With October 19's ACT election looming, I am marvelling that I know less about the personality of Canberra Liberals' leader Elizabeth Lee than I know about the personality of Joan my tennis ball machine.

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I have called her Joan after Miss Joan Hunter-Dunn the dashing tennis-playing damsel in John Betjeman's enchanting poem of young love and lawn tennis, A Subaltern's Love Song.

Joan is an important female in my life. She is my tennis companion when human tennis players, shunning me, are unavailable. I credit her with a personality because, bless her, there is sometimes a strange eccentricity about the frequency, pace and trajectory of the balls she flings forth. Sometimes, humming angrily, she refuses to fling the next ball at all. She has moods. It may be that repairs would abolish her moodiness, but a man must be an unappreciative sexist pig to seek to "repair" the personality of a woman he loves.

But I digress, because I want to say that even though Elizabeth Lee aspires to be an even more important woman in my life than Joan is (Ms Lee aspires to rule the dear city and territory in which we all live), she, Ms Lee, is not known to us. We know nothing of her personality, of who and what she is. We don't know if she even has a personality.

Chief Minister Barr, too, is quite enigmatic, although by virtue of his being a long-time living fossil of ACT politics, he is less of a stranger to us than Ms Lee.

But our ignorance of Ms Lee is not her fault. The strange, shallow, incurious nature of ACT public life and of the ACT public conversation is probably to blame. Our incurious ACT media have never sat her down for a........

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