It’s all intangible and you can’t define it. You would need a real good quack to work it out.

What are the chances of enough independents and Greens getting up, joining together and saying “A pox on both your houses, we`ll for a minority government”?

Nil, I should say, once you think through the procedural details of how the system works.

Let’s say that neither the ALP nor the Coalition wins a majority in the Legislative Assembly, and let’s say ‘others’ win a total of, say, 15 seats. What happens next? Either the Premier tenders his resignation at once or he doesn’t.

If he doesn’t tender his resignation, presumably he will try to secure undertakings of support, or at least qualified support, from crossbenchers. If he gets enough, that’s it. If he doesn’t, what happens next? Probably, Parliament meets and the Coalition leader moves a motion of no confidence in the government (or its procedural equivalent). If this isn’t carried, the ALP government will continue. If it is carried, the ALP government will resign.

So, if we get, one way or the other, to a situation where the ALP government resigns, what happens next? Either the outgoing Premier will advise the Governor who to commission as Premier or not. If he does, who is he going to advise if not the Opposition leader?–particularly if the Opposition leader has moved a succesful motion of no-confidence, but probably even if not. The Governor doesn’t have to take the outgoing Premier’s advice, but is likely to, and is likely anyway to nominate the Opposition leader if he has moved a succesful motion of no-confidence. Even in a scenario where the ALP Premier resigns immediately after an election defeat and tenders no advice to the Governor, who else is the Governor going to commission if not the Opposition Leader? We’re looking at a situation where the crossbenchers still only have about 15 seats, and they will also have no recognised leader. Even if they could get together to agree on a leader, that person would not have been in the public eye as leader, let alone potential Premier, during the election campaign and won’t have the same public status as the Opposition Leader–and, in this scenario, will still have the support of fewer MPs than either the ALP or the Coalition leader.

Once a Coalition Government is formed, the ALP, having just resigned from government, is hardly likely to move an immediate motion of no-confidence, and is also hardly likely to support one if the crossbenchers move it. So the Coalition Government will carry on for the time being.

In the immediate aftermath of an election with the kind of results you’re talking about, pretty much the only way the crossbenchers could prevent the formation of a Coalition Government is by keeping the ALP government in office, protecting it from defeat on a motion of no-confidence.

In any case, where do you see your scenario going from here? I just can’t see any sequence that leads up to your government of Independents and Greens.

I agree the ALP is totally concerned with the spoils and nothing to do with the governing. In 14 years of government, I can think of nothing they have done.

I ask and no-one has ever provided me with an adequate answer – Name one significant achievement of the NSW ALP government that they started and finished.

Look at all the transport announcements with nothing achieved. In both the 1990s and the 2000s in WA a major rail line was built – north and south. Yet here there is nothing major at all.

Dancing around in your underwear at a party, for heaven’s sake! More like a rugby team than a government. Now they are paying the price, basically for treating politics as a game rather than a profession.

Look at the rubbish they pursue, with their faction fights and deals. These factional leaders would be unemployable in the real world. If you had a group of workers coming to work on your garden or house, you would sack them in two minutes if they spent all the time backbiting each other, rather than just getting the job done. I have no doubt that one of the reasons the Rudd government is doing so well in the polls is that it isn’t engaging in this sort of nonsense, but is focussing on doing what people expect it to.

I suspect even people who are sympathetic to the ALP in NSW have concluded that the party machine is so dysfunctional that the only way to reform it and to make it viable in the long run is to see it so flattened at an election that the old ways will be permanently discredited, as happened with Japanese militarism at Hiroshima.