Squabbling over the order on how-to-vote cards in this seat or that in a single election is finger-in-the-dyke stuff. It might save one or two seats for the ALP, but it will not stop the transformational change that is affecting voting patterns. The Green tide is rising, and increasingly it appears to represent a long-term realignment in Australian politics.

Every poll and each subsequent election shows the same phenomenon: the Coalition's vote is holding, Labor's primary support is falling and the Greens' share is rising. A battle for primacy is taking place on the non-Coalition side of politics. The Greens are unambiguous about it; they want to put the ALP out of business. In this election, as in the federal election, their aim is to take voters away from Labor, with their latest street poster depicting a young woman declaring: ''My values haven't changed but my vote has.'' As Brown has said several times in recent days: ''We are not there to keep the bastards honest - we are there to replace them.''

The Greens have played a long game. Unlike the Democrats and One Nation, minor parties that emerged in a rush and then went into decline, the Greens' build-up of support has taken many years. Because support appeared to be stuck under or around 10 per cent throughout most of this decade, large sections of the Labor Party allowed themselves to take an arrogant view of the minor party and its mostly young activists.

They regarded it as a protest movement, a phase that some voters would go through - a form of political adolescence. This was a serious misreading of changes in political sensibilities that were resulting from more than a decade of affluence courtesy of rising house prices, the growth of tertiary education, the rise of identity politics within the middle class, the decline of manufacturing and the fall of major party and union membership. In Victoria, the heartland of Greens politics is in the inner city - a long way from the natural environment.

The penny has finally dropped for Labor, quite possibly too late. In 2006, the ALP held on to the seats of Melbourne and Richmond in part because the then new Labor recruit, Peter Garrett, went for a street walk in Carlton late in the campaign. The stunt worked then, but how would it go down if Garrett tried it now? The ALP is out of effective stunts and must face the reality that it pretty much sat still while the political realignment took place.