Antony Green joined the ABC in 1989, after spotting a newspaper ad for a six-month researcher job.
He had spent years working as a computer programmer, database designer and analyst and knew how to talk to engineers — and the ABC pounced.
From those first six months spouted a four-decade career front hundreds of federal election for the national broadcaster.
As he prepares to present his last election night, we take a walk through elections past.
On my first week at the ABC…
I walked into this organisation and it was rather odd from having worked in offices where you have a certain number of hours a day. I was in a team that was creating Lateline, which was a late evening current affairs program for many years on the ABC. It was attached to the 730 Report, and I was above the ABC newsroom at the old Gore Hill television studios. And the thing that rather fascinated me watching how newsrooms worked was that for in those days, everything was for the 7pm bulletin, and so it seemed like not much was going on during the day. And as you got closer and closer to the deadline, it got busier and busier. Then, you know, in that last hour, everyone had to perform 100 per cent correctly.
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On the dramatic 1993 election in which Paul Keating won the ‘unlosable’ election…
Tasmania was still on daylight saving, and so these results were coming in from 5pm when we weren’t on air. We were getting these figures and it was showing these dramatic swings. They had a program called Archie the Bat, which was an ABC wildlife documentary, and at 5:45pm management made the decision to crash into Archie the Bat with these first results for Tasmanians. It was a one-minute hit on what was happening in Tasmania. And then we went off air.
It was bedlam exploding. That was the first hint that Keating could win but people were thinking “oh that’s just Tasmania” and then we started to get the results. Eventually I got to air at 8:40 and said, “the government’s back through the chamber, 90 majority”. And this sort of made me quite famous.
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On how shifting voting patterns impacted election coverage…
We started to count preferences so the model became much more reliable over the next couple of years and then we got to Queensland in 1998 and that was just extraordinary, because One Nation just came from nowhere, and we hadn’t built anything which really coped with the situation where Labor candidates were excluded from the preference count. The results didn’t fit into the two-party model we’d had forever, and we were having to manually override results. It was one of the hardest nights I’d ever worked on. After that we went to rewrite bits of our software so we could compare any pairing of candidates rather than just Labor versus Liberals.
On my proudest predictions…
I’d written some code for myself to do to work out how the tickets would work. If you could program the tickets, you could work out who was winning very easily. And we did the 2004 federal election, and I had this little tool which allowed me to do it. And at a certain point, on the night I just ran it for Victoria, and came back and it said, Stephen Fielding wins the last seat for Family First.
And I thought oh Labor’s vote is too low. And what happened was Labor had done a deal to try and beat the Greens for the last spot, but their vote wasn’t high enough, and so the deal we’d done with minor parties backfired, and their preferences ended up with Family First. And so I said this on the panel on the night, and this is my proudest prediction on camera: “And just an update, looking at the Victorian Senate figures, Stephen Fielding from Family First will win the last seat in Victoria.”
[Former Labor politician] Bob McMullan was on the panel, and he put his hand on his head because he knew it was because of these preference deals, which he’d objected to. Later in the night I said: “Just another update on the Senate, the Liberals will win three seats and Barnaby Joyce on the National ticket will win a fourth seat for the Coalition”. And they all said “no, no, that’s not possible” but it did happen. Barnaby Joyce got elected.
Results from the 2007 poll show a double dissolution election may not deliver Labor the majority needed to break the deadlock in the Senate. (ABC News)
So for the 2007 election I convinced them to do two codings, including an upper house calculator, and you’d go to a state and you’d put in all the you put in percentage votes for each party, hit the button, it would apply the tickets, and it would tell you who’d won. “This was like a revelation!”
