Votercam reporting - a street-level view of the New South Wales election

This view needs to be tested on later groups, but what we found in our first group was firstly a great deal of boredom with the issue. Lora Norder has been done to death and as far as these voters were concerned the conventional prescriptions, such as locking offenders up, ought to be euthanased. Whether this was because they thought that no matter who was in control or what they did, crime rates didn't improve, or because they actually thought crime had been exaggerated as an issue, was unclear. What was clear was that they saw a lot of crime being drug-related, and they actually favoured liberalisation of drug laws as a way of treating it. As Liberal-leaning Jim said: "Give Heroin to those who want it. Easy!"

Which leads to the Greens - pilloried during the week for their liberal drug policy. If there is a potential for a protest vote, that potential is there not for the Liberal Party, but for the Greens. Our quantitative polling showed that around 50 per cent of the Greens vote was drawn from erstwhile Labor voters. There is a potential for the Greens to win lower-house seats from Labor. For it to become a reality a number of things need to happen.

First, the Greens must convince voters that they can win seats. Their by-election win in the federal seat of Cunningham provides a basis for that claim. They also appear to have prospects in seats like Port Jackson and Marrickville where the Labor Party has huge two-party preferred majorities; its primary vote is relatively low; the Liberals poll poorly; and Independents poll well. They need to talk up those prospects, and get some polls done to scientifically illustrate that point. Second, they need to explicitly ask people to vote for them as a way of telling the government to change tack. If they don't ask for the vote in those terms, they won't do well enough. Third, they need to convince the Liberal Party to change its mind on preferences.

I was puzzled during the week when John Brogden made his announcement that he would not direct preferences to the Greens as a matter of principle. Given the potential for the Greens to cause problems on the left for the ALP, as well as robbing them of a vital flow of preferences in some close seatrs, this seems a bad strategy. Perhaps Brogden is trying to make it much less plausible that the Greens might win seats, robbing them of their attractiveness to protest voters and pushing those voters towards the Liberal Party. On our reading of it, this won't happen. If they don't vote Green they will either vote for Labor or try and pick a John Hatton from among the offerings of Independents.

How do we call the play? Well, after the first round, the defending champions are likely to win back-to-back championships. The major challengers don't have the form to win and are doing their best to knobble the minor challengers. The challengers are playing predictably but missing opportunities. Unless the Liberals can shake up their game the result will be similar to last time, although there is potential for Carr to win by an even bigger margin. In all this there is still potential for individual contests to play out quite differently from the norm, particularly in those seats with strong independent candidates. Other information available from outside sources also suggests that Labor may have some trouble in the bush. It may be a dead rubber, but there are plenty of areas of interest.