Hi dreamy..indeed :)

Ludwig.. it seems a truth that the more Left people openly go..the less people who vote for them. So..in order to win elections, Labor is posturing itself as centrist it seems. The hard core left will either renew their "Socialist Alliance" membership or join the Greens (perhaps as well)
Labor still benefits from their preferences it seems..so it's either shuffling deck chairs on the political Titanic or..they might still scrape through on the prefs.

I'll be doing what I can in marginal seats to stop them doing so :)

I'm in and/or surrounded by 3 or 4 of them.

*It's WAR* .... (to the sound of a Marching patriotic type tune)

I can see some disgruntled Labor lefties wanting to join the Greens as well as a few of the real Liberals who don't like the Neo-Con direction of their party. Possibly Malcolm Turnbull and Malcolm Fraser, for instance.
But the greens don't like people switching Parties for opportunistic reasons.

Unlike the 2 majors parties, the Greens don't have policies that sway in the wind. They post them and allow their members to discuss and modify them through a democratic process. If a policy area is not clear cut then the rule is to represent the constituency, or use a conscience vote. The big parties change for populist reasons and members are bound to the party line, regardless of constituent or member concern.
Most seasoned members of other parties cannot come to grips with this and don't like this kind of true democracy.

That said the swing to the right by both Liberal and Labor is causing grief for many members of both parties as well as those who traditionally voted for them. These voters are looking to the greens along with many of Generation Y who see real problems with the Traditional parties. Conroy is a joke among those aged 18-30, Abbott scares them and they wonder why Garrett joined Labor instead of the Greens, where his performance would have been so much better.