Preferential

I wrote this while counting continued, before concession. It’s better that way than with an updated edit. Enjoy.

He’s the son of a Dutch tiler who’s no longer with us. He was made on the way over and he was, during the last Coalition government, the Chief Whip of the Australian Federal Parliament. “I don’t reckon there are a lot of places that’s possible,” he told me once. I reckon he’s right.

He’s one of five from a single-income family whose only breadwinner was this tiler, assigned beforehand to Indonesia with the navy and deciding — as part of “the closest thing to a proposal” my grandmother Cornelia ever got — to move to Waterford, Queensland.

He grew up there a soccer player, a goalkeeper, and he met my mother in high school. Together they’ve kept, through the way life wanes and waxes, the nuclear family dream alive.

He’s won four elections on preferences we had to wait days if not weeks for the results of. In 2022 we had a pretty good idea pretty fast. But it’s no secret that this time is not quite the same. It felt for a few hours there on Saturday night similar to 2010 or 2013 but in fifteen years you get a read on these things.

My Dad has been the Member for Forde for my adult life, elected in my last year of high school and my brother’s second-last. He’s the longest-serving Member for the division. That legacy is about to end.

Of course, in fifteen years on the conservative edge of politics we’re not always going to agree about everything. I won’t dive deep into that. I’m on board with tax reform, motorway infrastructure, heavy rail, and a fair bit else. There are limits. He knows. This is not a surprise to anyone.

Even with a little l liberal arts education, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Writing, I’ve been proud of him the whole time. He stood up, he put his reputation on the line, and for six elections now he’s been offering his performance review up to a general public where it’s aired on the ABC and everyone around you knows the results too, and he rolled the dice. They’ve gone in his favour since 2010 but maybe now not so much.

I inherited what I would describe as Dad’s risk appetite more than my brother though he got the aptitude for numbers. I’ve got more of Mum percolating around inside. In Japan earlier this year I noticed Dad, Josh, and I all sitting forward, our arms crossed, leaning on the table, looking at whoever’s speaking as they spoke and then, at our turn, looking off to think about what we’re saying. Gathering our thoughts in the middle distance without eye contact until we’re really quite sure.

There’s some of that now. The AEC website open, autorefreshing, updating with every count, winning ballots, losing others, this now all anyone can do. This time there’s less appetite to wait. Just rip the bandaid off. I don’t know that any of us want to push for a recount. And how he feels about that? Let him look off and away out into the carpark over the Beenleigh shopping centre from his now-former office’s window.

He will walk away either way just fine. Adjusting, sure, disappointed, sure, and adrift now inside a community that will still know him by name in Woolies, getting coffee, probably even shopping for new joggers to come running with me (I doubt it). The hard part will be that he might not know who’s saying g’day, maybe even saying sorry.

I know that wherever he goes next will be lucky to have him. And we’ll be lucky, Mum and Josh and I, to have him back here amongst the riff raff, part again of the people of Forde and not held to a higher, busier, more prominent standard. Some of this is by choice of course. But he’ll be able to sleep in, to leave the house after 6.30am, to be home before 10pm, to even just be in town for dinner all year around.

Even now he wears it with an Old Frankish manner. It was a tear he wiped away while I went to the downstairs fridge to get a bottle of water for the drive home. And while his last speech was a concession on social media instead of a proclamation inside the House of Representatives, he’ll still be the tiler’s boy that made it almost all the way.

If I had to vote for who’d be my father all over again, I’d preference him first. 

Bert number one.