It’s not the elections, it’s the pre-season: Antony Green on hanging up his boots

After 36 years at the national broadcaster, ABC chief elections analyst Antony Green is calling it quits. The upcoming federal election will be his last in front of the fabled results touch screen.

Green, who turns 65 on Saturday and has presided over 13 federal elections, made the decision last year but only confirmed this morning that this year’s federal election – which he predicts will be on either April 12 or May 17 – will be his last.

The ABC’s election guru Antony Green has called time on his three-decade stint with the national broadcaster.

“I’m a bit cooked,” he said about his decision to leave. “I keep using a football metaphor: that a lot of footballers retire, but it’s not because they don’t think they can get through the games; it’s that they don’t think they can get through the pre-season training. I could probably get through many more election nights, but I’m not sure I could do the sheer volume of preparation that I have to do, to do that.”

Green’s presence on election night has been as much of an election day tradition as the democracy sausage and pun-laden cake stalls at primary school polling booths. He has even inspired election night games, including a bingo card with squares that included some of Green’s most well-known phrases such as, “These are very early figures”, “Sorry, that’s the wrong screen” and “I suspect the result in this seat could come down to postals”.

Green, however, is a bit overwhelmed by the attention and called the fuss around his retirement “National Embarrass Antony Day”.

‘He makes it look pretty easy, but what he does … is like watching an elite musician at work. His brain needs to be donated to science.’

Annabel Crabb, ABC News

ABC journalist Annabel Crabb, who will have covered five elections with Green by the time he retires, said it always felt like “a privilege to witness in action a brain as baroque and remarkable as Antony’s”.

“His ability to adapt to real-time complications and events and to make very, very fast calculations and judgments is like no one else’s I’ve seen,” she said.

“He makes it look pretty easy, but what he does on election night broadcasts is like watching an elite musician at work. His brain needs to be donated to science.”

Green began his career with the ABC as an election researcher on a six-month contract in 1989. Since then, he has covered more than 90 elections, including 13 federal elections, as well as byelections, local elections, and international elections in the UK, New Zealand and Canada.

He said the 2022 federal election was the most difficult of his career, as the rise in pre-polling votes - and their unpredictability – and the teal independents made it incredibly hard to predict. Green also felt there was now more pressure around being the first to call the election result.

“The thing that always gets me is that increasingly there’s this sense of, ‘Is this the moment when we call the election? – We don’t know the result, we don’t know the result, we don’t know the result. Yes, we know the result!’ – and it doesn’t work like that.

“I can see what’s happening … and I’m doing some hints about where I think the data’s going, but then everyone wants me to be definitive, and I tend not to be definitive. I’ll say, ‘It looks like the government will win – it’s not confirmed yet, but it’s going that way’ – and everyone says, ‘That’s not my headline!’”

Green will remain at the ABC as an election consultant, with Casey Briggs taking over Green’s on-air role, starting with the South Australian election next year.

“I’ve had a joke for years that it will be more than one person replacing me,” said Green, who wasn’t sure if Briggs would take over both election data collection and website management.

Antony Green on-air in 2010.Credit: Jacky Ghossein

As for what Green will miss – he already has a holiday booked for Portugal in September – he’s really not sure.

“I haven’t really thought about it,” he said. “The decision to say ‘I’m retiring and giving up on this’ is, in a sense, it’s been forcing myself into this change. I’m a bit of a stickler, and I’d keep doing what I do except I’ve made this decision to change. I’ll have a few more years working online in a far less stressful role, and you’re not standing on camera thinking, ‘Am I going to look like a complete idiot?’”

Green’s departure is part of a broader changing of the guard at the ABC, with News Breakfast starting the year with the new team of James Glenday and Bridget Brennan, while ABC local radio in Sydney and Melbourne also have largely new presenting line-ups. With Josefine Ganko

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