That Saturday night party of the election, amid four blaring TV screens, food smeared across the carpet, broken bottles, soggy edibles floating in flat Coke — I spent the evening alone — the real question for any radical was: what did one really want?

The left party line has always been to hope for, indeed to work for, a hung parliament with a Labor plurality with a Green bloc it would need to rely on. The rise of the teal community independents complicated this somewhat, but the election of four lower house Greens delivered the sort of result many were hoping for.