Some time last week, two things happened.

In Australia, a deal was done putting a price on the carbon tax, a policy proposed, initiated and pushed through by the Greens — and in the UK, Rupert Murdoch realised that he would have to personally visit the family of Milly Dowler, the murdered 13-year-old, whose mobile phone was hacked by News of the World reporters in 2002.

It was revelations of the Dowler hacking that brought down any possible defence News International (News Corp’s UK subsidiary) had a mind to try and run — when hacking the phone, the hacks had erased two messages on Dowler’s voicemail, giving the family hope that she was alive, when she had already been killed by a predator.

From there, in short order, everything collapsed. The rogue journo defence had gone long ago, now an attempt was made at a “rogue paper” gambit shutting down the News of the World entirely. But since the paper had been a feeder of talent to the larger News organisation, that failed too, and the whole cancer had to be cut out, with Rebekah Brooks resigning, and then Les Hinton — the ultimate survivor, the Molotov of Murdochland — taking a bullet to try and seal the US organisation off from the taint of the scandal.

Murdoch, meanwhile, had visited the Dowler family personally to pay obeisance, which must have been a pretty awful spectacle. The Dowler family’s lawyer piped up to say that Murdoch had appeared pretty sincere throughout — a measure of how strange this incident has become.

For the purpose of Murdoch’s visit at this point was to demonstrate not merely that the organisation was contrite, but simply that it was human — that it, and Murdoch, understood that there were things that mattered other than the global accumulation of power.

That Murdoch himself felt it necessary to make this journey to the Dowlers’ door speaks volumes about the manner in which the scandal has damaged the Murdoch global brand, and the reputation of other parts of the organisation.

Journos and editors in Australia may bitch and moan that they’re a separate part of the organisation, but they live off its power, and the bullying and vindictive culture of Murdoch’s Australian papers is cut from the same web offset.

Murdoch attracts those who enjoy the notion of being part of a special elite, and who get a little giddy with the nihilistic thrill of it all. It isn’t coincidental that this is a group whose journalists try and assault others at awards nights, slap politicians in the face, and can’t even be trusted to play by the rules in an intra-media cricket league.

So it was instructive to see the group’s fortunes falling, as the Greens were rising. Last Saturday’s Australian seemed to mark some sort of cross-over point — the usual brace of anti-Greens pieces had the feel of a nervous spasm, an automatic response by a group whose heart was no longer in it.

For months, if not years, News has been trying to paint the Greens not merely as “extreme”, but as out of the mainstream of normal society at all — a suggestion Julia Gillard was happy to echo in the inaugural Gough Whitlam Oration, another pathetic, cowardly step along the way to comprehensive political failure.

The high-tide of this style may have been Gary Johns’s piece the Saturday before, in which he dubbed the Greens as “anti-human” for their advocacy of same-s-x marriage. Johns, originally from the NSW Right, and now spruiking a combination of Catholic familialism and neo-liberal economics last seen in Chile in 1973, channelled the most hysterical version of the argument — in the West, the family was being ripped apart, and same-s-x marriage would be the killing blow.

The argument touches reality at no point — and is largely a proxy for feminism, which Johns is unwilling to attack head-on — and its endless repetition in various forms over the years has failed to stop the phenomenal rise of the Greens, who have seen a 1300% increase in their vote since 1996.

More importantly there is no chance that it will. By now, the Green Transfer has taken place — a group of people that for a decade saw their vote as wavering between the ALP and the Greens, have now decisively committed to the latter. The Greens is now the home of their vote, and the nonsense about “extremism” and “anti-humanism” attached to what is really a European-style social democratic party simply washes off.

Johns and others were responding to a provocation by Bob Brown in which he suggested that, in the coming decades, the Greens may replace the ALP as the major party of the Left. Brown expressed this fairly cautiously, but it was still greeted with the usual howls of disbelief, as if nothing ever changes in politics, and if it does, never changes suddenly, dramatically, and at every level.

Two weeks later, with the ALP primary vote at 26% and the Greens about 12%-14%, Brown’s suggestion may still be of a longer-term prospect, but numerically the Greens and the ALP look a lot closer together than they were ten, five or even two years ago.

News Limited’s relentless attacks wouldn’t stop the march of the Greens to power, but the nature of their class base provides an upper limit.

Overwhelmingly the Greens are the party of knowledge/cultural producers, and the party’s politics express that class’s core process and defining activity — that life can be governed and improved by the continuous application of the intellect to social problems, and by the successive rethinking and transformation of existing processes and values.

Indeed, it’s ironic indeed that Gillard chose the Whitlam oration to denounce the Greens, for that spirit is exactly what Whitlam spearheaded in the ALP — and the absence of which has doomed the ALP to be a laggard party for 15 years, and for the past two, an intellectual junior partner to the Greens.

The knowledge/culture producer class is unlikely to expand sufficiently in Australia to give the Greens a base that would challenge Labor (the success of the Greens in Germany is due to the fact that about 30% of the population could not be identified as in that class). But that may not be the only way to power. Should environmental pressures continue and grow, as they surely will, in severity and visibility, then the inability of the two major parties to provide answers to new generations of voters, and the continued existence of the Greens as a party with clear beliefs and a program, may create a sudden and abrupt switching effect — triggered I would imagine by some defining global event, the sort of thing to make Fukushima look like a Japanese tea ceremony.

Along the way, the Greens would achieve double quotas in half-Senate elections — something that seems inevitable, and would make them the most significant third force in the history of the Senate, effectively changing the nature of Australian governance — before they hit the difficult tipping point set by the preferential system of the House. Given the manner in which political movements grow by sudden bursts and shifts, this is a far more plausible scenario than the tired hacks of either Labor left or the Right imagine.

Previously, in writing about the Greens and the Right’s deranged attacks on them, I’ve wondered when a sensible analysis might occur from across the way. Andrew McIntyre claims to deliver one in his new edited collection, The Greens: Policies, Reality and Consequences, from Connor Court Publishing. We shall see. But it would be sensible for the Right to apply some of the rationalism it erroneously prides itself on, because the demonisation has been spectacularly unsuccessful. The Greens run the table, setting the agenda of Australian politics — which may now include a media inquiry — and leaving the Right to play a desperate and reactive catch-up game.

Unsuccessful, and, in the case of News Limited, now darkly ironic. Because it is clear that the anti-human force among is not the Greens, but Murdoch, and his scions, minions and epigones, who have created such an abyss of an organisation that its operatives cannot understand the difference between an A-list starlet, and a murdered teenage girl and why one might be fair game and the other not — leaving their boss, to remove his shoes at their gate, and, like a Walsingham penitent, walk the last mile barefoot, to convince a grieving family that yes, he too does understand, that parents love their children, and what it is to be human.