‘Bungee jumping for intellectuals’: Antony Green on elections and what he’s doing next | Kerrie O'Brien
It was an election unlike any other. The nearest comparison was the Queensland election in 1998 when One Nation shocked with its strong performance, says Antony Green, the ABC’s election guru.
He is slightly exhausted when we speak, a couple of days after the election. Remarkably, straight after the television broadcast – an almost six-hour stint involving constant on-air data analysis – he had one glass of wine and then went back to work. He had to reconfigure the ABC’s computer system with the post-election feed and didn’t leave until 4am.
Looking back, he admits, “We probably should have said earlier on the night that the government couldn’t win.“In saying that, it was terribly unclear how Labor could govern – it was just looking incredibly messy. As I now look back, you can see that the regional and rural vote did not swing like the cities. The picture became clearer once we had a handle on the cities, and the picture became very clear once Western Australia came in.
Politics remains his core focus year round. Green is responsible for the content of the ABC’s election website including the site’s data analysis. He has worked on local government elections, byelections and elections in the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Canada for the ABC.With that global perspective, Green argues Australia has a very good electoral system. Compulsory voting does give us very centrist politics, he says, and adds a degree of inertia.
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