Does labor have another recovery left, this time? What is its current base and the condition of that?
That'd be my worry.
O'Farrell is just the Labor Right overtised and now the paradigm rules, whover gets in.

paul,
the NSW Labor government is dead in the water. They are political poison. The unions will become the de facto opposition. It is not even thee case that seats in usually safe Labor territory will become contested. It's worse than that.

It is expected that most of the seats in Labor's western Sydney heartland---the band of 11 seats stretching along the Great Western Highway corridor from Auburn to the Blue Mountains--- are going to fall to the Liberals. Labor looks like retaining only a minority of them.

Paul,
Re: What is its current base?

This is the IPA 's view of Labor's base. Julie Novak says:

In general terms the policy stance of the new Labor intellectual cohort includes the reinforcement of state control over economic activity, albeit dressed in the garb of market jargon (for example, a 'carbon price'), and a social agenda of cultural and social reprogramming of public attitudes through legislation, NGO funding or standardised school curricula.

This policy agenda of ALP's intellectual classes, which arguably has more in common with Bob Brown than Joe De Bruyn, is likely to come at the continuing cost of Labor losing political support from the mainstream working and aspirational classes of Australian society. This is because workers and aspirationals alike prefer economic growth to stagnation, loathe policies that hurt the hip pocket, and resent political correctness and its enforcement through government law or funding.

Novaks says, to put it simply, phenomena such as 'Howard's Battlers' or 'Abbott's Army,' could represent a more permanent addition to the Coalition voting pool at both federal and state levels at the increasing expense of Labor the longer the noveau intellectuals hold sway within the ALP.

Have fun.

Well, what do you expect from the IPA. Let's look at some of Novak's language, dressed in the language of conciliation and objectivity, and see what it really says.
For example, "the reinforcement of government control (like Stalin?) over economic activity" might have been better put as the "return to basic principles of law, from a Hobbesian anarchy that encourages looting and wastage, toward greater efficiency in solving the problem of human need". as for the second para, I'd translate that as meaning, "if politicians try to break the masses out of consumer fetishism, they'll howl and throw tantrums at the loss of their toys".
The false dichotomy of "stagnation" as the only alternative to "growth" (for whom?)is presented without regard to costly disasters represented at Sendei, where the ill thought out nukes displacement (cost cutting) must have added tens of billions to the cost from the quake itself, and the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico last year, let alone issues like our underlying addiction to fossil fuels and a fossil fuels, consumerist economy and society.
And "humanity" is regarded as "political correctness", when people question the current terms under which the world operates.
Yes, the mortgage belters will continue to cavill. They've been encouraged in victim hood/entitlement by the media, press, shock jocks and the right wing politicians, to this kind of thinking, rather like Americans.
But it does not change the fact that there may be many flaws in the world at the moment, including attention to sustainability and better investment in actual technology, rather than paper shuffling and gambling on derivatives for a quick fix. Some things won't go away just because I've bought a new plassie, in order to finally get the wife back in bed with me next Saturday night, when I lurch home drunk from the pub.

The Shooters and Fishers Party may well hold the balance of power with the Christian Democrats in the Legislative Council.

Hey paul... you had me for most of your comment, but you lost me right at the end... that "plassie" thing.

You're talking about a big screen TV, right? Please, oh PLEASE don't tell me the aspirationals are actually using that word.

Not that it makes your observation any weaker..well said, good work.

Mars 08, it is true that "plassies" is blue collar patois for large screen idiot boxes.
What "aspirationals" would call them, can't begin to imagine.
"Second generation indeterminate content delivery platform"?
Am not "aspirational" and if the writer ever starts to resume even a vague resemblence to these, eh, individuals, some one please take a shotgun to me, lest I become abusive and say things to people that I might later regret.