Final word for now about the election. There was much discussion with friends on Saturday about the perils of who to put last — particularly in the Senate, where every man and his dog was in the race, including parties nobody had ever heard of before. Do you put the racists last? Or the nutbags? (Nutbag racists are pretty much a shoe-in.) Or the Fundamentalists?

Inspection of the group voting tickets shows Socialist Equality Party didn’t preference Socialist Alliance. SPLITTERS!

And who are the Liberty and Democracy Party, anyway? For me that was answered by the Chaser, who noted that one of the LDP candidates was Lisa Milat, the sister-in-law of convicted serial Ivan Milat. The Chaser showed incredible footage of an ACA interview where she called for less gun control, and apparently didn’t know what euthanasia is. If I’m reading the results correctly, the she personally got no votes at all, though the LDP in the ACT got 402 — around a fifth of what each of the socialist groups got.

The aforementioned Neil Henry Smith got 307 votes, the least of any candidate in his seat.

So anyway, while the senate could take some time to sort out, the change from Coalition to Labor brought back memories of the last time it happened, in 1983. I was too young to vote back then, but my mum was overjoyed when Hawke won. And she decided to take down that amusing poster she had that said “God giveth and the government taketh away.”

I was pretty miffed about the last Federal election result, so I’m pretty pleased this time round. Now, if the ALP can just be reminded that funding public transport is in their policy platform (but alas not in their actual policies)…

I got my sausage at the polling place sausage sizzle, so I was happy.

There seemed to be a few wedding parties about during the afternoon. I guess they’d managed to find church halls that weren’t being used for polling. (One wedding party on the steps of St Paul’s in Bentleigh were memorably sipping from stubbies. Steeling the groom’s nerves perhaps?)

By 6:30pm we tuned into the ABC, but occasionally flicked over to 7 (Mel and Kochie), 9 (Laurie et al) and 10 (The Empire Strikes Back, which might have been an omen for some people).

Frankly I didn’t believe it when Stephen Smith from the ALP declared early on that he reckoned they’d gain 20 to 25 seats. He turned out to be right on the money.

Very funny moment when Kerry was talking about Maxine McKew and accidentally said “ABC gain” instead of “ALP gain”. Kerry also seemed to try to calm Antony down when his computer crashed, and started to get a bit hot under the collar when rowdy ALP supporters in the Tally Room started to get noisy.

Channel 7 was going overboard on the flashy graphics and that set of knick-knacks — what was that about? The little caricatures of Rudd and Howard as they showed the various seats. Not to be out-done, Channel 9 put MPs losing their seats through a little “Into the shredder” animation. This is why we tuned to the ABC… to avoid the ads and lame jokes… and indeed they won the ratings for the night.

Channel 7 did show us the grinning Peter Beattie and the very sad looking Joe Hockey during the PM’s concession speech though.

And so following his ascension to power, now the glorious prime ministership of the mighty Rudd begins. Kyoto ratification? Bring it on, Kevvy-baby!