After seven and a half hours of live election broadcasting the ABC panel admitted they were delirious. “We’ve broken the record: suck on that, Kerry O’Brien,” said Leigh Sales after a long night which saw no clear result. “That’s how loose you get at 1am.”
Sales, who was leading her first election panel – the legendary O’Brien stood down at the 2013 election – did for the main part remain professional, throwing to the election analyst Antony Green for insight on when viewers could expect a result from a very tight race.
Which is more than can be said for Channel Seven, which had assembled a motley crew of panellists and analysts who threw insults at each other and berated the network’s own reporters.
In an extraordinary exchange, which certainly gave Seven’s coverage high entertainment value, the conservative broadcaster and Tony Abbott loyalist Alan Jones attacked the Queensland Liberal National party senator James McGrath, Malcolm Turnbull’s numbers man.
“There were a lot of bedwetters in the Liberal party and you seem to be the captain of the bedwetters,” Jones said to a bemused McGrath. “The reality is that in 2010 Abbott won seven seats from Labor and in 2013 he won 18. In two elections he won 25 seats.
“The Liberal party out there will be very, very distressed about what’s happened.”
McGrath replied: “Alan, I actually don’t care what you think, because you’re not a friend of conservatives, you’re not a friend of the Liberal National party. You’re the king of the bedwetters, actually. You are actually a grub.”
Jones’s fellow panellist on the Seven desk, Jeff Kennett, was equally explosive, attacking Seven’s reporters in the field for allegedly swallowing Labor’s spin. “It’s appalling! Get your facts right,” Kennett said. The Seven anchor, Chris Reason, and political editor, Mark Riley, tried valiantly to defend them, telling Kennett they were merely relaying sentiments from the Labor headquarters.
Earlier in the night the panel, which included the former Labor leader Mark Latham and the independent senator Jacqui Lambie, had been vastly improved by the presence of Labor’s deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, who continually corrected Jones’s pronouncements with calm resolve while looking as though she would rather be anywhere else.
Surprisingly, chief bomb thrower Latham was comparatively well-behaved, seated on the end of the desk next to a relatively quiet Lambie.
If that wasn’t enough colour and movement, Seven also had a suite of absurd graphics and animations including the Departure Lounge, which saw parliamentarians strapped into their seats and ejected skyward.
Over on Nine’s more sedate coverage the Crusher was getting a workout as a tired-looking Karl Stefanovic and Lisa Wilkinson tried to keep it interesting. Previous election gimmicks on Nine have included the Boot, the Shredder and the Shark, which saw politicians dropped “down the gurgler” and fed to the CGI sharks.
The ABC wasn’t entirely immune to gimmicks, positioning News Breakfast host Michael Rowland up high above the election set with a giant map of Australia floating above him. “I feel like the Phantom of the Opera but I promise not to sing,” he said.
But the gold star for election night high jinks goes to Seven, which resorted to a live shot of the prime ministerial car driving from his eastern suburbs home to the Sofitel Sydney Wentworth, OJ Simpson white Bronco-style. “A sense of anticipation in the room,” the Seven newsreader Mark Ferguson said as the network broadcast a split screen so viewers could watch the PM’s car in real time.
“I thought he might have got all green lights. I am enjoying this vision.”
Ch7 have MalcolmMobileCam going on. And Mark Ferguson may have fallen asleep. #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/wCAaguBJCu
— Dave Meddows (@davemeddows) July 2, 2016
