What I most want to know about the candidates stalking me for my votes in the coming election (all of them are total mysteries to me at this time of writing) is what sorts of books they read.

We are what we read (or what we fail to read) and I would never knowingly vote for anyone who doesn't read and love literary fiction. At this election time I find myself studying the faces on the political poster corflutes to look for evidence in the face that the mind behind it has been improved by empathy-deepening books.

The method in my madness is I have a belief, supported by good research, that those who read literary fiction are sensitised by the experience and are enabled by it to feel better empathy for others.

There is an overview of this big idea online in Megan Schmidt's piece "How reading fiction increases empathy and encourages understanding" for the reputable Discover magazine. Your columnist has just read and reread Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel Klara and the Sun and I am a much better person, a much better voter for having been exposed to Ish's investigation of the hearts and minds of robots and of those of us (increasingly all of us) who have important relationships with them.

Had I been one of the 100 undecided voters in the room for last Wednesday's fabled Sky News-Courier Mail people's forum my question of the two leaders would have been either "When will you intervene to save Julian Assange from any more persecution, and why haven't you intervened long before this"? Or a question seeking to find what sorts of books the two leaders do and don't read.

Not that I have any doubt about what Scott Morrison doesn't read since he and his unfortunate personality are an unhappy advertisement for what becomes of someone who, unassisted by fiction, never lives any life other than his dull, dry, unimaginative bible-blinkered own.

Indeed, the very fact of his never speaking up for Assange is a testament to his morally-impoverished inability to put himself in the persecuted Australian's shoes, in Assange's cell.

One cannot be so sure about Albo and what he does and doesn't read. His personality is eerily hard to find. The comedian who has just quipped "Albo had a near-death experience and his whole life flashed before him but he wasn't in it" may have put a finger on a surreal but true Albo truism.

What my federal Labor federal member for Canberra Alicia Payne reads and doesn't read is like everything about her (including where she stands on the plight of Assange) a mystery.

But thou Canberrans voting in the electorate of Fenner have in your Labor member and candidate Andrew Leigh a proven reader of books.

In a speech to parliament on October 18, 2021 debating a motion on the value of reading (predictably, Morrison was not a contributor to that debate) Leigh catalogued and sang the praises of the many books he had read that year. They included the aforementioned empathy-stoking Klara And The Sun. He ringingly concluded his speech: "All leaders should be readers. All of us in the parliament should be reading more."

Contemplating the Leigh-blessed electorate of Fenner I feel a pang of candidate-envy (a voter phenomenon under-researched by political scientists) as I search in vain for any proven bibliophiles among those seeking my vote in my electorate of Canberra.

Meanwhile, as I scribble this the federal capital city is becomingly festooned with election portrait corflutes. I love them for among other reasons the cheery disorder they bring to the appearance of a usually insufferably immaculate metropolis. Canberra is usually a short back and sides city, but corflute time briefly puts flowers in the city's temporarily democracy-tousled hair.

The corflutes are unpopular with this city's miserabilists and there is a real risk they will succeed in having them banned.

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So I have had a brilliant idea that, implemented at the next election-festooning, might not only dampen the gunpowder of the anti-corflute miserabilists but also work other wonders for our city.

What if electoral laws about these things are amended to require that every party, every candidate festooning the city with corflutes must according to their means make 50 per cent of them reproductions of great works of art? Perhaps, in the spirit of the way in which political corflutes are always portraits of candidates, the artworks could be reproductions of famous painted portraits?

So, for example, in place right now instead of the Liberals' ubiquitously monotonous 50,000 (my impressionistic estimate) identical portraits of a grinning Zed Seselja there would be just 25,000 of them (still an irritating surfeit of Zeds).

Accompanying them after my reform would be the aesthetically uplifting display (paid for by the well-heeled Liberal Party) of 25,000 reproductions of, say, Frans Hals' Laughing Cavalier, of Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earring, of Leonardo's Mona Lisa or of any of the engagingly self-honest self-portraits of Rembrandt and of Vincent van Gogh.

This would make election time in the ACT gaily synonymous with the transformation of the city's highways and byways into pleasing and culturally sensitising linear art galleries.

The world would take notice and democracy-loving people everywhere would marvel at this democracy-inspired display in the federal capital city of one of the world's oldest and most fun-loving democracies.

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