Tom Duncan has heard more debates in the ACT's Legislative Assembly than anyone in a span stretching back to self government's early days. But his enthusiasm for Parliament remains undiminished.
Where some might see a municipal theatre of the absurd, the retiring clerk's belief in parliamentary process has stood fast through more than 1300 sitting days.
"I am passionate about Parliament. I believe in the institution," Mr Duncan, who has been the Assembly's most senior official since 2003, said.
"I think it's a very worthwhile institution, and yeah I'm keen to see it thrive and particularly in these uncertain times, I think we will need to rely on institutions like Parliament - and a free press.
"I think those sort of things have served us well in the past and hopefully they will serve us well in the future."
Mr Duncan joined the Legislative Assembly staff in February 1990, less than a year after the first ACT election since the territory was granted self government.
Members were still meeting in a chamber put together with ex-government furniture and the No Self Government and Abolish Self Government parties had collected 19 per cent of the vote and four seats between them.
"I was never worried that the whole self-government experiment would be decimated from within, but I did go to a lot of dinner parties, because you used to do dinner parties a lot more in those days, and people would say, 'Tom, where do you work?'" he said.
"And you'd go, 'Oh, Legislative Assembly.' 'That's the place that we didn't vote for, and it was imposed on us, and we should get rid of it', and whatever.
"I got that for about the first 10 years from 1990. In fact, up until the bushfires [in January 2003] ... After the bushfires, I think Canberrans realised that actually, if it had been a Commonwealth administration, or a NSW administration, they wouldn't have dealt with the problems of rebuilding and cleaning up and all that sort of stuff.
"And yeah, it sort of dissipated it. So I never thought it was going to go away, but it was always going to be a rocky road, I think. And it was, for the first 10 years."
Mr Duncan said the most successful Assembly members were the ones who had studied the standing orders, learnt how to navigate the chamber and a committee hearing and could make their point succinctly.
"There's a phrase in the Scottish Parliament that says, 'Say it well and say it short', and I think outside the Scottish Parliament it's on a wall there. I think that's true of any parliament," he said.
Mr Duncan said the party system, for all its flaws, had delivered a history of stable governments but he would not be surprised if more independents were elected to the next Assembly after the examples shown by Thomas Emerson and Fiona Carrick this term.
"I did an economics degree and I learnt nothing about economics in three years, but I did learn that for every economic decision there are winners and losers," he said.
"And a treasurer that says, 'I'm handing down this budget, there are no losers' is lying through their teeth. There's always going to be someone that loses.
"And if you're in charge, if you're a government, you have to offend some people to please others. And a group of independents are not best placed to do that."
Mr Duncan was also sceptical about the need to completely overhaul the system, arguing there is already ample opportunity for the community to shape decisions between elections.
"I think we've got 16 active inquiries going at the moment on a whole range of issues ... If [parliamentary] committees are operating effectively, you don't need citizens' juries; you've got ample opportunity to put submissions in and viewpoints to allow the members to make some recommendations," he said.
Mr Duncan, who in year 12 went back to Marist after sitting in the first youth Assembly in March 1978 to write a set of standing orders for the student representative council, has long encouraged improvements to parliamentary debates.
"[In question time in the ACT], you can't ask, 'Is the minister aware of any alternative proposal or alternative policies?', which is outrageous in the Federal Parliament," he said.
"I'm giving a paper in Perth saying that should be banned because it's just asking you to get stuck into the opposition and question time should be about what the government's doing."
Mr Duncan said the Assembly had enhanced its procedures, tweaking its standing orders and regularly reviewing its practices. Among the recent tweaks is a rule giving the speaker more power to compel ministers to actually answer the questions in question time.
"That's been the difference I've seen, that it's been getting better and better in terms of the way we practice Westminster," Mr Duncan said.
"I'm not saying it's a perfect parliament but it's a lot better than some of the ones around Australia at the moment."
When Wayne Berry was speaker, he introduced a code of conduct for members at Mr Duncan's urging. A standards commissioner to investigate breaches followed a conference trip with speaker Shane Rattenbury.
"I think we've made some really good changes over the years that I've had a hand in and you know given advice to, and members have been very receptive to a lot of that advice," Mr Duncan said.
"But it's advice. I mean, they don't have to accept it. They can choose to do their own thing but often they go, 'Oh yeah, let's try that, Tom.'"
When the Assembly paused earlier this month to pass a motion of thanks for Mr Duncan, several members said they had tried to get onto first-name terms with the clerk without success.
Mr Duncan said he learned the practice of always referring to members by their surnames in the first five years of his parliamentary career at Federal Parliament, where he started working in 1985.
"A lot of members just hated it. In fact, I did a trip with [former Liberal MLA] Brendan Smyth to South Africa. He was the year in front of me at school, I knew him before - I went to visit him in hospital when he had a car accident," Mr Duncan said.
"And we were overseas in Johannesburg for a week and on the sixth day he said, 'For Pete's sake, Tom, can you call me Brendan here? We're in Johannesburg. No one's going to know that you didn't call me Mr Smyth.'
"But it's just ingrained in me that to be seen to be impartial and to be seen to be giving the same advice to members no matter what their political persuasion is, I think it's not a bad thing for a clerk."
Mr Duncan said he really had enjoyed working with all 97 members who have served in the Legislative Assembly, dismissing any scepticism that could not possibly be.
"It's just when I gave them advice that they didn't want to hear, I don't think they enjoyed working with me," he said.
The clerk's job is to ensure the smooth functioning of Parliament and to provide non-partisan advice to the speaker and members on practice and procedure.
Mr Duncan said parliaments have been through rough times "but I'm a glass-half-full sort of guy so I think it's going to survive".
"AI is going to be a challenge how we manage that. It's just like it's a new internet; it's a new process of gathering information really, it's just how it's managed," he said.
"I'm still pretty confident [Parliament] will serve us well in the next hundred years or so."
