Super Saturday turned out to be merely Status Quo Saturday with no change to the numbers in the Parliament, but beneath the surface a great fracturing is under way.

In all five by-elections on Saturday, the people reaffirmed the choices they'd made at the last election. Untroubled by the fact that their MPs had been ineligible to sit in Parliament because they were dual citizens, the voters insisted that the system respect their votes.

Everyone who asked to be re-elected was re-elected. So, superficially, the status quo ante has been restored. Yet within that outcome is evidence of subterranean upheaval across Australia's political landscape.

Most obvious is the Queensland shock for the Turnbull government. The government cannot hold power if it cannot hold Queensland, where it has five seats on wafer-thin margins of under 2 per cent.