Illustration: Jim Pavlidis And so they did it on Saturday. As a consequence, they rewarded the Coalition but this was not enough to give it power in its own right. The essential lesson in this, however, is that as overall political performance has declined, the lines between the states and the Commonwealth have blurred. The public's respect for the political process is suffering as a result. Since the 1990s, as political and economic power has become more centralised, state politics has increasingly become a backwater. Individuals with political aspirations are drawn more and more to the national stage. The relentless centralisation of political power has diminished state politics. It is not just a matter of political talent and where it is going, it is also about money. What is abundantly clear - and the problems of the Howard government in its final term and the single term of the Rudd-Gillard government show this - is that the federation is broken. In an environment that is becoming more challenging and more complex, the states are ever more strapped of funds and talent.

The man who could be prime minister by the end of next week, Tony Abbott, knows this. In his book Battlelines, published last year, he examined the issue in a chapter entitled ''Australia's Biggest Political Problem and How to Fix It''. He wrote: ''In contemporary Australia, there is a yawning gulf between classic federalism and governmental practice and voter expectation. Health, education and the environment are the clear constitutional responsibility of the states but are also the areas of government policy that voters typically nominate as most important.'' Abbott is a centralist and is disdainful of the traditional Liberal states' rights argument. Would he devote himself to fixing this problem in office? He did not speak of it during the campaign. Part of the Coalition's cost-cutting regime involves reducing the number of meetings between the Commonwealth and the states and territories each year, suggesting that working on federal-state relations would not be a priority. In an interview earlier this month, he told me that there was ''much in the book that can't and shouldn't become part of our policy - and hasn't become part of our policy''. During the final years of the Howard government, the question of how the states and the Commonwealth shared responsibility for policy delivery became a powerful issue. Howard and his ministers regularly blamed the states, all of them Labor, for poor policy outcomes. Kevin Rudd as opposition leader promised to end the blame game. Some voters took this to mean that Rudd would improve the performance of the states or close the gap between expectation and service delivery. He failed to do so and Labor has paid a massive price. In many respects, this election result, if it can be called that just yet, flatters the Labor Party. Rudd in 2007 promised to repair much of what was wrong with public policy and to create a new political dialogue. As has been demonstrated over and over again throughout this year, Labor in office found itself incapable of making good on Rudd's promise. Too often it fell back on cheap tactics and easy talk and took flight from promoting genuine Labor values.

The creation and protection of jobs was Labor's standout achievement in the past three years. It could have fashioned this as its version of Howard's successful (for a time) adoption of low interest rates as a definition of the Liberals' brand. Instead, once it found itself in trouble it attempted to ape its opponents and tried to woo the Sydney talkback radio audience, going after the votes of people who are worried about asylum seekers. Every time Labor has done that this year, polls have shown its primary vote falling. This is because Liberal and undecided voters concerned about the issue do not believe it. And its own supporters have been offended by it. Ever greater numbers are jumping, dismayed, to the Greens. After only one term of office, Labor's coalition of blue-collar and educated middle-class supporters has fallen apart. There is every prospect, even if Julia Gillard manages to hold on to office with the support of independents, that its base will continue to fragment so badly that its constituent parts cannot be reconnected. Loading The grim portent for Labor lies not in the mere fact of its loss of a parliamentary majority, but the way in which that loss has been inflicted, with many of its own people saying after only three years, ''no more''.

Shaun Carney is an Age associate editor.