Beyond Selidor

Honestly, it made me happier than Liz Truss and Jacob Rees Mogg last year — and they already made me very happy!

The last time something in Australian politics made me that delighted was 2007, when we voted out a ghastly, right-wing government, led by John Howard, who had been prime minister for my entire adolescence, undergraduate years, and the first year of my full-time working life. They'd been in office for eleven years (the second-longest serving prime minister in Australia's history), they were really on the nose, and everyone knew they were going to get booted out of power — the question was just how decisively.

At that time, Australia still had a 'national tally room' in Canberra, where all the votes from all the various polling stations were counted (obviously the actual ballots were counted closer to the individual polling stations, but they were tallied in this central location in our capital city), and where members of the public could come in and witness democracy in action. TV news crews often filmed their election night coverage there as well. I was watching the ABC's tally room coverage at my mum's place with a bunch of tipsy, ageing left-wing boomers — champagne was flowing.

As the night wore on, it became apparent that John Howard — the sitting prime minister — was going to lose his seat, the first time this had happened in Australia since the Second World War. (As in the UK, you would never put the sitting prime minister in a marginal seat, and this was one of the safest, safest Liberal seats in the country — I think it had literally always been held by a member of the Liberal Party.) The live ABC coverage from the tally room was finding it impossible to broadcast, because they were getting drowned out by a massive, cheering crowd of members of the public, who were celebrating Howard losing his seat so loudly that the journalists and other pundits were unable to make themselves heard. (As in the UK, they had members of the two main political parties on their panel, and the Liberal politician started whining about 'lefty ABC bias,' as if they'd somehow brought in their own partisan crowd, as opposed to this being the genuine, spontaneous emotion of all the members of the public witnessing the election results unfold in the tally room.)

All the above was incredibly satisfying to watch. I'm not sure if it's beaten by Dutton losing his seat this time around, but it's close!