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.

Election Bulletin 2

That substance that caused the evacuation of our office wasn't harmless at all. It was MSG. No word yet on the culprit.

Election Bulletin

We're in the middle of an election campaign so we shouldn't have been surprised to find some white power in an envelope sent to our office with a postal vote application form.

The police were called and the envelope put to one side. A short time later, Doug, from the local fire station (it's only 50m away) rang to say he wanted us all to leave the building with our hands in the air. I made the last bit up, but we did feel rather like a bunch of failed hostage takers when we stepped out into a blitz of flashing lights on fire and police vehicles and a maze of haz mat tapes, sealing us off from the rest of humanity. A woman stuck her head out of the legal aid centre next door to see what was going on, only to be promptly taped off as well, along with several parked cars.

Doug addressed us reassuringly from a safe distance, while we were photographed by the local paper and a fireman zipped himself into one of those all-enveloping suits, donned an oxygen mask and waddled off to retrieve the envelope. Early indications are that the substance was harmless.

No doubt there are more fun and games to come though Family First have undoubtedly had the best story of the campaign so far and they're welcome to it.