Last Saturday this columnist, like so many left-leaning, bubble-dwelling Canberrans, went from extreme joy in the optimistic morning (my experience of voting, in the sweet polling-place's sausage-scented air, was idyllically democratic) to soul-withering despair at night as the horror of the election result unfolded.

With what delight we gambolled to our local polling place, the Garran Primary School, early on Saturday morning. Balmy sunshine, democracy sunbeams, illuminated the scene and in the trees democracy cockatoos (like all of us, deceived by the opinion polls) cackled their confident prophecies of impending sweeping socio-political change.

The morning sun searchingly investigated the features of the party workers giving out how-to-vote material, revealing hard, old, hobgoblin Liberal faces etched with capitalist unkindness and with anxiety about their franking credits.

The same searching sunlight highlighted the soft, pixie-like idealism in the youthful faces of the Greens. Enthusiastically I took a how-to-vote leaflet from one of the pixies.

There was a colourful, multicultural queue of voters and the air was fragrant with sizzling democracy sausages, the heady, titillating perfume of the Australian polling place.

Our multi-complexioned queue shuffled cheerfully into the school's hall. A beaming young man of Middle-Eastern appearance was photographed and applauded as, voting for the first time in his adopted nation, he plopped his ballot papers into the welcoming ballot boxes.

It felt very, very good to be an Australian, queuing cosmopolitanly in our best-in-the-world autumn sunlight to vote in a safe and law-abiding democracy.

Then, a song in my heart, I cast my idealistic, pixie-nave votes, imagining I was contributing to nationwide change when (as one was to learn later that day) in truth my votes were as inconsequential and ephemeral as stray snowflakes alighting on hot desert sand.

That evening, like umpteen hot political Canberrans, I took my euphoria to an election-night party at which everyone was like-mindedly leftish and dreaming of a change of government.

Therapeutic as it is to be among friends on such occasions I wonder now, looking back on Saturday, if there is a case, for the sake of ideological polyphony, for inviting or even hiring a token Liberal to be there.

Perhaps, too, we might have hired a tokenly selfish bourgeois burgher to put his greedy fears for his accursed franking credits ahead of thoughts of the public good. Representatives of these sorts of awful people, offering contrary perspectives, might help keep us grounded, might remind us that our election-night parties are being held in an artificial ideological bubble within the bigger bubble that is Canberra, the sometimes strangely un-Australian national capital city.

Similarly, Canberra's leftish election-night parties might have been helped by the sobering presence (perhaps using the wonders of Skype) of a blue-collared Queenslander, a miner from that mining state, an Australian for whom coal mining's fortunes are sincerely thought to be a crucial matter of employment and unemployment, of meeting mortgages, of putting food on tables.

As it was, on election night, the balance of my mind disturbed by the horror that was unfolding (with ABC TV's Antony Green the unfolder in chief) I found myself thinking of my fellow Australians who had voted conservatively for swine I could never vote for even under torture, as total strangers, from a species quite unlike my own.

Our election-night party involved a soiree. My contribution was my re-writing, with an ACT election theme, of the lyrics of Tom Lehrer's shockingly offensive but very funny song Poisoning Pigeons In The Park. My version confessed to a similarly perverse, election-time pastime of my own. If you know Lehrer's ditty then sing along. All together now.

Election time is here! Election time is here!

Life is skittles and life is beer.

And there's one thing that makes elections complete for me

Makes them such a masturbatory treat for me.

All the world seems quite right on a moonlit May night

When we're vandalising Liberal posters after dark.

Every night time you'll see my wife Sandra and me

As we smash up Liberal corflutes after dark.

When they see us coming

The posters try to run and hide,

But there's escaping

Our frenzied chainsaw postercide.

Zed's posters are especially pleasing to ravage

As you think of the beast's attitude to gay marriage.

Female Libs' smirking faces

Are left transformed and weird

Once you've spray painted on them

A black Ned Kelly beard.

And on stubborn posters we just might

Use some discreet gelignite

While we're mangling Lib material

After dark.

Gosh! Nothing on earth's so adrenalizing

As vandalising Libs' advertising

With explosives, chain saws and spray cans

After dark.*

After the party I drove home in dismayed silence. An unusually enormous, special election-night full moon loomed in the sky. It, the moon, has seen so much.

"What went so terribly, terribly wrong?" I asked her, this wise old planetary satellite.

But she has that eerie enigmatic quality, just like psephologist Antony Green in his narrow area of expertise, of knowing absolutely all of the facts without ever using them to express a passionate personal point of view.

*I suppose it's necessary in these humourless times to explain that my song is satirical and that I've never, yet, vandalised Liberal corflutes. How can a self-funded retiree (especially one not blessed with franking credits) possibly afford gelignite?