Three cheers for Julia and Tony ...

(How ironic that the man Julia Gillard supported as Labor leader to the end proved to be her nemesis in successfully urging many to exercise the donkey vote! What a savage indictment of the ALP that such a brooding and vindictive character was ever given political oxygen in the first place!)

Labor now has to decide whether it can continue to pander to prejudices and provincialism or whether it responds positively to the larger intellectual and political agenda introduced by the Greens.

Furthermore, Labor now faces the prospect of dealing with mavericks from rural Australia. If Gillard is able to woo the country independents it is not simply because Bob Katter and Tony Windsor dislike Barnaby Joyce. It is because there has been a breakdown in the historical pact between the urban middle classes and those in the Bush. No longer does the Liberal National Party coalition represent a neat political cohabitation between national industrial capitalists and the squattocracy.

As trans-national corporations displace national industrial capital and the fortunes of agriculture and grazing decline, so the cracks have appeared in the coalition. Katter, Windsor and Rob Oakeshott are symptoms of this deeper cleavage. At a time when the Liberals are talking the language of economic austerity and budget surpluses, the rural and regional citizens are clamouring for state support.

In seats like Eden Monaro in southern New South Wales, where there was a swing to Labor that went against the state-wide trend, policies like the National Broadband Network have much more salience than in the city.

But the Greens must also be included in a rainbow coalition and it will be difficult for Labor to contain the resulting tensions. Given the Greens question the sustainability of many rural industries - timber, coal mining, highly irrigated crops - it is unlikely that they will happily cohabit with the cockies. These are challenges that cannot be addressed by fine tuning and real politik. They require a preparedness to confront some difficult questions and stake out some unpopular territory. We live in interesting times.