Donkeys live to a great age and federal parliamentarians enjoy a generous superannuation scheme. And so if Matilda, the long-eared parliamentary candidate for the Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) can just get elected she should go on to amass a fabulous nest egg.
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On Tuesday morning and and in front of Parliament House the miniature donkey grazed contentedly on the lush and still dew-wet lawns. What was she doing there?
During this election campaign the koala foundation is taking Matilda to lots of NSW federal electorates (she travels in a swish white float, liberally decorated with campaign stickers). The AKF is calling her their "candidate" but alas electoral laws make it impossible for her to stand.
Really, she is out campaigning for support for a koala protection Act. The AKF is urging people to "donkey vote" if their local candidates do not have koalas or the environment on their agendas.
On the lawns of Parliament House, the foundation's CEO Deborah Tabart OAM explained why they were there. Ms Tabart has been the foundation's CEO for 28 years and she is frustrated and (in a controlled way) as mad as hell.
She told us she has been trying, ahead of this election, to get the Prime Minister, Labor leader Bill Shorten and Greens' leader Richard Di Natale to sign a statutory declaration. It was to be a promise that when elected they will support the enactment of a koala protection Act.
But typically for them, she told us, fuming a little, they hadn't responded.
"While I've been CEO of the AKF we have funded about $20m worth of science [about koalas and their habitats] ... But it seems to me that the science is not being heard ... all the science we've produced can gain no traction ... Minister Hunt [the federal minister for the environment] and I constantly tweet to each other. I ring him. I provide science to him. And then he approves [environmentally damaging] projects that just should not happen.
"On this trip with Matilda, as her campaign director, I've gone through parts of Australia that were given good biodiversity maps of habitat that should have been protected ... and I can see that the developers have just ignored it all and councils are too close to them.
"And so at the beginning of 2016 I felt that if science isn't heard, if reason isn't heard, then maybe the ridiculous [as in campaigning with a donkey] should be heard."
She has been told that hundreds of thousands of people vote informally at elections and so she is asking those people to creatively donkey vote by drawing Matilda's ears on the ballot paper.
"Then those people will be heard instead of just being seen as a bunch of people who aren't interested. And on our 5000 km journey down the coast people are saying 'No worries. I'm going to vote for you, for Matilda.' I have great faith in the Australian people. I think that they are feeling disenfranchised and that this is a perfect time for Matilda to be on the road.
"So not one single politician that we wrote to has said they will sign this stat dec. How can these politicians say, after they've put a koala into the hands of [the visiting] Mr Putin and Mr Obama, that the koala is not important to our country? But they show, by not turning up today with those stat decs that they do not care about koalas. They're captive to industry."
Here she introduced an honorable exception to this chilly indifference to koalas in the form of Martin Tye of the Sustainable Australia Party (SAP). He has signed the stat dec and has pledged that if elected he and other SAP members will fight for a koala protection Act.
This columnist, a little intoxicated by all this idealism and, surely, naivety, (for how will drawing donkeys' ears on ballot papers enable those who draw them to be "heard"?) went for a short, sobering walk.
Then I came back and asked Ms Tabart about the plight of the koalas.
Her statistics make things sound dire. And she testifies that the AKS has determined "every single piece of [koala] habitat in the country" and in which federal electorates those pieces are.
So, for example, on Tuesday she was set to take Matilda campaigning in the electorate of Eden-Monaro. The AKS calculates there are between 150 and 200 koalas left in the 61.6 per cent of their Eden-Monaro habitat that remains.
The AKF asks us to imagine the nightmarishly unthinkable, an Australia with no koalas. Ms Tabart told us, with understandable horror, that the AKF has "manifests" for eight million koala skins sent to New York and to London between 1890 and 1927.
Her point was, we think, that this callousness is still with us today, albeit not being shown in the same systematic way. Rather it is, Tabart believes, that councils and developers are colluding in the destroying of koalas' habitats.
A campaign sticker on Matilda's float has an apprehensive-looking koala and the stark warning: "No Tree No Me."
