Transformative may be the best word to sum up last weekend’s election and the resulting streams of acceptance, concession, pledging and promising.

Depending on individual tastes and persuasions, some will be celebrating the future – others will be bracing. It is undeniable that big changes are coming which will solidify elements of the national identity, destroy others and create still more.

The country has seen some of its most prominent party members and public faces flung from their positions; Kevin Rudd is gone, Craig Thomson is out, Bob Katter’s lost what once seemed his perennial seat, the Greens no longer hold sway in the Senate, and former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie popped up on the political landscape for the first time in years before being brushed away just as quickly.

It is likely that time and the endless cycle of the media will soon move these previous players out of Australia’s collective consciousness, swapping them for the new deck of talking heads, and what a hand we’ve been dealt.

Barnaby Joyce, the politician who could go by just his first name, has moved house from upper to lower and QLD to NSW.

Inner-city trendy types have put their fashionably ironic support behind Greens MP Adam Bandt in the totally vintage seat of Melbourne.

Andrew Wilkie is on a very short list of Independents still around after being stitched-up on preference deals. Nick Xenophon adds to that list in the Senate as does the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young, whose party suffered most from the adjustment to inter-party preference deals.

There has been no end to the excitement from the election whose outcome was all but predetermined.

Many wait with tangible anticipation for the outcome in the seat of Fairfax, where billionaire mining boss Clive Palmer has managed to endear himself so completely that barely anyone has noticed his lack of policy, regard for the environment or strong intention to attend his role in public office.

‘Micro-party’ may be the buzzword of the 2013 elections. Previously one only needed to throw a casual preference to the Sex or Hemp Party and be done with it. This year voters were faced with a Homeric epic in the form of a ballot list, combined with the major parties’ re-jigging of the always slightly shady inter-party agreements, resulting in an utter mish-mash of a Senate.

While no Australian in possession of any political outlook should be denied the right to put their name on the ticket, the serpentine path of polling and preferences certainly needs some tending to.

This week has been full of suggestions for changes, questions of minor-party policies (as if liking sport, drugs, guns, sex or the environment isn’t a solid enough platform) and outright condemnation of the little guy who just wants to have influence behind his station. The last of that list should never be reformed.

Something is definitely wrong when a member like Ricky Muir from the Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party is capable of becoming a Senator with a vote of less than one per cent. At that point it is not democracy expressing itself, but rather throwing up some random by-product to draw attention to a lapse in a far-from-perfect system.

The Conversation tackles the issue of what can be done about our sickly Senate, a piece called ‘How do we solve a problem like the Senate?’ published there deals in detail with several proposals, and provides an excellent explanation and analysis of the subject. Well worth a read while we wait to hear Clive Palmer’s asylum seeker policy – likely to include a processing centre with a gift shop.