Tony Abbott is a position player, and he will be - as Prime Minister - very different from the way he was as opposition leader. But there is a price to pay, as there always is for opportunists, writes Annabel Crabb.

Good morning! It's Monday, and Tony Abbott has been elected Prime Minister.

Even five years ago, this sentence would have provoked a honk of disbelief even from its subject.

But things move pretty fast in politics, and the Liberal Party leadership with which Mr Abbott tottered away narrowly from that ungainly three-way SNAFU back in 2009 has grown, thanks to management, energy and discipline, and a helpful dose of the other lot being a thoroughgoing rabble, into a prime ministership.

People who vowed passionately to "emigrate to New Zealand if that d***head Abbott ever becomes prime minister" now face an awkward reckoning.

Arch-conservatives who approve of Mr Abbott's historical attitudes await with anticipation his fulfilment of the ancestry he once so memorably claimed for himself; "I am the ideological love-child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop".

Both groups might be in for a surprise.

For Tony Abbott is, and has always been, a position player.

And as he spoke to the Four Seasons crowd on Saturday night, daughters and photo-bombers tensed attentively in the wings, you could almost hear the clashing of gears.

He spoke of humility, and of moderation; of "a government that understands the limits of power as well as its potential".

"A good government is one that governs for all Australians," he said.

"Including those who haven't voted for it."

Tony Abbott, not for the first time in his life, is changing up.

For the first phase of his political life Mr Abbott was a bomb-thrower; an ideological provocateur whose undergraduate joy in baiting the Trots was clearly evident in the speeches he made and the profusion of columns he wrote on matters various.

An ideological combatant at university, the young Tony Abbott arranged pro-Kerr demonstrations after the dismissal, and at Oxford staged a pro-Falklands War march. It is possible to draw the conclusion that the ideological point of these exercises had perhaps equal billing with the young contrarian's love of attention, and the sheer exuberance that comes with being young, overeducated and free.

As John Howard's protégé, Tony Abbott was a "licensed insurgent", who regularly got in trouble for his provocative ideas and off-message wanderings, but not that much trouble. For Mr Howard, a practised manager of others' ambitions, Mr Abbott kept things interesting. Plus, he was smart, and an enthusiast.

As opposition leader, Tony Abbott played an entirely different position. Where the old Tony had been eager and discursive and happy to get into trouble, opposition leader Tony was militantly risk-averse.

In his monkish way, Mr Abbott renounced the fleshly pleasures of conversation and embarked instead on a subsistence diet of three-word phrases. His asceticism in language was matched only by his unstintingly hard-core approach to physical exertion; the opposition leader was a twanging human monument to endorphin addiction, who tended to go a bit funny when he didn't get a sufficiently gruelling bike-ride in the morning (a problem his handlers quickly neutralised by establishing an underground railway of loan road-bikes among cycling enthusiasts around the continent).

In retrospect, it is evident that this was a necessary phase in the Abbott evolution. For colleagues, who entertained strong and well-founded doubts about their new leader's capacity to conquer his lifelong struggles with indiscipline, it was an important faith-building exercise to demonstrate that the New Tony Regime was nil-by-mouth, including feet.

The broader strategic advantages were significant, too; iron-clad discipline and reliability, where the Labor Party offered vacillation and chaos. Opposition-Leader-Tony relentlessly exploited every weakness Labor had, a brutal manoeuvre that swiftly disbanded the mutual admiration society he had hitherto co-founded with Julia Gillard. This was aggressive and divisive politics, played hard, as has been commonly observed.

But there were disadvantages, too; the buttoned-down approach nurtured a certain generalised suspicion as to what Mr Abbott might be hiding behind that disciplined exterior, and the mounting appetite for turfing out the Australian Labor Party did not widely translate to discernible enthusiasm for the Liberal leader. The substantial paper trail of provocative views established in his earlier career phases didn't help.

When Tony Abbott spoke on Saturday night (his modest, even sombre demeanour so markedly different from the beaming triumphalism on display at the rival Gabba event that an uninformed observer watching both speeches with the sound turned down might easily have misidentified which one was the victory speech and which one the concession), his paean to a gentler, more conciliatory brand of politics was absolute.

Tony Abbott is a position player, and he will be - as Prime Minister - very different from the way he was as opposition leader. For all his bomb-throwing, he takes institutions seriously - like any natural conservative - and he has never shaken off, despite all his misadventures with the priesthood, the Jesuits' central exhortation to be "a man for others".

That said, the speech might have raised a few eyebrows round the place, especially those of Julia Gillard, watching the broadcast as a private citizen and no doubt reflecting that the prime minister-elect's new appetite for consensus politics could have been more useful had it arrived a shade earlier.

Mr Abbott's triumph is complete, and there is no question that he has worked fiendishly hard for it.

But there is a price to pay, as there always is for opportunists.

The vicious tribal hardball of the last three years, in which the new prime minister has had a substantial hand, left voters with an unappealing field of options in 2013.

Which to choose; the wrecker, or the self-harm experts?

The national answer to this conundrum is most clearly read in the Senate, the chamber most usually reserved for crowd-sourced ironic political commentary.

And the strongest trend telegraphed by this new Senate appears, at this stage in the counting, to be a tremendous swing towards None Of The Above.

Last night's ABC projections were for the Coalition to have 33 Senate seats, and the ALP 25, with a staggering 18 seats for Greens, Palmerites, accidental Liberal Democrats, motoring enthusiasts, and so forth.

In order to pass legislation, Mr Abbott needs 39 Senate votes. So for every contentious item, he will be obliged to extract six helpers from the discordant collection of chancers the great Australian voting public saw fit to bestow upon him at the weekend. It is a parable of Biblical proportions. The man who so harshly punished Julia Gillard for succumbing to political circumstance in minority government now faces - after his own glorious victory - a living, breathing balance-of-power nightmare.

Perhaps the most sensible option, in these circumstances, might be simply to deal with the Opposition in the Senate? Hmmm; the last time a government dealt productively with an opposition over a key policy reform was in 2009, when Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull arrived at an agreement on carbon pricing, only to be blown up by… the man who was just elected prime minister.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.