Counting, Counting...

The dust is finally settling on Saturday's election. Our seat of Cowper was too close to call on Saturday night and it's only now that Luke, the sitting member and my employer, has been able to claim the seat. With 88pc of the votes counted, he's got a majority of 2,212 or 2.82pc, down from 6.5pc. The Australian Electoral Commission has the details.

It's just like the UK in 1997, with the Liberals and The Nationals being turfed out after nearly 12 years and a modernised Labor (that's how it's spelt) taking power, although they don't seem as modernised as UK Labour were back then. We'll see. We're now in the middle of leadership contests and, no doubt, a continuing inquest.

I spent much of polling day standing outside the local school, handing out leaflets while being watched by a wallaby in the banana plantation opposite. It was hot. The last three days have been spent in a church hall in Kempsey scrutineering votes. Voting is compulsory here so, as well as voting on the day, you have pre-polling, absentee votes and postal votes, all of which take time to collate and so the seat might not be actually declared for another two weeks.

We've also got preferential voting. If you have six candidates, as we did, you have to number them all in order of preference for your vote to be valid. That means that those people who put 7 or 8, instead of 6, against their least-preferred candidate, presumably as an insult, didn't cast a valid vote. Neither did all those who just wrote on the papaer that it was all in the hands of Jehovah. But that's democracy for you.