Can't we fast-forward to the election?

I don't know about you, but election night is one of the best nights of the year for TV. It's got all the right ingredients: characters you know; a suspenseful, unknown ending; and plenty of action. And numbers. (Lots of numbers.) At the end you get a victory speech that will be sampled and replayed on the news for days and days. The whole country is watching. It's well and truly on.

Then there are the democracy sangas, the sausage sizzles. Right there where you are bound by law to be on this day of all days in the year, the folks behind the barbies are doling out yummy hot sausages wrapped in fresh, white bread. With tomato sauce on top for spice.

What's not to like? Well, there's the campaign season, for a start. In fact, they haven't even declared that there will be an election, let alone whether it will take place on 2 July. Here we are, red-hot raring to go and ready to mosey on down to get our democracy sausages and to do our democratic duty and the politicians are still faffing about with the grizzly details. It's so annoying. Why can't they take into account the needs of the entertainment-hungry populace for once?

The next just-on-two months are going to be crushingly slow for many people in the community, people who have already made up their minds - like probably the majority of people in the electorate - about who they will vote for. In the interim they have to listen to the politicians banging on, making promises that turn out to be disappointments about dental health, tax reform, education funding, disability funding and the rest. The long hello, they should call it. This endless wait for a day we can already sense in our nervous system like a bottle of top-order chardonnay sitting on the shelf in the cupboard. A day full of promises of high-calorie foods and hours of top-rating TV. A day to remember.