In fact, the new parliament started with the sort of bipartisanship we’ve been warned would be impossible – albeit on an issue that did not rate a mention during the eight-week election campaign.

Following the week-long wait to decide which party would form government following the July 2 election, both Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and opposition leader Bill Shorten have called for Australia to investigate electronic voting at future elections.

And it’s hard to argue with that.

In 2016, the sight of booth workers tipping out huge bags of votes to begin hand-counting on election night looks strangely out of place.

There must surely be a better way that delivers an accurate result in a fraction of the time it now seems to take.

All sides of politics have given cautious support to the idea of electronic voting, though all say security concerns must first be addressed.

But just how secure is the current system?

There were polling spread across 394,000 sq. km of the Parkes electorate and nothing – apart from the time and distance between each booth – to stop a voter casting a ballot in all of them.

Currently the Australian Electoral Commission requires no identification before the voter receives a ballot paper, simply that the intending voter states their name and address.

That name is then ruled off by hand in the electoral roll, with no way of knowing whether that name has already been ruled off at another polling place that day.

You would think anyone wishing to defraud the system could easily get away with it – providing they didn’t use their own name, of course.

So if electoral fraud is not an issue now, then surely there’s no real reason to think it would become an issue under electronic voting. If anything, you would expect the system to be tightened under any changes, not the other way round.

Electronic voting may not be the biggest issue facing our country today, but if it’s an issue that can win bipartisan support and pass easily through parliament then it’s well worth exploring.

After all, we might not get Mr Turnbull and Mr Shorten to agree on anything else for however long this parliament lasts.