KEY POINTS:
If an election had been held last week, and if TV3's TNS opinion poll was accurate, Labour would win 54 seats and the Greens 10.
Add those together and there's the magic number - 64 seats, a comfortable majority in Parliament.
If that had happened, then right now Labour would be negotiating a coalition or support agreement with the Greens to form a fourth-term government.
It wouldn't need any other minor party to give it the numbers; the Greens would be enough. There might not be many other seats held by minor parties anyway.
Labour's result in that poll, 44 per cent support in the party vote, wasn't much different from previous surveys.
It is the Greens' level of support that is significant.
In the 2005 election the party won 5.3 per cent, but since then its ratings have climbed to 8 per cent.
The trend is solid. All the polls show the Greens have more support now than they did in 2005.
It is happening at a time, midway through the election cycle, when minor parties are usually at their lowest ebb.
Jeanette Fitzsimons, the Greens co-leader who has confirmed she will stay on through to the next election, modestly says she expects her party will "play a strong role" in the next Parliament.
"Surf's up on climate change and sustainability generally, and we must not waste that opportunity," she told supporters at the weekend.
Ms Fitzsimons interprets the polls as showing more people are starting to think hard about climate change, and taking notice of Green Party policy - even though it isn't designed to be popular.
She says her party's time has come, and she could be right.
And from the Greens' point of view, the good thing is that climate change isn't going to go away. Internationally, the issue is gaining more and more publicity and powerful Governments are talking about ways to deal with it.
If the crunch comes and the Greens are in the middle, neither of the main parties will find them easy to deal with.
Ms Fitzsimons and her MPs - there would be 10 of them if they won 8 per cent of the party vote - want action which any Government would at best consider risky and at worst too unpopular to implement.
She questions whether the Government is really committed to confronting the "ecological slaughter" of the fishing industry, or fixing the water pollution problems caused by agricultural run-off.
- NZPA
