By Lenore Taylor
How many independents does it take to change the government? It's the riddle paralysing the nation.
The answer is likely to come down to whether the people trying to be prime minister need the help of some, most or all of the four independents to complete the task, and whether they really want to live with all the complexities their new and only semi-committed recruits would bring.
With Brisbane, it would seem, likely to fall to the Coalition, it looks as though the result is going to be 72 seats each. The Green, Adam Bandt, who won Lindsay Tanner's old seat of Melbourne, has said he would form a government with Labor and the independent Western Australian National, Tony Crook, is unlikely to sit with Labor. That makes it 73 all.
That means Julia Gillard would need either two or three votes from among Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor, Bob Katter and Andrew Wilkie (depending on which way Brisbane falls) for a confidence motion in the lower house and to guarantee supply.
But Bandt is unlikely to promise to vote for everything she does, so after that she will need either three or four votes from among the five men on the crossbenches to get each government bill through.
Tony Abbott is always going to need either three or all four to form government and to govern.
From what we know of the public positions these men have taken it is at least possible that two, three or even four of them could at times agree on climate policy, mining taxation, asylum policy or broadband services to the regions.
Given Katter's on-the-record position against free trade, scepticism of climate change, opposition to the mining tax, support for turning North Queensland rivers inland etc it seems highly unlikely that either side of politics could form a stable government if they had to rely on his vote every time. As things stand they won't.
But if a government has the capacity to ''mix and match'' the independents, the chance of a functioning government increases. The independents have every reason to try to strike a deal. If the nation goes back to the polls they might never get the opportunity to actually exercise their endlessly discussed power.
But for all the forced politeness of the major parties in their meetings with the independents this week, it remains an open question whether they really want to embark on the wild ride of multi-party and multi-independent democracy.
Labor appears to. Gillard has, quite literally, everything to lose. Wayne Swan looked almost as if he bowed when he shook hands with Bob Katter in the meeting with the independents in the prime ministerial suite.
Nobody who has watched Abbott in recent months could possibly doubt his desire to win. His tougher line with the independents could be a strategy to set some terms and conditions for the power relationships with the independents with whom he would have to govern.
But some within the Coalition are advising him to play a longer-term game, to allow Labor to form a minority government that would be unstable and that the coalition could further destabilise by constantly questioning its legitimacy, pressuring the ''unrepresentative'' minor party participants and playing up the Labor in-fighting that has already begun.
If all went to plan, things might finally fall apart around about the time of the NSW election next year, helping the Coalition to tie federal Labor even more closely to the sinking ship of their state colleagues and win an absolute majority.
The Coalition's initial refusal to submit its policies to the Treasury for costing reinforced the suspicion Abbott was hedging his bets for a return to the polls. His excuses kept changing but none was convincing. First he said the Treasury wasn't capable of understanding opposition policy, a curious claim since they would have been implementing it by now if they won government.
Then he said he was worried about leaks - even curiouser, since there's nothing to leak any more because it's all on the public record. Finally, the finance spokesman, Andrew Robb, claimed a Treasury official would ''tamper with the assumptions'' to show coalition policy in a bad light. Vote-tampering I've heard of as an illegal means of bending an election result but ''assumption-tampering'' stretches credulity. Finally, yesterday the Coalition set its terms for the costing of its policy. The main one being the costings stay confidential until a decision is made.
An obvious explanation for this desire is Abbott is concerned his team may have made mistakes - quite possible given the limited resources of opposition - and if the Coalition formed government these might be quickly washed out of the bottom line by new decisions and variations in revenue.
But a ''black hole'', or even a smallish greyish one, could be big problem if Abbott needed to immediately re-prosecute a ''debt'n'deficit'' election campaign and again make the claim that he would return the budget to a much bigger surplus than is promised by Labor.
At the same time the arguments began quietly circulating questioning the legitimacy of the result. The country independents were ''holding the nation to ransom'', it was said - even though they hadn't asked for anything except information yet.
This will never work and we may as well just get it over with and call another election, it was argued, before the votes from the last one had even been finally counted. Labor couldn't form stable government because it was ''about to tear itself apart'', it was asserted, ignoring the fact that both parties at times have proved themselves more than capable of self-harm.
Canberra this week has been like a B-grade movie: the tension is unresolved as utterly exhausted control freaks waited around for one the biggest decisions of their lives, over which they now had no control; the seesawing emotions as the count swayed one way and then the other; the bunch of outsiders from the bush riding in, slinging crazy ideas and promising to shake up the town; and the utter strain of everyone having to be unfailingly nice to them.
The main party politicians have crashed from 20-hour adrenaline-filled days (ultimately 24 in Abbott's case) to the unaccustomed task of doing nothing. They can't negotiate to form government until they know the seat count. They can't really spin because they don't know their strategy yet. And they can't get on with work because they don't know whether that will be governing or opposing.
Phones have stopped ringing. Email inboxes have gone from overflowing to empty. They call scrutineers, they pace around enduring the intense symptoms of campaign withdrawal and then - as one senior frontbencher put it - they start ''kicking walls''.
It may be that the 2010 electoral story has no happy ending. But this is the verdict the people have delivered. It would be a B-grade democracy that didn't even try to make it work.