My mind turns the polls in the US and how very sure the right was their man would win.

Let's not forget that the last Coalition PM failed to even win his own seat at the 2007 election bloodbath - and there wasn't even a GFC then.

To make a massive understatement, the fortunes of political parties wax and wane. What most political observers prefer not to mention (because their jobs would then become meaningless) is that electorates just get bored.

It's easy to be triumphalist over the Coalition's recently undeserved good fortune. However, since the GFC and collapse of the world financial sector, every government throughout the Western world has either lost power or a substantial part of its voter support. This is typical voter panic, made worse by the Western media's commitment to framing the GFC as a crisis of national economies, instead of what it really is - the inevitable meltdown of an irresponsibly, indeed criminally, deregulated world financial sector.

The Greens are a brilliant protest party with their finger still on the pulse of the values that both the majors discarded decades ago in their pursuit of neoliberalism, which has in turn created the financial disaster the world is living with today and will for decades to come. As the people become poorer and the rich get disgustingly richer, we'll need the values of the Greens more than ever.