This election result will reinforce to every opposition party in the future that they should be a "small target".
And the government will take the lesson that they can ignore the polls. They're already spinning their "narrowly avoided defeat" as "crushing victory." I think the fact that Abbott was binned will be ignored, since Dutton and Christensen and so on got back in.
What both parties are ignoring is that the primary vote for someone other than LNP or ALP is up over 25% now, and that
both parties suffered a national swing against them of a bit under 1%. While the ALP may be popular in Victoria and the LNP popular in Queensland, overall people are turning against the major parties. It is not clear that either of them are learning the lesson of this, which has been evidencing itself in the Senate long before the House.
It's interesting that the pre-polling and the election results were so different. Veteran electoral analyst Anthony Green says it's because of the death of landlines. Surveying companies used to ring people at home, and knew where they lived, so they could get a representative sample. Now they can only call us on our mobile phones and don't know where we live, which makes getting a representative sample harder.
This has some consequences for democracy, I believe. On any policy the polls may indicate people love or hate it, but MPs will feel justified in ignoring the polls. Instead, they will tend to listen to their own party caucus members, focus groups and lobbyists. This means more nasty internal party politics, and gives groups like GetUp, the Catholic Church, the Business Council and so on more power. Yes, the lobby groups you like, and the lobby groups you dislike, too.