Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. Credit:Andrew Meares "Micro party preferences will be directed towards Labor in marginal Coalition seats and in seats where the Greens think they have a shot," Mr Druery said. "You would expect Melbourne to be impossible for Adam Bandt to hold for the Greens." Micro parties meet in Sydney on April 23 to wargame a strategy of targeting Coalition and Green held seats. The campaign is payback to the Coalition and the Greens for joining Senator Nick Xenophon in reforming Senate voting to effectively wipe out micro parties.

Glenn Druery. Credit:Andrew Meares "Labor will certainly claw back seats but micro party preferences will ensure they get even more and Malcolm Turnbull's victory is by no means assured," Mr Druery said. "More than three million Australians voted for micro parties at the last election. "The Coalition and the Greens said the Senate voting system was undemocratic but Australians are no fools – they know it was the crossbenchers who saved the country from an increased Medicare payment and deregulated university fees and other ideological flights of fancy." Mr Druery said anger with the Coalition and Greens over the Senate changes had also prompted smaller parties from both the left and right not to oppose one another in 2016.

"For the first time, they have decided to stop cancelling each other out but leave right wing micros to take on the Coalition while the left micros will fight the Greens – a move that would certainly help Anthony Albanese in Grayndler and Tanya Plibersek in Sydney." Mr Druery said he was considering standing for the Senate in NSW but if that did not work out there had been an offer to work on US presidential election campaign. "Not for Trump," he said. In readiness for the federal election, Mr Druery had been mountain-biking around the NSW south coast with his American partner Melissa Archey this week. It has been a long journey for the 54-year-old political adviser since first spotted by the Herald in March 1999 at the NSW Electoral Commission office in Kent Street, Sydney, talking conspiratorially with groups of hopeful minor party candidates. That was the year of the notorious Legislative Council "table cloth" ballot paper with 264 candidates from 78 parties

Mr Druery boasted of stitching up preference flows from up to 40 other groups - some of which he set up - and, heading the Republic 2001/People First ticket. His photograph appeared on the Herald front page under the headline "Look what I just built - a political career". Nearly. He wanted a parliamentary career but ended up a back room boy. Druery directed his second preference to his mate, the Outdoor Recreation Party's Malcolm Jones, and somehow shot himself in the foot. Jones won a seat. Druery later fell out with Jones – he often does with those he helps: Senator David Leyonhjelm was once a prodigy until bad blood broke out between them. Druery calls Ricky Muirthe "accidental senator", saying when another Victorian minor party senatorial candidate refused to pay him he arranged for the minnow preference flow to be directed away from Family First to Muir's Australian Motoring Enthusiasts Party.

After 1999, the Carr government moved quickly to squash the micro party preference flow but the changes have not stopped the occasional minnow win - in 2015 the Animal Justice Party won a seat with 1.8 per cent of first preference votes. Mr Druery went on work for the crossbenchers in the NSW parliament, had a shot at the senate for the Liberals for Forest and followed up in 2010 with a similarly failed tilt as the Liberal Democrats candidate. Backroom politics, he said, had not made him rich. He rents a Sydney apartment and drives a 13-year-old car. In the run up to the 2013 federal election, the enormity of Mr Druery's preferences by stealth dawned on commentators and the pejorative "preference whisperer" surfaced. The Monday after the 2013 election Australians woke to predictions by Mr Druery that those he had helped with preference flows, Leyonhjelm, Muir, former NRL legend Glenn Lazarus and Jacqui Lambie (Palmer United Party from Queensland and Tasmania), and South Australian Family First stalwart Bob Day were on the way to the Senate.

Nearly three years later Mr Druery believes micro party senators were down but not all were out out. His predictions for the 2016 Senate election in the event of a double dissolution? "Lambie and Lazarus to return. A $1 million taxpayer funded war chest could also see Leyonhjelm win and if he can find the money Clive Palmer could be a chance for the Senate. He's gone in the Reps though. In Victoria, Derryn Hinch. "Whatever the fate of the micro senators, the one assured outcome of the Senate changes is that Labor will never ever control the Upper House."