Despite victory, the booers and hissers spoil the party

Yet in a city where most broadsheet journalists rarely travel more than 10km west of the CBD, these results elicited small interest.

The key Labor victory in NSW was clearly the outer-western seat of Lindsay, based on the city of Penrith. That was where the local Liberal Party, in its desperation, was caught handing out flyers inciting racial hatred a few days before the poll.

Here the very low-profile but persistent Labor candidate David Bradbury secured a swing of slightly more than 10 per cent, almost double that in Bennelong. Lindsay is now once again relatively safe Labor territory, after an absence of 11 years.

Macarthur, in the city's outer southwest, recorded an 11 per cent swing to equally low-profile small businessman Nick Bleasdale, who pushed local Liberal identity Pat Farmer right down to the wire in a seat that was supposed to be safe.

Elsewhere in western Sydney the swings were never less than 7 per cent, and often as high as 12 per cent. After a decade of alienation from the ALP, blue-collar outer-suburban Sydney was returning to the Labor fold.

Don't get me wrong. Labor has always been an electoral coalition of interests. There are those who vote Labor to protect the futures of themselves and their families. (For those people, WorkChoices was the key issue, since it spoke to their anxieties about the security of their family life.) And there are those who vote Labor because they identify with a set of social and moral values that they take Labor to embody. Since the baby boomers asserted themselves on the cultural stage in the '70s, these people have become both more numerous and much more visible and audible.

Of course, in practice, there is also a third category: those whose political allegiance is determined by some subtle amalgam of these two instincts.

Most political debate, however, is driven by those who belong to the second of these three categories. These are the kind of Labor people whose parents voted Liberal, and who identified Howard with some kind of reversion to the Australia of their parents' day.

They're the people who in their 50s still cheer, boo and hiss at the TV on election night, like a bunch of perpetual uni students.

A couple of years ago, when Labor looked set to spend another couple of terms in the electoral wilderness, then shadow minister Craig Emerson wrote a searching document for internal party consumption titled Seven Steps along the Mainstream.

Emerson began with the bracing observation that "in the recent past Labor has been at risk of making an unwanted transition from a major political party to a minor one". The public increasingly perceived the party as a socially divisive force "representing noisy minority interest groups at the expense of mainstream Australia".

Yes, that's the same mainstream Australia where people still own Hills hoists, and where they still mow their lawns on Saturday mornings, much as their parents did.