But one thing they (setters and candidates) do have in common is leaping out at us now that the nation is festooned with posters of the photograph-portrait faces of political candidates.

In my poster-studying peregrinations around the ACT and the nation I am being reminded of illustrator-cartoonist Gary Larson's masterpiece How To Recognise The Moods Of an Irish Setter.

It features six identical portraits of the same Irish setter, its wide eyes and lolling tongue set in a face alight with joyful exuberance. But each identical setter face comes labelled with a mood, with happy, depressed, angry, pensive, excited and suicidal.

Larson's fond point is that the Irish setter (like so many sorts of dogs) is a sweetly cheerful and uncomplicated brute that chortles, gambols, drools and tail-wags through life, its tiny mind never troubled by a dark thought.

My point is that candidates and their parties always see to it that the candidates are wearing Irish setter expressions in their poster portraits. A variation of Larson's masterpiece might be The Many Moods Of A Political Candidate in which, in spite of variations of gender, age and political affiliation, every candidate face is a face wreathed in jollity.

So for example the most superabundant posters in my bailiwick of the national capital feature a photograph of a female Labor candidate and a male Liberal candidate, and, in spite of the chasm of gender and ideology between them their facial expressions (tooth-displaying jollity) are, like any two of Larson's setters, identical.

Why do parties and candidates imagine (and perhaps they are right) that these portrait posters are an effective thing? In my intellectual detachment I find the use of these posters both strange and fascinating.

Are the portrait-posters used because, perhaps subconsciously, candidates and their parties use flattering portraits in the way a peacock displays his tail during courtship, as a form of sexual display? Do voters, again perhaps subconsciously (and like a subconsciously discerning peahen) make a quasi-sexual assessment of a candidates' face, thinking a display of sparkling teeth and glowing skin and lustrous hair a proof of the kind of reproductive health we want in a mate/member of parliament? Are we, the voters, when we look at candidates' portrait-posters, being treated (by candidates and parties) as enfranchised peahens?

But to return to my opening point, the redsetterism of candidates' posters, there is what I would call a moodism about these politicians' poster face expressions.

This moodism discriminates in favour of faces expressing shallow, setter-like, pentecostal-churchgoer-like childish joy. In doing so it discriminates against faces expressing, deeper, grander, more complex feelings.

Do party hacks not know how to scowl? Do they never feel and show awe? Are they never agitated? Surely a face etched with agitation would be appropriate for concerned Greens candidates, believing, as they say they do, that climate change is about to turn our planet into an uninhabitable cinder.

I am serious-minded and believe I am more attracted to faces that show seriousness than to faces displaying mindless jollity. I have no time, no respect for people who don't know how to brood.

Whenever we think of Beethoven our minds fly subconsciously to pictures of him as a troubled brooding genius with spectacularly long and dishevelled hair.

These sorts of portraits say, as the ruthlessly honest self-portraits of Rembrandt and Vincent van Gogh say of those great men, "Here is a person of depth and complexity, of poetic sensibility." Politicians' poster-portraits say "I am a flibbertigibbet."

So, candidates, embrace your multiple moods. And if you and your well-heeled party are planning to install lots of portrait posters along a long stretch of thoroughfare (for example along presently poster-festooned Hindmarsh Drive) why not make a gallery of yourself?

Have each of your faces on each poster display a different emotion (jollity, say, then 400 metres later melancholy then 400 metres later pensiveness, then 400 metres later ecstasy, and 400 metres later dummy-spitting pique, and so on) so the overall effect along the highway is to show that you, far from being just an Irish setter, are a complex, engaged person through whom the gale of life blows high?