KEY POINTS:
A Kevin Rudd election victory would deliver coast-to-coast Labor governments - nine of them - for the first time in Australia's history.
If the opinion polls are correct, Rudd is poised to add the final and most glittering jewel to the ALP crown - power in Canberra - to top off Labor's current political supremacy in all six states and two territories.
Such a whitewash is unprecedented in the party's 116-year history.
Australia has never been a one-party nation since federation, and only once since then has it been painted all one political hue, when the conservative parties ruled every roost for 13 months until mid-1970.
John Gorton was Prime Minister back then, the biggest states were in the vice-like grip of three political titans - Sir Robert Askin in NSW, Sir Henry Bolte in Victoria and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen in Queensland - and conservatives also ran the show in South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania.
Little did they know it, but it was to be their high-water mark; Gough Whitlam was just two years away from ending the coalition's 23-year stranglehold on Canberra.
The Swinging Sixties were leading into the brave new world of the '70s.
Man had just landed on the moon, British troops went into Northern Ireland and Concorde made its first supersonic flight. Monty Python was just starting off, so was Germaine Greer with The Female Eunuch, and Hair was premiering in Sydney.
Just like today, Australia was involved in an unpopular, drawn-out war at America's behest. But compared with Iraq, Vietnam could not have occupied a more different place in the public consciousness.
Vietnam was a momentous issue. Anti-war moratoriums attracted up to 200,000 people, the largest demonstrations in Australia's history.
Perhaps the Australians of four decades ago felt more politically engaged.
There was another difference; unlike Iraq, Australia suffered many combat deaths in Vietnam - 520. And soldiers came home not as the returning heroes of today, but as "baby-killers".
They were spat on and had rotten vegetables thrown at them, as the public vented most of its anger at the Diggers doing the dirty work rather than the politicians who sent them to do it.
Nowadays national security has become an electoral plus for Governments as voters spooked by terrorism stick with the supposed safety of incumbents.
That may not be enough to save John Howard this time, the polls suggest, but there is no doubt this has been a golden age for incumbents.
That helps to explain Howard's political longevity - second only to Sir Robert Menzies at the top of the heap in Canberra - as well as Labor's astonishing track record at state and territory level.
Morris Iemma's triumph in NSW last March - if it can be called a triumph when both sides of politics were on the nose with voters - was Labor's 21st successive win in state and territory elections.
Apart from the federal coalition, the conservative parties have not won anywhere for nine years, since Kate Carnell held on in the ACT in 1998.
They have not won a state election for 10 years, since Dean Brown struggled to form a minority government in South Australia in 1997.
They have not won a state election outright for 11 years, since the heyday of Jeff Kennett in Victoria and Richard Court in Western Australia.
They have not won outright in NSW since the bicentenary year in 1988, when Nick Greiner defeated Barrie Unsworth in a landslide, only to have to settle for minority government three years later when Bob Carr made his first impact.
Liberals around the nation have consistently failed to unseat state Labor Governments, despite a string of scandals and some clear cases of ineptitude.
NSW was the perfect example.
Iemma was returned with the paltry loss of a couple of seats.
Yet his Government had been running one of the most sluggish economies in the country, it had failed to deliver on essential services like health, education and transport, and had been plagued by scandals, of which child sex charges against a former minister was merely the most serious of many.
It was a negative campaign, too; voters might not like them, but they seem to work, and Rudd is expecting another from a Government desperately trying to hang on.
Australians, with their traditional love for checks and balances, might be reluctant to commit to Labor wall-to-wall when they vote on November 24.
But a one-party nation is on the cards, for the first time ever.