It revealed how rotten the system was. And so by 2013, you know, you’re getting giant ballot papers. We’re getting 50 columns on a ballot paper as every candidate would stand. And that election a gentleman called Ricky Muir, Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party and I remember saying on the night he’s winning a seat. But what I remember about it was that I got this furious email from a professor of medicine saying: “Has the ABC taken leave of its senses? How could it possibly predict someone getting elected from half a per cent of the vote?” And then so I just sent back, “if you scroll down the page, it’s got all the mathematics that explains it” but I didn’t hear back. It was quite funny.
Green on set for the 2007 federal election night coverage alongside host Kerry O’Brien and panellists Julia Gillard and Nick Minchin. (ABC News)
On my most memorable elections…
The ones I mostly remember, are the ones which were a bit of an upset. The first election I ever did on camera was in 1991, the NSW election. Yeah, the Greiner government was expected to be returned, and it only just got back so the night was quite dramatic. The 1993 federal was very similar like that. I mean, it was clearly results narrowed, but nobody quite expected the government would get back as easy as they did. It was a quite a dramatic night. The 1995 election, when the Goss government eventually lost its majority, I remember that was just a nightmare because of the way we were still getting paper.
The 1999 election in Victoria, was just dramatic, because it just the fact that Kennett government lost was just unexpected. It was highly unusual as an election. In Victoria, the Labor Party usually won elections when it gained seats in Melbourne, right? And at that election, it gained just three seats in Melbourne. What happened was the swing was massive in rural areas and regional cities, and it significantly changed, permanently changed, the voting patterns in Victoria. The Liberal Party haven’t won a seat federally or state in Bendigo or Ballarat since. That’s the shift that occurred at that election.
I remember the 2001 Northern Territory election. The CLP had governed the Northern Territory throughout its entire history. Nobody was expecting anything specific to happen that night. And Insiders had started that year, and they arranged for me to go on the next morning to talk about the result. I remember them ringing me up and saying, “we don’t think it’s going to happen, but, you know, we got at least report it as this is a politics program”.
And then, you know, blow me down, Labor won! It was extraordinary results on the night. Clare Martin became chief minister later said “remember you compared me with Nelson Mandela?” And I thought what is she talking about? And what had happened was Barrie Cassidy had said “well, what happened last night?” And I’d said, well, on a scale of political surprises from one to 10, it’s not up there with the fall of the Berlin wall or the release of Nelson Mandela, but it’s pretty high on the political wow scale.
It was just an extraordinary result to watch all these seats go down. That was peculiar.
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On my fight against the monstrous ballot paper…
I had written some articles in 1997 saying that NSW was headed for a completely unworkable ballot paper and final seats would be determined by complex deals that nobody understood. And that’s exactly what happened in 1999 we had the famous tablecloth ballot paper with 264 candidates. It was a triple decked ballot paper with 81 columns. It was complete madness, and they had to change the electoral system the next year to get rid of these tickets.
On the two major things I watch out for on election night…
One is what’s called variance, that the polling place results vary from polling place to polling place. So, as you get the progressive count, the numbers will initially bounce around a bit, until they settle down towards a trend. You just use basic probability statistics to deal with variance.
Antony Green and Leigh Sales (ABC News: Leigh Sales)
But the other problem is something called bias. The first figures you get are not representative of the final outcome. Now, if you’re familiar with the play, Don’s Party by David Williamson, it uses as the metaphor for it the results the 1969 federal election. Early on, it looked like Gough Whitlam and Labor were going to get into power. And as the night wore on — because of the way results used to be reported on in those days, the Labor vote would start high and fall — these people were very excited they were gonna get this, and then their frustrations and disappointments grew and reflected in their personal relationships.
There is a clear difference in voting patterns on the day versus pre poll, and on election night, the pre polls come in late because they’re bigger, much bigger. And so we’ve got another relationship where there is a difference between swing on the day and pre poll, and that means the figures we get early may not be representative of the end of the night.
On being recognised in public…
I remember going to football one day and just walking around the corner with some friends, and someone just went: “oh my god, you’re Antony Green” and sort of almost collapsed on the floor. My friend said “Greeny, it’s always fun going out with you.”
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