Gerard Henderson, the Greens and a hearty dose of castor oil and reality ...

(Above: open wide).

In the good old days, which is to say days that were not necessarily good but were certainly old, my grandmother used to love to give us a dose of castor oil for anything that ailed us.

In an idle moment, I browsed the wiki on the medicinal use of castor oil, only to be told that its okay as a laxative though not a preferred treatment, and that the stuff has been used for old kinds of snake oil remedies.

The wiki assures the world that cold pressed castor oil is tasteless and odourless when pure, which can only mean that the dollops of vile pongy smelly oily goo that granny ladelled into our mouths was definitively impure. Reading in the wiki about the traditional or folk medicine uses of the muck helped me to understand that as children we were in the hands of a quack. Sure, a kindly family quack, but when it came to the matter of castor oil, a martinet and a disciplinarian of the first water.

In his usual ineffable way, Gerard Henderson shares certain tendencies with my granny, as he sternly decides to give us Polls, hype and a dose of reality.

Sigh. Open your mouths children, here comes the dose of castor oil reality.

You see, Henderson has a stern granny view about all that rampant hysteria and fear mongering about the rampant Greens, and how you need to eat your greens or Bob Brown will come out from under the bed and offer you watermelon.

Why only yesterday Glenn Milne was almost dying of apoplexy at the thought. The Greens with real power! Turns out that today it's all nonsense:

In short, it is exaggeration to assert no one wants to vote for Rudd Labor or the Coalition under Abbott's leadership.

Better to have the "in short" version than we all nod off to sleep. But you should note that the suggestion that people don't want to vote for either of these leaders came on ABC2 News Breakfast via Melissa Clarke. Dear lord, who watches ABC2 News Breakfast? Feed that man some castor oil.

Moving along, it's handy to get a fix on the Greens, who can be found watching the ABC, Gerard Henderson excluded of course:

The Greens are essentially the party of the affluent inner-city professional class, many of whom work in the public sector or who enjoy generous taxpayer-subsidised superannuation.

Thank the lord they don't work for the Sydney Institute and enjoy a generous private institute subsidised superannuation scheme, as required by the government. Yep, it's sitting at a desk scribbling righteous guff that provides a clear distinction between a Henderson and a professional greenie.

Sure, there might be only a sliver of sunlight in it, but it's there for all to see ... especially if they work in Phillip street in the heart of Sydney.

Meanwhile, forget the surge in voting intentions indicating that the Greens have picked up support from people disenchanted with the two major parties.

The rest of Henderson's piece is a bit of number crunching, and an instruction to the Liberal party not to preference the Greens as a way of ensuring they can't pick up a couple of inner city lower house seats.

Henderson spends a considerable and tedious amount of time refuting Waleed Aly's comparison of the local Greens to the UK's Lib Democrats, when of course the ambition of the Greens is more likely to be the German Greens, where the party did quite well in the 2009 election with 68 seats, a +17 movement.

Thank the lord Australia doesn't have German democracy or a desire to empower indulgent inner west professionals, or their acolytes, or an ABC saturated with middle aged women determined to have a knit in at Ultimo (oh the horror, the horror).

Always one to hold a grudge, Henderson naturally troops back to the ill-fated campaign of Clive Hamilton, which allows a sideswipe at mortal enemy Robert Manne:

A few academics and journalists predicted a big vote for the Greens in last December's byelections in the suburban seats of Bradfield in Sydney and Higgins in Melbourne. Robert Manne canvassed in The Australian the possibility of the Greens' candidate Clive Hamilton winning Higgins. On the morning of the poll, The Age ran a large photograph of Hamilton with his bicycle. Hamilton made no impact on the Liberal vote and, being based in Canberra, had a bigger carbon footprint than any candidate in the contest.

In his typical way, Henderson refuses to acknowledge the vigorous campaign that loon pond mounted for the Australian Sex Party, as a counter to the devious and puritanical Hamilton. If we'd wanted Grandma Moses handing out tablespoons of castor oil and puritanism, we'd have got a granny to run. Hamilton was simply an ersatz granny, and that doesn't cut it in the world of reality politics.

Truth to tell, Henderson is a two party person. He enjoys a system where there's a simple, rigid duopoly, and the parties can swap power on a regular basis, and in the way of things it's often hard to tell Tweedledum apart from Tweedledee.

For all the current media hype, this year's election looks like a not untypical close encounter between Labor and the Coalition - with both parties hoping to maximise preferences from the Greens, minor parties such as Family First and independents.

Same as it ever was.

The Greens might win House of Representative seats and just might have a role to play in a hung parliament. But it is unlikely Bob Brown and his colleagues will be anything other than influential senators.

Yep, for an entire column, Henderson has rabbited on about the bleeding obvious in relation to the lower house, and just when speculation might get interesting, contemplating whether the Greens might actually form an effective, controlling third power in the upper house, to implement the dire agenda of inner city comfortable professionals, he stops short in his tracks.

A huge dollop of castor oil, and that's all we get by the way of analysis? Suddenly Glenn Milne sounds astute, and he didn't even need to set up a couple of straw dogs in order to shoot them down ...

So it goes, and yes Granny, I'm ready for my castor oil. It'll take my mind off Gerard Henderson ...

(Below: and now in honour of grannies, here's Grandma Moses, and she does look alarmingly like my granny. Bet she liked to use 4711 eau de cologne, the choice of grannies everywhere, when they're not scoffing castor oil).