The Sydney Morning Herald has learnt Mr Abbott's ''Fair Go for the Regions'' package would initially have been funded from unidentified offsetting savings, but in the longer term would have come from proceeds of new projects paying the petroleum resource rent tax.

By opting to support Labor to form government the independents instead secured $1.17 billion over the next four years for new bridges, roads, energy and water projects in the regions - part of the trumpeted ''$10 billion'' package of funding promises over a longer timeframe.

Five hundred and seventy-three million dollars of Labor's money comes from the regional infrastructure fund to be set up with some of the proceeds of the yet-to-be-legislated mineral resource rent tax and $600 million will be paid for by deferring for one year the tax discount on interest income, another plank of the Henry tax review.

Mr Abbott was also unsuccessful with his far more generous hospital funding offer to the Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie. Mr Abbott offered $1 billion to build a teaching hospital in Hobart but Mr Wilkie opted for Labor's $340 million upgrade plan on the basis its total response to his requests was better thought through and more affordable.

The National Party, for which the country independents' achievements pose a serious political threat, believes Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott have been ''conned''.

The Nationals leader, Warren Truss, said Labor's offer to the independents delivered far less for regional Australians than they would have received had the Coalition formed a government.

''Labor's $9.9 billion deal is mostly smoke and mirrors and I am amazed that the independents were so easily conned,'' he said. ''Six billion dollars of the proposed $9.9 billion package will trickle to the regions over 10 years and comes from the proceeds of a mining tax which will not even eventuate until 2015-16. There will be two more elections before then.''

As Labor and Liberal MPs returned to Canberra, others in the Coalition declared the Labor government to be ''illegitimate'' and seized on pre-existing policy differences between Labor and the Greens to claim ''a descent into policy chaos''.