -- a scowling Berry turning his back on a shocked Kate with arm outstretched.
Well, who could blame him? Still, his position as ALP leader is in doubt, and as he took over from Andrew Whitecross who was perceived as having a charisma shortage, it is hard to see any Labor figure with a vibrant enough personality emerging to fill the gap. Whitecross looks unlikely to gain re-election, and the red-headed Marion Reilly is also heading for extinction.
It's three years to the next election, but in this town of the political personality, it is hard to think of anyone eclipsing the brilliant light of Liberal star Kate Carnell.
The rest of the evening is a blur of colours and colourful people. Michael Moore in green shirt and ginger beard; Green Shane Rattenbury in purple shirt, scrambling for media attention; Bob Brown, too late to influence Green votes; the Democrats' Jane Errey, her white jacket matching the white face of her husband and strategist Andrew Kerans as he realised the implications of the preference trickle.
But by then I was talking to veteran election commentator Malcolm Mackerras about the Constitutional Convention. His face creased up in pleasure as he recalled his moment of glory, making a speech as a proxy for another delegate, but he admitted that most of his time had been spent in the caucus room, helping out Kerry Jones, whom he generously described as the monarchist's master strategist.
There's a story there, of back room deals and an ambush out in the open. But that will have to wait for another day.