It is clear already that Barr will have to pay more attention to securing Le Couteur's vote than he has had to do for Shane Rattenbury in the past term. Whatever influence Rattenbury had in the past four years of Labor government, it was inside Cabinet, and rarely on display. Only on a few occasions did he force change in a visible way - the Telopea Park land swap, more recently with the conditions be imposed on poker machines in the casino, and extra design controls at Red Hill (although the government has itself since gone back to the drawing board on Red Hill).

But even then, he didn't force defeat on the floor of the chamber. Rattenbury's rebellions were those of a colleague.

Le Couteur, by contrast, appears to an extent at least to be keeping her own counsel, and feeling no obligation at all towards the Labor government - even though it has her Green colleague as a cabinet minister.

It's a fascinating dynamic that could well be one of the stories of the coming four years.

The result is less predictable chamber that might require more politically agile minds to manage than the current government and opposition whips, Mick Gentleman (Labor) and Andrew Wall (Liberal).

If Barr wasn't alert to the dangers before the Assembly sat on December 13, he surely was by the time it rose on December 15.

He lost a vote on Wednesday, an occurrence that had some shrugging their shoulders and insisting it was minor, and others tuning their radar. Governments which are paying attention do not lose votes. If they haven't got the numbers, they negotiate and compromise until they do.

The vote that went wrong for Barr in the first week wasn't any vote; it was a vote on his handling of the mess that surrounds the Land Development Agency - an issue with very damaging political potential.

Barr's handling of this has been unedifying - since the first questions from the Canberra Times about the Glebe Park land purchase early this year were dismissed as trivial and obsessive, to his repeated and aggressive denials of problems on the floor of the parliament, to his partial capitulation in the face of a report from the Auditor-General when he announced that the Land Development Agency would be split in two. As an aside, restructuring the agency might be necessary and it might bring about the desperately needed change of culture, but it doesn't address the second part of the equation: who is to take responsibility for the agency's cavalier handling of taxpayers' money?

Alistair Coe has been pursuing this issue all year in the Assembly, and has got little from Rattenbury. In August, Coe put a motion that would have forced Barr to answer a long list of questions about the Glebe Park and City to the Lake land purchases. Rattenbury teamed with Labor to defeat the motion, letting Barr off the hook.

Rattenbury's justification was two fold: Barr had already provided some of the requested information, and he preferred to wait for the auditor's "objective, thorough and complete review". Which, of course, we now have. Its findings are startling and troubling. Whether the findings are now investigated, aired and dealt with comprehensively in a way that looks back at what happened rather than simply forward at Barr's new structure, will be largely up to the Greens.

The signs are good. The Liberals will push for an inquiry through the parliament's public accounts committee, perhaps even with public hearings and witnesses called. It remains to be seen whether that will get traction, given the committee is locked two Liberals, two Labor, which results in the defeat of most any contentious motion. But the Liberals will seek Greens support in the Assembly to refer an inquiry to the committee, and thus force the issue. Rattenbury and Le Couteur are likely to agree. Watch for the government's damage control to manifest itself in the committee with dedicated efforts to limit the scope of any inquiry, and curtail any thoughts of compelling witnesses or canvassing some of the murkiest corners of the affair. So the detail might be less than satisfactory, but an inquiry of some shape appears likely.

And on the floor of the parliament, Le Couteur is already making trouble. It went like this. On Wednesday, private members' day, Coe brought a motion pointing to the auditor's findings of "manipulation" of freedom of information documents, a "lack of transparency, accountability and rigour" in agency land purchases, and "major issues around integrity and probity" at the Land Development Agency.

Barr moved to amend his motion to remove all of the critical references and turn it into an anodyne statement highlighting the government's reforms.

This is typically the way it goes. But this time, Rattenbury was away - he was attending a national meeting of energy ministers. And no one thought through the implications. Barr took Greens' support for granted and so lulled had everyone become by the routines of the last Assembly that the whips forgot to do their job.

Le Couteur sided with the Liberals. Barr lost his motion. Coe lost his, too, since Le Couteur's support tied the vote - and a tied vote is lost.

Labor failed to head off defeat on the floor, by seeing it coming, treating the Greens with more care and respect, and negotiating a position they could live with.

Arguably, the Liberals failed to exploit the new dynamic for a significant win - although this is a trickier argument to make. If the debate had been pushed back an hour, Rattenbury would have been there and two Greens could have won the vote for the Liberals. In practice, though, if Rattenbury had been there, political experience and habit is likely to have seen a negotiated position between Labor and the Greens and avoided the defeat for Barr.

All this is politically intricate and usually goes on behind the scenes. The fact that it played out in public is a valuable lesson for Barr so early in his term. He and Rattenbury have already spoken about what went wrong and you can expect Barr to be watching more closely, counting more carefully, and speaking with more clarity to the Greens ahead of contentious votes, especially on private members' day when the Greens are in full crossbench mode.

Rattenbury ensured he never missed a sitting day last term - he had no choice, since Labor could only govern with his vote.

Asked about the voting mishap in the first week of the new term, Rattenbury says that, essentially, "no one had done the procedural thinking".

He says the Greens are sharing a chief of staff and will be working hard to ensure they are given time to discuss their position, allowing Rattenbury to take a joint stance to cabinet, and ensuring their Assembly vote is clear.

He's also talking about trying to negotiate a vote-by-vote pair with Labor and the Liberals, so if he's away, especially on private members' day, his vote still counts. "We're going to have to invent a mechanism" to make pairs work, he says. But it's impossible to see either of the major parties wearing this idea, since they both lose from the deal.

Rattenbury points to another loss for Labor in the first week, when Labor backbenchers "dreamed up" a number of inquiry topics and tried to refer them to the newly establishedcommittees. The Liberals and the Greens combined to block the move, saying they hadn't been consulted and although there was nothing wrong with the inquiry ideas and the Labor backbenchers were simply keen to get to work, Labor should respect the right of the committees to meet and sort out their priorities before receiving referrals.

Rattenbury's take-out message from the week is that Labor needs to "not take the Greens for granted".

For the Liberals, there's clearly a chink here for them to exploit. While Coe is more socially conservative than his predecessor, a characteristic you would think would drive the Greens and Liberals further apart, Rattenbury says he has already signalled a more cooperative relationship than Jeremy Hanson. Hanson, he says, was combative in the chamber and dismissive of the idea of working with the Greens, insisting that Rattenbury could not play the role of crossbencher and cabinet member at the same time.

So Rattenbury sees some fertile ground. And Le Couteur is not happy about the goings on at the Land Development Agency, and has already been unsettling Barr with questions in the chamber. On Tuesday, her first question in the new Assembly was on this topic. She asked why the Glebe Park land purchase had not gone to the board for approval as required, and why only one formal valuation was sought. Barr's reaponse was that the answers were already on the public record. But rather than accept this brush off, Le Couteur went back to the public record, and returned to the chamber the next day to tell him that what was on the public record was far from satisfactory. The agency's answers to questions from Coe at a planning committee hearing late last year did not match the findings of the auditor, she said.

"One thing has been said to the planning committee and another thing seems to be what actually happened," she said. " ... The Assembly is very concerned, and we are also very concerned because the questions we ask are simply not being answered on this."

Her conclusion: "Something is not right." It must be a worrying one for Barr.