Federal election 2016: It's 50-50, so what was the point of it all?

• Federal election 2016: Full coverage
• Poll shock: Coalition faces defeat
• Voters undecided with just hours to go
• Engrossing count looms

At the start of the election campaign, the Turnbull government was ahead on the national vote by 51 per cent to Labor's 49 in the Fairfax-Ipsos poll.

Today, eight weeks later, it's on 50:50 in the Fairfax-Ipsos poll.

The poll has moved by exactly one percentage point.

And it's the same picture across all the major polling firms, where all the movement has been within the polls' margins of error.

Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten

"These figures have been incredibly static," says the Fairfax pollster, Ipsos's Jess Elgood.

So what was the point of it all?

The frenetic campaigning, the hundreds of events, the thousands of emails, hundreds of thousands of phone calls, millions of dollars on party ads, and billions of taxpayer dollars committed on politicians' promises?

"It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing," Macbeth might have commented.

Says Elgood: "It makes you wonder if any of the sound and fury has cut though. You could either argue that it's extremely closely fought, or that we've all switched off."

In one of the distinguishing characteristics of the 2016 election, a record percentage of the electorate says it will vote for someone other than the two major parties – in this poll, 27 per cent.

This supports the "switched-off" theory.

But there has been some meaningful movement in some of the other parts of the national political picture.

For instance, Malcolm Turnbull was rated as the preferred prime minister by a margin of 22 per cent at the start of the campaign. Today that has shrunk to 14.

"There's been a significant shift in the number of people who can see Bill Shorten as prime minister," Elgood suggests.

And beneath the national averages, in the marginal seats that decide who will form government after Saturday's election, there has been real movement.

The strategists for the main parties do nightly surveys of the most volatile marginal seats, and they found that voters' opinion did move back and forth in response to two big themes.

Labor's scare campaign that the Coalition secretly plans to privatise Medicare moved voters to Labor; the Coalition's unwavering theme of stability moved them back again.

So who's going to win?

The evidence of the betting markets, the polls of individual marginal seats, the behaviour of the political parties all point to a Turnbull victory, but a slender one.

And with the wild card of the strong debut for the Nick Xenophon party in South Australia, an upset, possibly another hung parliament, is a realistic prospect. As the poll says, it's likely to be close.

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