Did you know that the Australian government in bygone days issued licences to citizens to hunt Aboriginals? No, I didn’t either, but the rector of St George’s Anglican church at Fiveways, Paddington, in the heart of Allegra Spender’s federal seat of Wentworth says this is true and repeated his claim several times before polls closed last weekend.

Why is it important to note this clerical intervention? Because his church hall was used as a polling station, as it has been for decades, by the Australian Electoral Commission. Not only that, but the rector, who has been in situ for the past two years, also insisted that the children’s artworks depicting Uluru and adorned with statements of love for the Voice which decorated his church inside the boundary set by the AEC’s supervisors were not relevant to the referendum debate.

Despite one copy of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the one which PM Anthony Albanese is moved to tears by, being displayed in the foyer at the entrance to the polling booth hall and another attached to a shrub in the churchyard through which voters entered, the AEC officer in charge said no rules regarding political material being displayed had been breached.

Over the past fortnight’s pre-polling, I had received an apology from the AEC after being aggressively, offensively and publicly abused by the supervisor of the pre-poll booth at St Matthias Church on Oxford Street, Paddington after he claimed that I had called a pre-poll voter a ‘dickhead’. He later amended that claim to say I had called someone an ‘idiot’. False claims which the AEC acknowledged in an email (misspelling my name) which read in part ‘it appears there has been an unfortunate interaction and this has been discussed with the Officer in Charge. On behalf of the AEC I apologise for your experience – it appears the situation should have been managed differently’.

Quite, but there was no indication that the AEC (which asks complainants for a Suggested Outcome) responded to my request for a public apology and that the officer not be permitted to represent the AEC at any polling booth.

Unfortunately, the AEC now appears to be almost as politicised as the other taxpayer-funded woke bureaucracies, the ABC and the Bureau of Meteorology. The Teals, as they incessantly remind the world, are gentle people intent on saving the planet by killing the Australian economy. Their fantasy translated into emotive pleas for support. As vacuous as their federal representative, they shouted meaningless but emotive slogans at those coming to vote. ‘Make Paddington proud’, ‘Make us a better country’, ‘Do the Right Thing’, ‘Vote for a Kinder Nation’, promises voters anywhere but in the virtue-signalling eastern suburbs would recognise as meaningless as the Albanese government’s promise to lower electricity prices and reduce the cost of living and provide housing for the homeless.

The Yes voters who took their leaflets viewed the handful of outnumbered No campaigners with a studied disdain or outright hostility. The extent to which No voters would surreptitiously wink or give a thumbs-up to show support was indicative of the fear they felt about going public with so much animosity in the air, and justifiably so. I was disgusted by the abuse hissed, shouted and vented in my face by Yes voters.

One man, who demanded to know what my ethnic makeup was told me that he was Jewish, with Holocaust victims or survivors among his antecedents (as if there exists a Jew in Australia who may not have such a connection) placed his spittle-flicked mouth inches from me as he bizarrely commanded me to identify to which tribe I belonged.

I demurred, and pointed out that given recent events in Israel, I had not really expected to be called on to identify either race or religion in Australia.

Disgusting epithets were hurled at me and my co-workers from passing motorists in expensive SUVs, and riding by on the ubiquitous lime-green Chinese bicycles which now litter the area.

I did not see any Yes volunteers abused during the two weeks I was at a booth.

Ms Spender’s passive-aggressive supporters, sporting her Teal colours and acknowledging they were underwritten by her Wentworth for Yes campaign, were in the main officious women of a certain age bustling about with clipboards and huddling in conspiratorial groups to glance at the one or two No campaigners.

Just one male Yes worker, an experienced political campaigner, helpfully gave me advice about the process and the scrutineering which followed, for which I am grateful.

I was the sole No scrutineer at St George’s and was quite impressed with the AEC workers until it was revealed that 60 voting slips (27 No and 33 Yes) had not been signed when issued and were therefore to be declared informal.

One of the Yes scrutineers kept murmuring that they should be declared formal as the intention of the voter was clear on each.

After my objection, her argument that voters were being denied their rights because of an AEC worker’s error was rejected after the AEC supervisor called HQ for clarification. Was the exercise worth the contumely? Yes, though the final count at the booth was 1,042 for Yes and just 357 for No, the quiet thanks from those who voted for reason and not emotion, who identified with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and Warren Mundine, and not the spiteful Noel Pearson, the angry Thomas Mayo, the sullen Marcia Langton or even the semi-coherent Indigenous Affairs Minister Linda Burney, made it worthwhile.

I thanked the rector’s wife for the democracy sausage that her workers had provided (and my co-worker gave a $50 dollar donation to the church) and left to attend a dear friend’s birthday party.

I wasn’t driving and swallowed three bitterly cold beers at a pace which may have matched Bob Hawke’s on an average day.

I decided not to attend matins at St George’s to catch whatever baloney the rector might be preaching ‘addressing the global challenges of life today’.

The fact that his church showed no signs of support for Israel after the murderous terrorist attacks seemed to indicate that real global challenges were beyond his remit.