Federal election 2016: Australia's next government remains an educated, if ultimately fraught, guess

• Election 2016: news, analysis and video
• YourVote: where you align with the parties
• Fairfax-Ipsos poll points to cliffhanger
• Voters undecided with just hours to go

Amazingly, both Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten will go into Saturday buoyed by polls showing they can win, but nervous about which way undecided voters will jump.

For Shorten, this tantalising dead-heat possibility represents an unexpectedly strong position. For Turnbull, an unexpectedly weak one.

After months of hard policy grind and noisy exaggerated posturing, the colour of Australia's next national government remains an educated, if ultimately fraught, guess.

It's a strange but common fact that election results so often turn on the whims of a small cohort of people who even after eight weeks of argument have not made up their minds as they enter the polling place.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.Credit: Andrew Meares

To the naked eye, Turnbull has finished the campaign the stronger, carrying what people in politics characterise as "momentum". His late campaign performances have been noticeably keener and more effective than earlier, more wooden, presentations. But then they needed to be because as the Fairfax-Ipsos poll has shown, his side slipped behind Labor mid-campaign, for the first time since Turnbull had taken over.

Conversely, Shorten who hit the ground running in 2016, has struggled in the late going, attracting criticism for over-egging his alleged Medicare privatisation plan, and for his looser fiscal plan for larger deficits.

The Prime Minister's final campaign set-piece at the National Press Club on Thursday was an exemplar of "on-message" politics with Turnbull relentlessly hitting his key talking points of jobs, growth, economic stability, and the opportunities presented by constant change, all tempered by a transparently post-Brexit warning of the risks of a volatile global economy.

Yet as intellectually compelling as this might seem, voters have not been swayed. There are signs that Turnbull's optimism about "living in the most exciting times in history" has backfired, particularly in the former manufacturing strongholds of Adelaide and Melbourne. There, the "nice" theory of change has delivered the not-so-nice reality of job losses. It's been enough to turbo-charge a huge anti-establishment vote for the more protectionist old-style policies of the Nick Xenophon Team, or NXT as it calls itself.

Asked about the danger of a Brexit-style backlash in SA with voters simply wanting "out" of his risky new future - let's call this NXT push "Nexit" - Turnbull stuck to his lines.

Yet this anti-establishment tendency probably represents perhaps the biggest risk to his government's re-election. That and a Labor leader who has put his side in the perfect position to capitalise.

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