So who, in this crap-shoot, is likely to side with whom?

Certain points of tension made themselves apparent immediately yesterday.

Bob Katter feels that Warren Truss has been mean to him on television, as recently as election night.

Tony Windsor said he would work with anyone apart from Barnaby Joyce, whom he considers to be a "fool".

Rob Oakeshott, while restraining himself from open expressions of hostility, has ominously declared the election result to be a "stimulus package for democracy".

To assume that these men - conservative regional MPs - would automatically show a tendency to flock with their own kind is to miss something very central to human behaviour.

Did you ever wonder why it is that, of all the MPs who could have defended the right-winger Kevin Rudd against the ambitions of Julia Gillard, his staunchest allies - at the end - were members of the party's hard Left?

The answer is that no-one despises a left-winger like another left-winger.

Internecine hatred has a purity and intensity which far outstrips the limp-wristed attempts at hostility essayed by those whom Fate has ignorantly decreed to be adversaries.

Just as the geo-political rule in Europe dictates that countries should reserve their loftiest contempt for states with whom they share a direct border, Australian politicians tend viscerally to despise their ideological helpmeets.

Granted - this can be very confusing.

An uninitiated person might expect, for example, the newly-elected Independent National Party MP Tony Crook to be naturally sympathetic to the Coalition.

But Mr Crook has just displaced Wilson Tuckey.

And if you think that there is any more poisonous hatred than that which exists between a regional sitting Liberal and a National Party type sniffing round his electorate, then you haven't been paying attention.

Of all the cross-chamber hostilities occasioned by the Rudd government's first term, the only point at which one MP actually established a physical chokehold on another came in a Coalition joint party room meeting last year, in which the Liberal MP Alby Schultz succumbed to teasing about being stalked by the National Party and lunged at Chris Pearce, a talented concert pianist who was at that time the Member for Aston.

Bob Katter, who once upon a time was a National Party MP, now cannot stand his former National colleagues.

He views them as cats' paws to the Liberal Party.

Mr Katter's contempt is heartily reciprocated, and the strongest resistance within the Coalition to the prospect of constructing a formal alliance with him will doubtless come from within the ranks of the junior Coalition partner.

The three conservative independents have announced their determination to stick together.

Labor hopes to pick at least one of them off, and has already reportedly offered Mr Oakeshott a ministry.

Like accomplices under intense police interrogation, the three may prove vulnerable to suspicion and paranoia in the days and weeks ahead, Labor hopes.

Mr Crook, the ink still drying on his ballot papers, has hastened to associate himself with the independent crossbenchers, letting it be known that he would offer substantial cooperation in return for about $850 million in regional spending.

This brings us to the matter of demands.

All three of the "conservative" independents have nominated broadband and regional telecommunications services as a major issue.

Mr Oakeshott has indicated that he would like to see a legislated emissions trading scheme.

Mr Katter would like to see more made of ethanol.

Of the three, there is no doubt that Mr Katter's shopping list is likely to be the most baroque.

He is extremely concerned about Filipino bananas, and yesterday signalled his frustration with the excessive behavioural regulation of regional Australia.

"We're not allowed to fish much at all. We're not allowed to go camping or shooting - or even boiling the billy. We've got a terrible problem with deadly flying foxes. They're going to kill many more people than taipan snakes do in Australia. Rural Australia is closing down."

Mr Katter has never been more potent than he is right now.

Both major parties knew this election result would be close, but who among them would seriously have thought that by Monday this week they'd be hunkered down nutting out lateral-minded ways of bringing the deadly flying fox problem under control, possibly by means of issuing hunting licences to the Katter clan, or distributing baits concealed in discontinued Filipino bananas?

In 2002, South Australia's Mike Rann - inches from minority government - found himself negotiating with the former Liberal Party MP Peter Lewis, and anxiously addressing all of the concerns dear to Mr Lewis' heart, including the spread of a noxious plant called branched broomrape.

Despite the fact that half of the Labor caucus had never heard of it ("I thought it was some sort of complicated naval disciplinary technique", confessed one MP), branched broomrape eradication became a top priority very quickly.

The lone Greens MP Adam Bandt has indicated that he is more likely to side with Labor.

Of Andrew Wilkie, the former spy and former Greens candidate who seems a good chance to whip the Tasmanian seat of Denison from the clutches of the ALP, not too much is yet known; he says he is prepared to talk to anyone, but the long war he fought against the former Howard government over Iraq would suggest that - in the absence of other factors - his sympathies might lie elsewhere.

If the ABC's Antony Green (an election junkie who must be the only person in Australia who is actually pleased to learn that Election 2010 is poised to go on forever) is correct and the seat score ends up with the Coalition holding 73 seats and the Labor Party 72, what happens next?

If Labor can secure the Greens MP and Andrew Wilkie and chisel off two of the rural independents, it could construct a minority government.

If the Coalition can bump up its broadband offer, declare a foreign banana crusade and promise to keep Barnaby Joyce in a cupboard, it might be able to corral Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter and thus ensure an Abbott in the Lodge.

And if neither is able to construct a durable agreement, then it's back to the polls we go.

Annabel Crabb is ABC Online's chief political writer.