The federal election has been set up for the Greens to make a bold showing if they can overcome the popular fixation on the Rudd-Abbott confrontation. They will do better than they would have if Julia Gillard had remained prime minister. Those who have predicted a poor performance by the Greens may be disappointed.
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The Greens have nine senators and one member of the House of Representatives. Their Senate representation has given them the balance of power but this was thought to be endangered by the prospect of a landslide Coalition victory translating into a majority in both houses. Labor will now almost certainly poll much more strongly in the Senate and the ultimate beneficiaries will not just be the victorious Labor Senate candidates but the Greens, too.
The minor party will benefit in two ways. A better Labor performance will ensure the continuation of a Labor-Green majority in the Senate regardless of how well the Greens poll. Six Green senators are not up for re-election. Furthermore, surplus Labor Senate votes will flow to the Greens, improving the chances of Green candidates even without a stronger performance by the party.
But a strong Green vote is more likely because of the major policy changes instituted by Kevin Rudd to carbon-pricing policy and asylum-seeker and refugee policy. In both cases the Greens don't depend upon majority opposition to these new policies but just strongly held minority views. This appears to be the case with both policies, especially asylum-seeker policy which is more clearly seen as a ''lurch to the right''. These two policies are always at the heart of Green concerns.
At the moment, according to the Newspoll published in The Australian this week, the Greens are polling at 10 per cent, which is down on the 11.8 per cent vote they achieved in the 2010 election.
For some time the Greens' polling has been below the 2010 vote, but it is not that far below, and the issues are moving in the Greens' direction.
Rudd has been pitching for the youth vote since his return to the top job. But his new PNG solution to the asylum-seeker issue is unlikely to be as attractive to young voters as to older generations. That is where the Greens' strength lies, especially among younger women aged 18 to 30.
The Greens offer a clear alternative outside the mainstream on asylum-seeker policies. They oppose PNG and favour onshore processing. The same Newspoll shows considerable scepticism about the approach of the major parties to handling the issue of asylum seekers. Rudd seems to have gone some way to balancing the ledger as far as Labor and Coalition voters are concerned. Voters still favour the Coalition by a seven per cent margin (33 to 26) but in February it was a 27 per cent margin in the Coalition's favour (47 to 20).
But almost half of the electorate are still unconvinced by either of the major parties on this issue. 10 per cent favour no party, 12 per cent favour another party , including the Greens, and a whopping 19 per cent remain uncommitted. The bigger the refugee issue becomes, the more likely a considerable minority of voters will look for an alternative approach.
The Greens don't have to attract many of those dissenters to improve their chances.
They will have allies. The likely allies will be many elements of the the asylum and refugee movement. They regard this political fix as inhumane. The unlikely allies will be many church people, including the social justice wings of the Uniting and Catholic churches.
The presence of this issue makes it unlikely that this year will be a rerun of 1993 when the Democrats did so badly under John Coulter, and Paul Keating defeated John Hewson in a so-called referendum on the GST.
But the 1993 parallel does point to danger for the Greens. One of the prime issues then was leadership, and the Democrats could not cut through the hype of the Keating-Hewson contest. Coulter had strong environmental credentials but could not sell them.
This election will be a huge test for Christine Milne. The Rudd policy has set the stage for her to prosecute an alternative point of view not represented by either of the major parties. She has been assisted by Gillard's removal as she remains the only woman leader standing on the national stage. She needs to become the voice of compassion in the way Bob Brown used to be.
It won't be easy for Milne as this will be a ''presidential'' election, suiting Rudd's style. Air time for minor parties will be at a premium. Yet she has to connect with voters, especially younger voters, in a personal way that she has not yet mastered. If she can't do it, other Greens - including the young immigration spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young - must step up.
Milne will have to play her cards carefully because the appropriate face of compassion in the face of deaths at sea can be presented in many ways.
She will need to be both positive and compassionate in her approach in the face of a government advertising campaign. Not just Rudd and Abbott will make this their passionate issue, so too will Tony Burke and Scott Morrison, the respective immigration and refugee spokespeople.
The politics will be ugly but the polls suggest a considerable proportion of the Australian community will at least listen to a view other than the mainstream. The Greens are set up to succeed by the circumstances; which would make failure even harder to bear.
John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of political science at the Australian National University.
