Would you Buggers out there mind if I blew my own horn just a bit? I’m 72 so it probably won’t do any good anyway.

Long-term sufferers of my rants would know that I regard myself as possibly Australia’s most inaccurate amateur psephologist. The shingle’s still up but it often slips sideways and frequently needs straighening.

But deep down inside that idle boast have been two occasions when my ever-increasing gut nailed two poll outcomes I’m rather proud of. Or of which I’m rather proud.

Back in 1999 I had worked for a week in the office of the Victorian Independent Education Union throwing their newspaper together. It was the week leading up to the state poll and I had spent five days listening to all these wonderful unionists wringing their hands and saying Labor had no chance against a raging bull in Jeff Kennett.

As I walked out the front, I thought: “Fuck it!” I turned around and shouted something along the lines of “Snap out of it, you silly bastards. Labor’s going to win this!”

And what was it based on? Kennett had run a really stupid, presidential style, one-man-band campaign, as if to disguise all the shitty things he’d done. I’m rather proud of that call.

The second was the end of the one-term Campbell Newman government in Queensland in 2015. I predicted Palaszczuk would win that in a tight one. She did.

Those two predictions mean a lot to me. I once heard Graham Richardson boasting about how good he was at picking poll outcomes. He mentioned two he got wrong. Any guesses as to the two? That’s right. The ones mentioned above. Graham, you goose, most elections are easy to forecast! Just boast about the hard ones, okay.

I have no training as a psephologist. No academic tickets. No great knowledge of poll trends. No head full of political history and statistics. I just watch campaigns, listen to the arguments on both sides and let that ever-increasing gut go to work.

I also got the recent Victorian poll pretty much right but I’m not the least bit boastful about that one. Most of my Twitterfeed got it right, too, bless their little citizen journalist hearts.

Well out from polling day and with the Newspoll showing the Labor and the LNP on equal primary votes and the mainstream mediocre screaming “polls are tightening” and “Toxic Dan’s in trouble”, I predicted Labor would lead the LNP by over 2 percentage points in primaries at the end of counting last Saturday night. They did, although I got the primary figures wrong. Right about now, the figure is Labor 37.12 per cent primary; LNP 35 neat.

And on election eve, I wrote that my heart said Labor would keep its 55 seats from the 2018 Danslide; my head said they’d lose a handful of seats. Okay, so slightly wrong again.

I’m not going to boast about a prediction made after watching the fucking worse campaign I’ve ever seen by an Opposition anywhere and then being smart enough to totally ignore the bleatings of the LNP’s public relations outfits. Sorry! The MSM.

So, yes, while my tip wasn’t rocket surgery, I remain proud, nevertheless, of my little amateur psephologist shingle. All squared up, dusted off and sitting proudly on my wall.

Don Gordon-Brown