Dawn of a new political era

We live in interesting times.

What will be most interesting over the next few days and weeks will be whether the Australian commentary machine's momentum finally switches - an actual event has occurred, but the minute by minute "analysis" powers on, and the perpetual tweeting favours noise over signal.

The actual meaning of this historic federal election lies in a much broader context, both temporally and spatially.

We've seen 21st century politics finally wash over insular Australian shores.

The style of campaigning that characterised both the Labor and Coalition efforts is the final refinement of modernist politics - relentless micro-targeting of demographics, an obsession about message clarity and control.

There's the search for an illusory centre - in Labor's case, by trying to co-opt an imaginary voter living somewhere in Western Sydney or regional Queensland, in the case of the Liberals by summoning up a phantasm of the "real Australian".

Yet all the while, the tectonic plates of change have been moving at a slower pace, just as they have in America and Great Britain.

We've entered the world of a new politics.

Over the longer term, this election is a logical consequence of a political shift which predated Kevin07. The dumping of the ETS by Labor earlier this year is a key marker. Much of the rest is noise.

We will never know if Labor could have won this election had Kevin Rudd remained leader. It comes down to whether he would have been able to redeem the mistakes he himself made. Those mistakes were compounded by Julia Gillard's subsequent adoption of the same underlying political logic - a certain pattern of media cycle politics which has destroyed Labor in New South Wales and Queensland caught up with its architects in those two states, giving us two different outcomes in Eastern Australian north and south of the Victorian border.

Recriminations there will no doubt be, but amongst the flood tide of commentary on election night 2010, Maxine McKew's remarks were closest to the truth.

The ALP won in 2007 by harnessing a sentiment in favour of a conviction politics, manifest in the issue of climate change, whose twists and turns have destroyed at least three leaders of both Labor and the Coalition since November 24, 2007. Machine politics as usual, and a fear of the polls and the media noise machine have reaped a horrific harvest for Labor.

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.