Antony Green is the face of elections in Australia. Credit:Jacky Ghossein Australia's most loved election analyst was in Britain on holiday, but being Antony Green, he'd set aside a few days to cover the UK election. How could it be any other way? Green and his computers, fairly bursting at the seams with the most esoteric data, have been covering elections since 1990. Green says an election gives him the sort of rush that others might get by leaping from a great height.

"It's a bit like a bungee jump, except the rope that tethers me is my data," he says. There have been a lot of data-tethered bungee jumps. Apart from Green's famous ABC election night broadcasts – getting on for 70 Australian federal, state and territory contests now – he's covered city council elections, by-elections all over the place, three British elections before the number reached four last week, half a dozen New Zealand elections and a couple of US presidential polls. And now all that work has elevated him to the rank of Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). The official citation declares the AO is "for distinguished service to the broadcast media as an analyst and commentator for state and federal elections, and to the community as a key interpreter of Australian democracy". Antony Green never set out to become Australia's most famed and – yes – most loved election analyst, commentator and interpreter of democracy.

He was a well-paid computer programmer studying econometrics in Sydney, already armed with a science degree in pure maths and computing, plus an economics degree, before the chance to take a big pay cut and put his studies on hold came his way in 1989. The ABC wanted an election researcher for six months. It looked interesting, he recalls. He beat 150 applicants for the job. Neither Green nor the ABC could have predicted what would happen. The 1990 federal election between Bob Hawke and Andrew Peacock was a nail-biter, with no one able to figure which way government might fall until the early hours of the morning after election day. But Green, who had helped design the ABC's computer graphic, had also compiled a book of background material on candidates and electorates across the country.

His work gave the ABC's high-profile commentary team a significant edge. When it was all done and Bob Hawke was back in The Lodge, Green was supposed to finish his contract and depart. But the ABC's big stars – Kerry O'Brien, the late Paul Lyneham and the late Andrew Olle – insisted the ABC give the brilliant young backroom computer guy a full-time position. Within a year he was put in front of the cameras. It was a small role talking to Quentin Dempster about electorate redistributions in NSW – and Green, a jumpy sort of fellow at the best of times – was noticeably nervous. And yet the ABC's producers recognised Green knew his stuff, and it invested him with a form of on-air authority. His big break came in the 1993 election when Liberal leader John Hewson was considered a near sure thing to topple Paul Keating's government.

But the relatively little-known Antony Green had his computers, his advanced graphics and his scads of data. Seated next to Andrew Ollie, he was confident enough to call the election for Keating barely more than two hours into the count. He was the first commentator to do so. All these years on, with a long-established cult following, Antony John Green has, aged 57, been granted the high status of Officer in the Order of Australia. But for the moment, he was busy. He was preparing for another of those rushes he gets when a big election is close; this one in the country of his birth: a bungee jump tethered to his beloved data.