Call it the elephant in the ballot box.
The 2015 state election remained a corruption-free zone in the 29 days since the two Accidental Leaders performed for the first time together in a head-to-head debate at Olympic Park to start their campaigns.
Amazing really, given that the Independent Commission Against Corruption inquisition had ground down the reputations of a handful of former Labor politicians and two handfuls of serving Liberal MPs.
The ALP had winnowed bad seeds who rorted the system for their own benefit during Labor's last Rome burning years in power.
But it was the governing Liberals that were forced to throw MPs overboard as ICAC exposed their misadventures with donations.
But neither Mike Baird nor Luke Foley were willing to cast the first stone.
(The only politician to dare utter the acronym was Jodi McKay, Labor's Strathfield candidate and a former Newcastle MP, whose lachrymose ICAC appearance turned her into Saint Jodi of Arc).
Instead the leaders fed the 5,040,662 people enrolled to vote a steady diet of politics as usual.
A balmy autumn passed in a haze of privatisation of poles and wires, coal-seam gas and coal mining, hospitals, TAFE and the problem with L-plate leadership aspirants.
The Liberal L-plate television attack advertisements against Foley were about as personal as it got.
Foley stoically stayed on his anti-privatisation message.
He riffed on reports that feelers were out to sell the NSW electricity network to the State Grid Corporation of China.
Baird won every opinion poll at a stroll. On Friday the bookmaker sportsbet.com.au had him at $1.01 to win. Foley was $17.
Only Baird's mother could believe he could duplicate his predecessor Barry O'Farrell's achievement in getting 64.2 per cent of the two-party preferred vote to take 69 seats and reducing Labor to 20.
The pleasant natures of both leaders turned the campaign into a polite, professional, cool exchange of fire that never turned hot.
The upper house provided the only fun.
For reasons still unfathomable, a record 394 are standing for the 21-member Legislative Council seats.
This eclipses the 264 who stood in 1999 when the so-called "preference whisperer", Glenn Druery, worked out a method of marshalling minor party preferences to elect somebody who hardly anybody had voted for.
This year's Druery is Peter Jones.
His No Land Tax Party is standing in 93 seats, paying people to hand out how-to-vote cards and paying them from the $4 million public purse reimbursement it expects to receive for getting 4 per cent of the total vote.
Jones could be elected to the upper house on the donkey vote - his name is first on the left of the ballot paper - and his profile has soared thanks to an ongoing public brawl with talk radio's Ray Hadley and an altercation at a Penrith pre-poll. "I've apologised for that," Jones said.
