Politics is indeed a strange business. We have recently experienced the most dismal election campaign in memory, where the argument between the major parties turned on a series of confected panics about cynically selected non-problems – the reincarnation of WorkChoices; a terrifying national debt of 6% of GDP; the horror of a mining tax that even the relevant multinational corporations accept as just; the threat to national security posed by the arrival of a small number of asylum seeker boats. We have also just experienced an election that seemed to confirm the fundamental conservatism of the electorate, where the country was only spared from an even more right-wing government than John Howard’s by the grace and favour of two country independents. Yet despite all this – because of the most significant development of the election, the breakthrough performance of the Greens – with the return of the Gillard government the centre of gravity of Australian politics has now shifted perceptibly and unexpectedly to the Left.