Now the election is over, here are our Awards for noteworthy service given to the democratic process over the last few months.

Most Memorable Slogan Of The Campaign: The PM looked the obvious winner with his early entry: ‘We don’t want any more three-word slogans.’ He followed this up with three of his own: Jobs and Growth, Continuity and Change, Ideas and Innovation. By for a moment he looked like being overtaken by a contribution from Chris Bowen, with an aphorism that the judges felt encapsulated the ALP mission: ‘We’ll act in the national interest, not vested interests.’ But a late entry from the PM won the day: ‘I am completely opposed to churning Prime Ministers.’

Know Your Electorate Award: Won by an anonymous ALP apparatchik, mourning the calamitous performance of David Feeney, the candidate for Batman, but making at the same time an appeal to the better nature of the electors: ‘I feel sorry for him, stranded out there, surrounded by savages in hemp shirts and nose rings.’

Julian Assange Award For Courageous Journalism: Awarded to Leigh Sales for the penetrating and unfairly provocative question she asked in her first interview of the Prime Minister: ‘What would you say are your 10 best qualities?’

Karl Marx Award For Helping The Working Class To Throw Off The Shackles Imposed By Capitalists And Unscrupulous Landlords: Senator di Natale, the Greens leader, was an obvious winner, with his ground-breaking reform of the employment laws. This was achieved simply by ignoring them and concocting an innovative package for domestic servants by which they are paid $3.75 an hour for working on the di Natale rural estates, thereby imposing restraint on 7 Eleven, Coles and Woolworths, whose extravagance in paying wages of more than $3.75 an hour is putting an impossible burden on other employers.

Downton Abbey Award For Encouraging A More Servile Attitude In The Servant Class: Again, to Senator di Natale for noting, as an inspiration to others, that his servants are actually very grateful for their $3.75 an hour and now see themselves as part of the family.

Albert Schweitzer Award For Medical Research: Chris Bowen for his discovery of a new and irritating condition known as ‘fiscal contraction’. Research shows that it is an offshoot of ‘fiscal rectitude’, a more insidious and intractable disease and one with no known cure other than keeping downward pressure on interest rates. However, Mr Bowen thinks that the best way to treat it is to let it grow bigger for ten years and then have another look at it in the hope that by then the bloated patient will have recovered or died.

L J Hooker Award For Acquiring/Forgetting About Property: David Feeney a clear winner, having acquired a bijou workers’ cottage worth $2.3 m in the Green belt of Melbourne (which he forgot to declare by an understandable oversight in view of the small sum involved and the unrelenting demands of finding where his electorate is situated), an executive penthouse in the salubrious East Melbourne, and various other estates. The judges noted that Feeney’s formative years were spent as an official in the transport workers’ union and although this could not possibly explain the foundations of his vast fortune, his could nevertheless be called a true rigs-to-riches story.

Robert Mugabe Award For Innovative Plebiscites/ Referenda: And the joint winners are: the activists who oppose a plebiscite on same sex marriage, as it would enable people to say what they really think about that issue which would be divisive and judgmental; the Senator Sarah Hanson-Young variation that, as everyone will vote for it, there is no need to have a plebiscite; the EU for its suggestion to have successive votes until you arrive at the right one; the British variation that after a plebiscite you should change your mind and have a second vote; the Australian republican movement for its proposal that a secret committee of public servants should invent a republic and that people should be allowed to vote for it and keep on doing so, but not for anything else; Mr G Ingram, in the Age, for his suggestion that before a referendum, we should decide if the result might be 50/50 and, if so, voting should be abandoned; and our own modest proposal that for all referenda to change the constitution, ballot papers be issued already marked ‘No’.

Eponymous Award: To Arthur Sinodinos, for gracing the lexicon with his name, henceforth to be used to describe the colourful Sydney practice of being head of both a political donor and donee, not knowing where the money came from, where it went, nor spotting it as it flies by.

Flexible Preferences Award: The Greens’ highly principled decision in Sydney to direct preferences to Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats, long the opponent of the Gay Mardi Gras, ahead of the Liberal candidate who is a gay indigenous man in favour of same sex marriage. A close 2nd are the Lib Dems who say the 2014 budget cuts did not go far enough and who are thus directing preferences to the ALP who say the cuts went too far.

Creative Accounting Award: to the ALP for including the return from the Coalition’s retrospective superannuation policy in its ‘savings’, while opposing the policy itself because it’s retrospective. Congratulations to all.

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