WITHIN 90 minutes of polling booths closing at 6pm on September 7th, it was clear that Australia would have a new government. Tony Abbott, leader of the conservative Liberal-National coalition, will take over as prime minister, ending six years of government by the centre-left Labor Party. With three-quarters of the votes counted, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation projected that the coalition will win 89 seats to Labor’s 57 in the 150-seat House of Representatives. Adam Bandt, the one Green parliamentarian in the old parliament, seemed set to hold his constituency in Melbourne. Small parties are likely to mop up the remaining seats. The result is a crushing blow for Labor and Kevin Rudd, the party’s leader and prime minister. Labor suffered swings against it in the states of New South Wales and Queensland, where it needed to win seats to have any hope of clinging to government. It entered the election with 71 seats after ruling as a minority government for the past three years. Conceding defeat before his supporters in Brisbane, Mr Rudd announced that he would not recontest the Labor leadership. He called on the party to unite for a "time of rebuilding" ahead.

As Australians turned out to vote, protesters heckled both leaders over their hardline policies against boat-borne asylum-seekers: Mr Abbott as he visited a polling booth in southern Sydney, and Mr Rudd as he cast his vote in his constituency in Brisbane.

Mr Abbott, leader of the conservative Liberal Party, the senior coalition partner, will head a government that will take Australia to the right. He is a social conservative in the mould of John Howard, the last Liberal prime minister, whom Labor unseated in 2007 after 11 years of government. Mr Abbott opposes gay marriage (Mr Rudd supported it) and wants Australia to keep the British monarch as its head of state (Labor favours a republic). He promises to continue the tough stand against asylum-seekers that Mr Howard took 12 years ago.

Mr Abbott has given less away about how his government will manage the economy. He refused to release his policy costings until 48 hours before the five-week campaign ended. They included a pledge to cut spending on foreign aid by A$4.5 billion ($4 billion) over four years. The money will go instead to infrastructure projects in Australia, mainly roads in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, the three biggest cities. As well as “stopping the boats”, one of Mr Abbott’s most heavily-worked campaign slogans was to present himself as “an infrastructure prime minister who puts bulldozers on the ground and cranes into our skies”.

Neither Mr Abbott nor Mr Rudd managed to offer inspiring visions of Australia’s future in their campaigns. Three debates between the two leaders, in two of which they fielded questions from ordinary voters instead of journalists, did little to enhance their profiles. In some respects Mr Rudd had more to prove, even though Mr Abbott was the untested leader. If the election result was an endorsement of Mr Abbott’s new team, it was just as much a verdict on Labor’s internal disorder. Mr Abbott’s pugnacious parliamentary performances (he once called himself a “junkyard dog”) and unpopularity with women voters had earlier marked him out as perhaps the Liberal party’s least-likely future leader. Yet he managed to run a remarkably disciplined and gaffe-free campaign.

Mr Rudd, by contrast, struggled to win voters’ confidence, even though the Labor government had chalked up notable achievements. It steered the economy through the global financial crisis, putting Australia now into its 22nd year of uninterrupted growth. It introduced several worthy reforms: a fibre-optic broadband network, an insurance scheme for disabled people, schools reforms and a price on carbon emissions. In the end, though, much of this was overshadowed by bitter leadership rivalries between Mr Rudd and Julia Gillard, his former deputy. Having led Labor to power in 2007 Mr Rudd eventually lost his parliamentary colleagues’ confidence. They replaced him with Ms Gillard as party leader and prime minister in 2010. Then in June, facing dire opinion polls under Ms Gillard, they decided to reinstall Mr Rudd.

In his first spell as leader, Mr Rudd’s campaigning skills had been one of Labor’s strongest assets. This time, his campaign struggled to take off. In its last days, as electoral devastation looked likely, Mr Rudd tried to contrast Labor’s vision for “future needs” with Mr Abbott’s “rear-vision mirror view of politics”. And he appealed to voters to be concerned about the impact of Mr Abbott’s spending cuts, urging them: “If you still have doubts, don’t vote for him.” But voters’ doubts by then had settled just as much on Mr Rudd. He had once enjoyed consistent leads over Mr Abbott as preferred prime minister; the final opinion polls showed both men neck-and-neck.

Mr Abbott’s big test will be to adapt his combative style to the serious business of government. He has already ditched an earlier boast that he would return the budget to surplus in his first term. Up to now, he has pursued populist tactics, similar to those of Mr Howard. Mr Abbott promises as his first act of government to abolish the carbon tax that Labor introduced when Ms Gillard was prime minister. But this and other pledges may well face challenges in the Senate, whose political complexion will take longer to emerge from the vote counting. Greens and other small parties could hold the balance of power. Mr Abbott told the Australian Financial Review on election eve that there would be a “qualitative difference to the way things happen in Canberra”. What that difference is remains to be seen.