I’ve been dudded. This is what happens when you elect, then re-elect, a Greens MP. When your electorate goes from being a political laboratory to barely contested territory in less than a decade. You go from having the most magnificent menagerie of candidates to a dull, short list. That’s what I face in federal Melbourne.

There’s Adam Bandt, of course, and a token Labor nominee whose posters can only be detected in the windows of the upper floors of the few trade union offices that remain scattered around Carlton (and that’s if you look very carefully), along with a Liberal who appears to be strongly backed by Chinese real estate agents.

But we’ve only got three others; from the Sex Party, the Animal Justice Party and Drug Law Reform. Yawn. Melbourne is now seen as a safe seat for the Greens, one that won’t attract much media coverage. It’s not worth running there.

The really interesting candidates are going where Labor and the Greens are still locked in Reichenbach Falls-style conflict. And you don’t get a more desperate struggle than in Anthony Albanese’s inner-Sydney seat of Grayndler.

It boasts 11 candidates, ranging from a Fred Nile Group member through to a former editor of Australian Playboy, including the best-named contender in the country bar none; the Science Party’s Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow.

And its probably also got the candidate with the most fascinating manifesto – and I’m not referring to Green Jim Casey’s neo-Trotskyite “things must get worse before they can get better” YouTube effort.

No, it’s the Socialist Equality Party’s Oscar Grenfell, who told the local News Corporation suburban rag his campaign “will focus on exposing the right-wing, pro-capitalist politics of the Greens who ‘promote the lie that Labor and the Greens are a lesser evil than the Liberals’.”

I’m green with envy.