Never mind the ballots

Jack the Insider comes clean on how our elections are decided and offers tips for reforming the process of choosing a government

WHO is he? Jack the Insider is a man close to the top of public life in Australia.

Very close to the top. His identity cannot be fully revealed, but he has mates everywhere. Richo, Singo, "Baby John" Burgess: they're all mates of Jack. And odds are, if your name ends in an o and you've got a good word for Australia, then Jack is your mate, too.

Jack looks back fondly to a time when Australia was much more at ease with itself: when kids could play cricket in the street, when a deal was cemented with a handshake and the coppers could run this country free from the dead hand of judicial oversight. Jack has borne witness to some of the most glorious episodes in our nation's history.

It was Jack who poured beer over Hawkie's head after the America's Cup victory. It was Jack who egged on John Kerr to say what he really thought of the protesters at the Melbourne Cup. And when John Howard lost the Liberal leadership back in 1989, it was Jack who gently cradled his sobbing head.

But for all his influence and power, Jack remains a humble Aussie bloke. Every three years he does his bit for democracy: it's Jack who puts the numbers on the board.

It's all about the result: On election night I'm there in the National Tally Room. I'm the bloke at the back of the board turning over the numbers as the results come in. It's a terrific job: the Australian Electoral Commission always puts on a topnotch feed and they employ a couple of kids to hand me schooners of anisette throughout the night. Number turning is thirsty work, I can tell you. It's a huge responsibility.

I'm generally considered to be one of the top number-turners in the number-turning business. I do a bit of this sort of work (strictly on a voluntary basis, just in case the taxman is reading this).

I've been turning numbers in the tally-room at every election since 1974. Since you've done the right thing and forked out a few bucks of your hard-earned for this book, I feel I should let you in on a secret: Billy Snedden won the 1974 election. But the man was a train wreck waiting to happen, so I fiddled around, turned a few sixes into nines, and Gough was back for another term. The big man was grateful to me and he made sure there was always a big drink around the traps for me in the ensuing years.

In 2004, Mark Latham won by a landslide but I knew he was clinically insane and would put the country in a spiral of self-loathing. Cab drivers across the nation wouldn't be safe, for a start, so I bunged on a few thousand votes in the right places and little Johnnie Winston made his acceptance speech that night.

Howard said he was humbled by the win and, let's face it, he's not a man given to humility under normal circumstances. I can tell you now he was humbled only because he knew he lost by the numbers and he owed me a very large debt of gratitude.

No one seems to notice or mind and I like to think I am just reflecting the broad views of the nation. I understand that people can get confused at the ballot box and I've always been happy to straighten out any unintended voting behaviour.

This job gives me a unique perspective on the way our system works. And I can confidently say that Australia has the best electoral system in the world, bar none. But we can always improve things. Near enough is good enough has never been good enough for me. We never would have got the cardboard voting booth with that kind of thinking. Allow me to share with you a few sensible proposals for electoral reform.

Winning: Nothing disgusts the ordinary voter so much as watching the winner claim victory on television. They see a man they can barely tolerate beaming with a pleasure so intense that it's creepily sexual (which is why they always put a podium in front of him so the voters won't notice the rampant Shirvington pants action down below). And worst of all, they see the winner in a room full of people on the piss, having a party that they haven't been invited to. No wonder Australians are so disaffected.

That's why I say there ought to be some sort of legal requirement for the winner to shout a drink for every man, woman and child in the nation. Out of their own pocket. This would do much to create goodwill with the public and encourage citizens to overlook the winner's huge reserves of megalomania and hatred.

Losing: The biggest problem is making politicians more responsive to the will of the people outside of the three-week election campaign. The answer is quite simple and it came to me in a blinding flash of inspiration as I lay under a bar in Thailand after a three-day drinking excursion with the Australian cricket team. Are you ready for this? Here it is: Losing an election should be illegal.

The party that loses the election has been found wanting by the Australian people and should consequently be made to pay for its sins. The prospect of a stint in jail would do wonders for politicians' commitment to the voters. It would raise the stakes enormously and make the leaders' debate much more interesting.

To make losing an offence punishable by a stretch of 15 to 20 years in the slammer, bunking in with good, wholesome heterosexual folk who, as circumstances dictate, are prepared to experiment sexually, would be an enormous performance incentive. Most experts agree it would go a long way to reconnecting the parties with ordinary punters. If I had my way, right now Latham would be in the clink, along with John Hewson and Paul Keating. Little Johnnie Howard would only now be walking out of the prison gates for having lost the 1987 election and we would have been spared the past decade of arse covering and shoulder twitching.

It's such an obviously sensible proposal, it's beyond me why it hasn't been taken up thus far.

How to win an election: Every couple of years a government gets itself into deep shit and that's when I get the call to come and help. My advice to the hapless leader is always the same:

* Ditch the focus groups. Most politicians lead deeply weird and insular lives and are completely reliant on focus group reports to acquaint themselves with what's going on in the real world. But the results are unreliable. Focus groups are made up of ordinary people, which means they're greedy bastards who'll tell a whole pack of lies to look good. They'll put their hand up and say they're concerned about global warming, education and sustainability, but the truth is they'll kick a field full of pandas to death to get to a tax cut. So I tell them, forget the focus groups; instead...

* Go with the gut instinct. I always go with my gut instinct, even when that instinct has led me to a Chinese meal that left me crouching in agony in the ensuite. Politically speaking, your gut is your best friend. Forget the Jiminy Cricket of conscience on your shoulder; you're better off listening to the python of self-interest slowly uncoiling in your stomach.

* Be a scumbag for a day. I always remind the leader that the great Roman emperor Augustus Caesar didn't need any market research to find out what the mob wanted. Every year, for one day, the crafty bugger would disguise himself as a beggar and sit on the streets of Rome, drinking schooners of grappa, listening to what the punters had to say, and that was all he needed. So I tell the leader: smear yourself with human faeces, go to a railway tunnel and try busking some Neil Young songs. You'll quickly discover that a spirited rendition of Heart of Gold will earn you more coins than a dozen performances of The Needle and the Damage Done. Find out what the people want.

* Walk a mile in my shoes. I invite the embattled leader to come and live with me for a week. I make up a bed in the granny flat out the back and order the gormless clown to follow me everywhere and get a sense of what my real-world issues are.

Like why is it that toilet paper never tears properly on the dotted line?

And how come ABC TV only rarely covers the lawn bowls these days? And where the hell can a bloke go to get a drink and watch harness racing at 10am on a Good Friday? And why do I always have to ask the yum cha waiter to bring me some chilli sauce and an ouzo and cola? Why can't they just have it on the table with the soy sauce and the chopsticks?

These are the issues that connect with ordinary Australians. Who gives two shits about the current account deficit when you've got this crap to deal with on a daily basis?

Copyright Richard Fidler and PeterHoysted

This is an edited extract from The Insider's Guide to Power in Australia by Jack the Insider (as told to Richard Fidler and Peter Hoysted), published by Random House Australia.

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