Maybe the general political environment of Julia Gillard's denunciation of Tony Abbott for being what she called misogynist might have rallied female voters.

Most commentators at election time look at swings between the parties. But in the ACT (and Tasmania) we have multi-member electorates. Not only are voters confronted with a choice between parties, but they are also required to order the candidates within a party.

One does not just vote Labor, for example. One has to choose which of seven or five Labor candidates on offer should get preference because only two or three of them will be elected.

Moreover, the order of the candidates on the ballot paper is not determined by the political party, but is chosen randomly, so that only one seventh of the ballot papers, for example, would have Katy Gallagher's name at the top of the Labor column. One seventh of them would have Andrew Barr's name and so on. Further, the order below the top name is also scrambled.

The evidence of the count so far indicates that within party columns there was a strong tendency to put female candidates before male ones - other factors being equal. And the evidence comes in the context of a candidate's gender being apparent on the face of the ballot paper by virtue of the given name. (Though admittedly a woman might be called Zed.)

There is the obvious point that Katy Gallagher did well and probably has retained government whereas a Jon Stanhope-led government could well have lost. But the contest within parties is more interesting.

The Liberal contest in Molonglo is the most pointed. Yes, sitting MLA Jeremy Hanson topped the Liberal candidates, but one would have expected sitting MLA Steve Doszpot to come second, even if he had moved from Brindabella.

But no, Giulia Jones has beaten him. And it seems that Elizabeth Lee will also beat him or come very close to it. So two women have thrown over a male sports-involved MLA.

The Labor vote in Molonglo shows a similar pro-female trend. A hitherto virtually unknown candidate, Meegan Fitzharris, is running down sitting MLA and minister Simon Corbell. She got 50 per cent more than his primary vote. If Corbell wins it will only be because of stray preferences from defeated minor-party candidates. The Labor voters seem to have said we want a woman.

Similarly with the Green vote in Molonglo. Ordinarily, one would have expected the Speaker and articulate, longstanding Green campaigner over four elections Shane Rattenbury to have been the obvious first choice against the neophyte Caroline Le Couteur.

But no. Le Couteur has come within a couple of hundred votes of toppling him.

There is no discernable pro-female trend in Brindabella.

In Ginninderra, however, the Labor vote is interesting. Yvette Berry, daughter of Labor leftist stalwart and former deputy chief minister Wayne Berry, looks like either taking the seat of sitting Labor MLA Chris Bourke, or giving him a very close run. The other possibility is that the preferences from sundry motorist and train parties will give Labor enough votes to give her a seat ahead of Greens MLA Meredith Hunter. But even then she could well be elected ahead of Bourke.

Looking at the ratio of male-female candidates against the male-female ratio of elected candidates of the major parties in each electorate is illuminating.

There were more male than female candidates for each major party in all of the electorates. Yet it seems that there will be more females or an equal number of females elected for both major parties in all electorates except the Liberals in Ginninderra (where the Libs did not offer much choice - four male candidates out of five).

It seems that the ACT electorate wants more women in Parliament irrespective of the major parties' preselection propensity to give men the gig. Given the power in a multi-member system to determine which of several people in a voter's preferred party should be elected, the ACT electorate, at least, is giving two fingers to the party's preselection process and opting for women.

Of course, in a single-member system - as in the federal Parliament - voters are not going to allow gender to cause them to move from their preferred party. But where, as in the ACT, one can choose which of five or seven on offer from one's preferred party, the voters are showing a marked preference for female candidates.

Whether that preference is being expressed mainly by women we cannot tell. Whether it was an aberrant phenomenon because of the concurrent Gillard-Abbott misogyny debate we cannot tell. But the preference was definitely there.

As a result, it is quite likely that the next ACT Assembly will have the highest proportion of female members as any parliament in Australia's history - but still below the female portion in the population as a whole.

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I have now taught at the University of Canberra and more recently at the Australian National University for about a decade. So it is heartening to see this week a highly expensive investigation by leading accounting and consulting firm Ernst and Young tell us the bleeding obvious:

■ Universities sit on highly expensive real estate which they use for only part of the year and a lot of that real estate is green space.

■ The internet can give access to the world's best lectures on every subject to everyone.

■ The internet could give access to every textbook and every journal to anyone with internet access.

So why do universities persist in the one-lecture-and-one-tutorial-a-week system when everyone knows it is a dud? Cost. One lecturer with 100 students for one hour is cheaper than one tutor with 10 students totalling 10 hours.

Experience and student feedback tells me that lectures are a waste of time and that tutorials with about 10 to 15 students give the best experience and the best education. Who wants to hear Professor Dreary Bloggs at Billabong University talk for an hour when the best of Yale, Oxford, Sydney and Harvard are online? Who wants to be given the brush-off by a teacher preparing a lecture or driven by research when that teacher is the best person to explain their problem?

University is a great experience. Fellow students, staff and being on campus are experiences that should not be lost to bean-counter recommendations. So, Australian universities, get your teachers to teach in smaller groups which cannot be replicated online and abandon the big lectures which are accessible elsewhere.

crispinhull.com.au