Just as the result of the Voice referendum has painted us a portrait of who and what Australians are, next year's ACT election result promises us a portrait (will there be lots of warts?) of who and what a Canberran is.
What will be the expression on that federal capital face? Will it be an embittered glare of entitlement-demanding indignation? Or will the portrait be of a well-nourished face composed in an expression of quiet contentment with Canberra life as we know it?
It is not like this column to be suburban, an adjective correctly defined by my dictionary as describing someone or something "contemptibly dull and ordinary".
But we must loiter in suburbia this week so as to ask suburban Canberrans how they would spend on their suburb the doubloons the Canberra Liberals are promising every suburb if they, the Canberra Liberals, come to government at next year's election?
Liberals leader Elizabeth Lee this week invited us all to seethe about how allegedly "neglected" our suburbs are now. She has promised every suburb between between $500,000 and $2 million to spend on itself to upgrade its presently supposedly degraded self. She promises that we will all be consulted about how we want this money spent on our dear habitats and so it is time for you, suburban Canberrans, to begin to think about these things.
In the same speech on Monday in which she announced her Liberals' vision, Ms Lee seethed again about how degradedly third-worldy Labor-Greens governments have allowed Canberra to become.
"The cracks in our footpaths, the potholes in our roads, the unmown grass ..." she accused.
Ms Lee always speaks about these things (to my mind civic trivia, better explained by vicissitudes of ageing and weather than by wickednesses of governments) with the conviction with which better-focused folk engage with life's Bigger Pictures, speaking up about the climate crisis, about war and peace.
Meanwhile, though, the Liberals are going to make the federal capital's looks a big election issue.
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Analysing Ms Lee's speech in the next day's Canberra Times, an analyst fancied that "The policy from the Canberra Liberals, to spend $100 million on suburb upgrades, is smart and will hit home for many Canberrans who feel their neighbourhoods have been overlooked far too long."
The analyst may be right about this, but we must wait and see if the disgruntled "many" is many enough to lubricate the Liberals' slither into government.
Then there is the matter of whether the disgruntled have anything, really, to be disgruntled about, or whether they are just unfortunate miserabilists, embittered about everything, we should be encouraging to seek counselling.
Grateful by nature and seldom irrationally disgruntled, Canberra's suburbs, including my own, strike me as already more privileged than neglected.
My beloved city, too, looks good to me. But even if I did think it looked superficially dishevelled, stained, unmown and pock-marked, I think that for citizens to be preoccupied with their city's superficial looks rather their city's character and qualities is as shallow and contemptible as judging a person in that way.
Beauty, especially cosmetic beauty achieved with face-lifting groomings (such as, in a city's case, grass mowing) is only ever skin deep.
Canberra is no longer young (depending on how one dates her, she can be up to 110 years old). My suburb is in her venerable late 50s. For a city and its suburbs to begin to show some grey hairs and wrinkles is something perfectly understandable and not something to get into deranged, knicker-knotting, Liberals-voting rages about.
And, looking at a Bigger Picture than the niggly little entitlement-tinted one the Liberals are proffering, I fancy that 99.9 per cent of mankind would think Canberra suburbia a paradise. Canberrans might count their urban-suburban blessings instead of seething like pork chops the way the Liberals want us to.
Can't the ideas-impoverished, Zed-blighted Liberals think of policies that invite us to delight in our city rather than see it as a neglected hell? No, I don't think they can.
I appeal to Canberrans' better sides. I suggest that when and if the Canberra Liberals come to power and ask us what suburban bling we want to spend the money on, we should take the money but then donate it to places more needy and deserving than our own plush places.
Here is what we should do, thus exhibiting what's best about us rather than the greedy, niggly, bourgeois, suburban worst about us the Liberals are trying to bring out.
Let every Canberra suburb's movers and shakers begin, now, to cultivate a kind of "sister-suburb" relationship with a suburb in an unhappier, less lucky city than our own, in Kabul, say, in Kathmandu, in Honiara, in Dar es Salaam.
In those unhappier cities, this money that our already sleek and plump First World suburbs don't need (will we put decorative onion domes on our shops and schools, turn our local ovals into lushly maintained polo fields with palatial stabling for the thoroughbred polo ponies?) could do some real humanitarian good in fields of health and education.
Let us pass on the Liberals' devious doubloons, their shekels of shame, to truly needy people in the truly needy world beyond our city's plush bubble.
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Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
Ian Warden is a Canberra Times columnist
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