Jamie Parker

It’s a telling reflection on the Greens’ woeful campaign at last Saturday’s NSW election that the one politician they may have helped elect is the founder of the One Nation Party, Pauline Hanson.

The Greens were meant to cruise into office in the Lower House in New South Wales in at least two seats. Given how badly the former Labor Government had been going, and how strongly the Greens’ primary vote had been standing up in the polls, they could and should have been expected to return more than just a couple of MPs.

Instead, their campaign crashed and burned. And it did so in a way which may have caused enduring acrimony with the Labor Party. Needless to say, with federal Labor having the most precarious grasp on power courtesy of a formal coalition with the Greens, these tensions in our biggest State have the potential to strain this arrangement.

Continue reading "The Greens: when all else fails cry conspiracy" »

It will be one of the greatest carve-ups the country has ever seen – an election which is nothing other than a plebiscite on the uselessness of a government which even its own members find embarrassing. The polls don’t suggest NSW Labor is in trouble. They suggest NSW is in so much trouble that it might lose seats which don’t even exist yet.

The galvanising effect of this seething dislike for NSW Labor is that third parties such as the Greens will be an irrelevance in the result. There will be no hung parliament after March 26. Even if people still don’t know much about Barry O’Farrell or his policies, they will vote in their droves for the Libs. This election is purely about knocking off the ALP.

There are just two seats where the Greens are expected to trouble Labor or triumph over Labor. They’re Marrickville, held by deputy premier and health minister Carmel Tebbutt, and Balmain, held by education minister Verity Firth.

Continue reading "The weird, unscrutinised world of the NSW Greens" »