The Boy Bramston has an interesting article in Tuesday's Oz, which further demonstrates the absolute inability to think straight about the Greens. Noting that both Labor's David Feeney in Batman and Albo in Grayndler may be gone -- I think the assessment is unduly pessimistic (for Labor), perhaps deliberately so -- the Boy argues: "To Greens voters, the Labor brand is toxic. They have a protest vote mentality that defies reason."

By "protest vote mentality", the Boy means that Greens voters don't conspire in his fantasy that Labor is still the Whitlam-Hawke-Keating party, unifying progressive forces. The Greens' vote is growing precisely because it isn't a protest vote anymore. The Greens voters of Northcote, Thornbury, etc (in Batman), are public servants, academics, consultants, media people, tech people. They know that they run the knowledge economy, and that they will eventually run the whole economy, and they want to vote for a party that will express the whole of their values, not merely a part of them. Their vote is growing not out of protests, but because they can see power within their grasp -- both in a renewed control of the Senate crossbenches, and possibly as part of a crossbench in the lower house, should the result be close.