The component personnel may take another week. If our opinion poll and my instincts are right, Labor, under Katy Gallagher, will have the most seats and will be able to govern with the support of the Greens.

I should not be surprised if the Greens demand a ministry - perhaps two of five - as a price for their support.

Meanwhile, in South Australia, the last mainland Labor government is on the nose. Only the usual backstabbing and pratfalls within the state Liberal Party could stand in the way of their triumph at the next election.

Tasmania also has a Labor government with every reason to contemplate the shortness of life, fickle voters, and human folly.

Elsewhere, Labor over the past few years has been put out of government at the state level. With deliberation, if not great brutality, in Western Australia. Emphatically and ruthlessly in NSW and later Queensland. Perhaps sadly in Victoria.

In the Northern Territory, rejection was the more withering because it came from a hitherto entirely loyal Aboriginal constituency.

By tomorrow morning, the commentators will again be remarking how different the people of the ACT are from those in the rest of Australia.

The implication will be that we are weird. Out of step. Out of touch. Probably in la la land, no doubt because we are all public servants, rightfully fearful of the fate in store for us once Tony Abbott takes over. People with no idea whatever about what is going on elsewhere. Perhaps people who, as cartoonist Larry Pickering said in 1974 after the people of Fraser rejected him as a Liberal candidate, who ''would vote for a chimpanzee if it was wearing an ALP badge''.

Few will try to divine federal or national implications from the imagined perversity of the people of the ACT.

Perhaps, indeed, the ho hum return of Labor after an election which excited no great passions will be dismissed as entirely devoid of significance, whether because the people of the ACT are strange, or because the ACT government is really but a glorified town council, whose politics turn, as a Radio National host (and former citizen) remarked yesterday, only on issues about rates and rubbish.

There will be some oblique commentaries, most probably doing more to reiterate the already known beliefs of the writers than any reflection on the outcomes.

Regardless of how well or how badly the Greens perform, for example, one can be fairly certain that the house chorus at The Australian will declare that the result demonstrates that they are finished as a political force, and on the way out.

Even some of those who will reject any idea of the results amounting to any sort of hope for, or endorsement of, Julia Gillard, will no doubt sieve for signs indicating that voters think, or do not think, that Tony Abbott is sexist, or negative, or lead weight in the Liberal saddle.

Most of the commentary will be wrong. The people of the ACT have long shown, as have the people of NSW, Queensland, Victoria and elsewhere, that they well understand the difference between local and national matters.

Our opinion poll about the issues showed that the interest, as far as it went, was firmly on matters purely territorial - questions of health, education, of roads and infrastructure and the local environment, as well as leadership, financial stewardship and the cost of living.

There is no evidence whatever that the election amounts to any sort of referendum about Julia Gillard, or federal Labor, or for that matter the carbon tax, refugees or the threat of marriages between man and beasts.

The poll, moreover, showed that neither party, but perhaps particularly the Liberals, was well tuned to the public's view of what the issues were.

The Liberals put most of their eggs in one basket, suggesting that Labor had a wicked secret plan to triple everyone's rates. Even if that were true - and it was roundly denied - the polls suggested that there was never a time when the Liberals succeeded in making it the primary matter of concern to voters.

Labor was perhaps more focused on a certain smug incumbency, but the barely concealed undertone of its emphasis on

jobs was to incite fear that Zed Seselja might anticipate Tony Abbott in cutting jobs in Canberra. In this sense, Labor would have felt they were helped (and the Liberal Party hindered) by steady reports in recent months of savage public service job cuts in Queensland, and further public service job cuts in NSW. Yet the evidence suggests that voters did not much fear local retrenchment under Seselja.

To say that parties, or leaders, have misread the voter mood is not always fair. Some strategies are there to contain the size of an expected loss. Labor, for example, knew it could not win in NSW or Queensland, and its pitch to voters was designed only to rally a core faithful.

The Liberal focus on rates, taxes and the personality of its leader may have been a better strategy than one which either invited voters to contemplate the increased moral and social conservatism of Liberal candidates, or the personal quarrelling and disloyalty which has impaired Seselja's capacity to project an image of one big happy team. Liberal advertising suggested also that their research had picked up on Gallagher's popularity, leading to Liberal advertisements with the theme ''I like Katy, but …''.

Likewise, Labor's concentration on Gallagher, rather than her team, may reflect its research suggesting that some ministers are personally unpopular, have little profile, and hints that most of the elected Labor candidates cannot stand each other, and certainly rarely socialise together.

Some commentators will say, ''Well, Canberra is a Labor town. What else would you expect?'' John Howard once remarked that this city looks like Killara, votes like Cessnock.

The ACT car, in neutral, may well drift to the left of the road. But voters have repeatedly shown themselves able to grab the steering wheel, as Labor has learnt, locally and federally, to its cost.

Canberra has had six chief ministers. Three - Trevor Kaine, Kate Carnell and Gary Humphries- have been Liberals. Three - Rosemary Follett, Jon Stanhope and Katy Gallagher - have been Labor.

Successful leaders on both sides have been middle-of-the roaders, with liberal social views, rather than ideologues. The early history of the success of independents of morally conservative views suggests that there is some constituency for such views, but that the electorate is generally liberal and tolerant, with not much time for the wagging finger.

Economic - as opposed to social - conservative has not hurt.

On social issues, it was clear that Carnell, the Liberals' most successful leader, was on the left of her party and that John Howard felt little affinity with her. But Kaine and Humphries were reasonably morally conservative, though otherwise moderate by national standards. Observers who link Canberra's social attitudes - and the relative popularity of the Greens - to attitudes in inner city seats in Sydney and Melbourne are not so wrong, though they may well overstate the inner city effect when they consider those who live outside old Canberra in Tuggeranong, the Woden Valley, Belconnen and Gungahlin. This effect, however, is not merely a hippy or Balmain basket weaver effect so much as a reflection of an age in which the class conflict which once defined the major Australian parties now seems old fashioned, and irrelevant. In such environments, traditional philosophical gaps between the parties do not seem wide, much conventional disputation seems banal, and attitudes on social matters, the environment and the world of ideas are as important as bread and butter issues.

Many deride such people as smug, unaware, living in their own secure cocoon, oblivious to the hard world outside. Yet a look at the demographics challenges this, no more so than in Canberra.

We have the highest average level of education in Australia, the highest propensity to travel (whether for work or pleasure), to read, to use computers and modern communications, and to be well informed about events local, regional, national and international.

Of the major Australian cities, Canberra is also, considerably, the least parochial and up itself. Sydneysiders and Melbournites rarely think beyond city boundaries. By contrast a high proportion of Canberra's population comes from elsewhere and is still connected with their wider families, clans and social networks. Moreover, a high proportion of the population is concerned, one way or another, with the task of governing Australia, the development of public policy, and with programs that work nationally and internationally.

These are not merely public servants, but people in the universities and schools, the think tanks, the lobbies and the information industry, and the private sector that lives off their consumption and hunger for connection with the world.

Such a population may have its own preoccupations and peculiar view of the world - or a different view, at least, from the view in Warringah, Sydney, or Werribee in Melbourne - but it is not one to be dismissed as unimportant or against its own interest.