Dawn of a new political era

That's the reality, and any deconstruction of the events of the past three years or so probably needs to go no further than that.

The Greens have broken through more than one ceiling in 2010 - as well as the Senate result, their lower house vote now radiates far beyond its former inner city redoubts. Independents, and Greens, have captured a regional and rural vote once thought rusted on to the conservatives. This is poorly understood by metropolitan journalists and commentators.

Labor's now customary appeal to the right leaning suburban vote, while taking its left flank for granted, has comprehensively been shown to be a futile one with rapidly diminishing returns in the only poll that counts.

Tony Abbott, too, is the wrong Liberal leader for these times. His impatience for victory has not been rewarded with a majority of seats, and the triumphalism he cautioned against on election night may yet prove his undoing.

The truth of this election is that both the Howard era cultural hegemony and Labor's state model of populist electoralism have failed their architects - majority politics has broken down.

Whether either leader truly understands the nature of the sea change we've seen will play a very important role in deciding who finally forms government after the final results are in. But whether we end up with Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott as Prime Minister (and Gillard's chances of securing sufficient support on the floor of the House of Representatives are better than many credit) will not, in fact, be the decisive meaning of this putatively indecisive result.