On 9 October 2004, 13,098,461 electors were enrolled to vote for the federal parliament. The Australian Electoral Commission’s website records 11,715,132 electors having voted for the House of Representatives on a two-party preferred result. So much for voting in a federal election having been compulsory since 1911. And not a few will have left the polling booth wondering, ‘Why bother?’

Run, Johnny, Run is Mungo MacCallum’s personal account of the 2004 election. A Win and a Prayer is the latest in the UNSW Press’s ‘Briefings’, ‘a series of topical books exploring social, political and cultural issues in contemporary Australia’. For those of us who grew up with Nation Review and MacCallum’s ironic, humorous, partisan and occasionally vicious style, his political views come as little surprise. To MacCallum, The Hon. John Winston Howard MP, prime minister of Australia since 11 March 1996, has various nicknames, ‘many of them scatological, a number pertaining to body orifices, others involving the lower genera of the animal kingdom, some ironic and a few merely insulting’. But the nickname that most appeals is ‘the Stonefish’: