By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

My dilemma is that I write this early on election day and you read it the day after, a certain pivotal event having taken place in between.

As such, you know more than me about the political reset for which Australians opted. Or didn't.

Polling day in Australia, has a specific nation-defining character, rent with nervous energy, optimism, anxiety, fatigue, and most importantly, civic oneness.

Of course, many people now vote before the day itself, which is good. Australia is one of very few countries (21) to have compulsory voting, and it seems reasonable that as a quid pro quo, our electoral machinery makes discharging that legal duty, as convenient as practical.

That the major parties dislike pre-poll voting is another point in its favour.

As I approached the Old Parliament House polling booth earlier this week, I saw the good and the bad.

Having negotiated the chaotic parking and almost rounded the ugly scaffolds and fences blighting the front - the results of Trumpist "freedom" fools who attempted to set fire to this magnificent jewel of modern nationhood - a citizen came the other way and kindly told me there was a two-hour wait.

I didn't have the time right then and neither did she.

I figured I'd be back first thing, but as we headed towards our respective cars, she said over her shoulder, "I'd rather cop the fine".

It may have been an innocent comment, not intended literally.

But it reminded me of how flippantly we toss off the right of Australians to peacefully choose their governments, and the civic obligations that come with it.

Something the people in Ukraine are dying for right now.

It even prompted me to think of the violent mob which set fire to the front doors. "I'll cop the fine" is just the sort of thing these rioters might have said themselves, back before they became angry about a deadly virus and about lives being saved by medical science. Before they became freedom fundamentalists incapable of understanding that freedoms are often attenuated within a society.

Which is not to assert that people were not badly disadvantaged by the lockdowns. They were. Clearly, too little was done by governments for people in precarious work or marginal self-employment whose livelihoods were ruined. That grievance is real. And grievances unaddressed lead inevitably to just this kind of anti-social behaviour.

I thought back too to past elections I'd covered. I remembered being there in those desperate final months when John Howard - having won a staggering four elections in row - was reaching for a fifth. And over-reaching.

He had won so big against Mark Latham in 2004, that he jagged control of the Senate also.

It would only aid his undoing.

Media were different in those days too. Interestingly, Howard's approach proceeded from the understanding that journalists needed a story and cannot simply be parried, lied to, put off.

Howard held the country back, no question, but at a personal level he was not the arrogant bully of some of his successors (on both sides).

I once heard him described by a press gallery grandee as the last PM to truly understand newspapers having come of parliamentary age during the heyday of print.

At the end of an interview, he'd inquire whether you had enough. I was political editor of The Advertiser at the time and Howard knew how parochial the metro-mastheads could be. A dry economic promise of new productivity-enhancing infrastructure spending might run on page 6 but pick out a local project or two and accompany it with quotes from the PM saying, "my plan to get Adelaide freight moving" might get it on the front.

After his last big speech as PM on the final Thursday at the National Press Club - a democratic tradition Scott Morrison wantonly trashed along with the 50-year practice of the NPC hosting a leaders' debate - I travelled on Howard's plane for a one-on-one interview mid-flight.

All the polls showed it was over and sources inside the Labor camp were telling me confidently that Kevin Rudd was now a certainty.

Still, Howard was upbeat. We did the interview en route to Amberley Air Force Base from where he would do his final few events of the campaign.

I'd written some tough commentary about government failures and had been sharply critical of Howard's IR overreaches (enabled by that Senate majority).

But Howard didn't raise any of that, and when the formal interview was over, he invited me to stay seated there for a chat during the final half-hour of the trip.

When we landed he stood and shook my hand - a small thing but even at the time it felt like he knew it was over.

Three days later, it was. He didn't even hold his seat.

On the Sunday, I joined the excited press pack in Brisbane at Kevin Rudd's first press conference as PM.

Waiting interminably for his arrival (we should have known), I decided that if I got an early question, I would begin it with the words, "prime minister..." thus becoming the first person to say the words publicly. Mostly I was after the good-natured laugh that I expected it would bring. But it was also about respecting the voters' decision.

Yet when the chance came, I couldn't do it. I began only with "Mr Rudd...".

It was too soon. The prime minister's legitimacy increasingly comes from the people, despite our nominally Westminster Parliamentary traditions. But its real gravitas must be earned, the full meaning of the title, acquired through cumulative acts of national leadership.

Rudd wasn't there yet. And Morrison still wasn't after four years of divide and dither in the job.

Mark Kenny is a political analyst for The Canberra Times. He is a professor at the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.