It's as good a date as any.

The Liberals' Assembly team, still smarting from an election loss at the hands of a Jon Stanhope government they believed was very beatable, were invited to morning tea by the ACT Greens, the surprise package of the previous year's poll.

To hear the Greens tell it, they were interested in establishing a dialogue with the opposition, figuring the two outfits could work together on legislation that Labor government wouldn't support.

After all, there was nothing in the Parliamentary Agreement the Greens had struck with Stanhope's people to allow the Chief Minister to form minority government that said they couldn't work with the opposition if common ground could be found.

Seselja had offered the Greens a ministry the previous October if they would support his bid for power, so there was no reason to suppose ideology might get in the way of a mutually beneficial relationship.

The morning was cordial, by all accounts, everything went swimmingly and the Greens waited for a return invitation. Apparently that's the protocol. They're still waiting.

Since the high-water mark in Greens-Liberals relations, things have turned nasty between the two parties; there was the time Jeremy Hanson told Meredith Hunter her priorities were ''up her arse,'' in the middle of the Assembly chamber.

She hasn't forgotten or forgiven.

The failed attempts to get Shane Rattenbury sacked from his job as Speaker, trying to have his conduct investigated by the Ombudsman, the attacks in the media, the confrontations in the corridors.

And that's all before we get into policy, where the two parties are worlds apart.

Much further apart, in fact, than they were in October 2008 when the Greens, convinced they could do business with the Liberals, came closer than is commonly supposed to splitting over which major party to support.

W here were Katy Gallagher and Andrew Barr in all of this?

Sitting on the government benches, shaking their heads at the wonder of it all, mostly.

But, behind the scenes they were building bridges with the cross-benchers, establishing relationships, having coffee, talking up the things the parties had in common while making the occasional public show of disunity.

Labor's approach was that majority government is a rare and precious thing in this town and control of the crossbench, or at least a working relationship with it, was all that stood between successive chief ministers and political oblivion.

Even Kate Carnell in her pomp, the territory's most successful Liberal politician, had to rely on a couple of independents to prop up her government.

The contrasting approach from Liberal and Labor to the crossbench in the last Assembly has led directly to Katy Gallagher being favoured by the bookies and pollsters to win today, by forming government with the help of the Greens.

It seems fanciful that the Greens would break bread with Zed Seselja's men after all that water under the bridge, even if the Liberals emerged from today's poll as the biggest grouping in the Assembly.

The thinking behind the Liberals' change in attitude to the Greens has never been explained but it has brought Seselja from even money to a long shot in just four years.

The war on the Greens leaves Seselja in a position where he needs eight seats, and control of a ninth, to form government.

For that, he needs a swing against the sitting Labor and Greens MLAs of more than 16 per cent.

A landslide.

Opinion polls can be defied, upsets can be staged and this might not be over until late next week, or even later.

But Seselja's problems don't begin or end with the Greens.

K aty Gallagher looms as a massive obstacle for the Liberals' bid for power even though the past 18 months as Chief Minister and Health Minister have been far from plain sailing. The data doctoring scandal at the Canberra Hospital was horrible for her, manna from heaven for Seselja and his health spokesman, Jeremy Hanson, who threw everything into an effort to directly link Gallagher to the alteration of emergency department records to make waiting times look better.

Though she was officially cleared of any involvement, the drip-feed release of the full picture - the hospital executive who admitted to most of the tampering was a good friend of the Chief Minister's sister, who also worked at the hospital - made things look much worse for Gallagher.

Then there is the almost daily attrition of horror stories emerging from the department, mostly around waiting times, and the health system more broadly.

Being health minister bleeds a politician slowly, particularly when they have to cope with the access problems that afflict the ACT's system, where it can be tough to get in to see your GP, much less be admitted to hospital.

But the electoral damage seems to have been minimal with this week's Canberra Times Patterson poll putting Gallagher at 54 per cent in the preferred Chief Minister stakes to Seselja's 26 per cent.

The numbers are even more stark among women, with female voters preferring Gallagher by an even greater margin, with 58 per cent of them preferring her in the Legislative Assembly's top job, compared to Seselja's 23 per cent.

The figures evoke memories of scenes in the Assembly over the past four years of five angry Liberals men shouting across the chamber at one woman, Gallagher, as she struggles to be heard above the din. Such parliamentary tactics may need to be re-examined.

T he Opposition Leader managed 40 per cent as preferred Chief Minister in the corresponding Patterson poll ahead of the 2008 election, a collapse in popularity which may prompt questions in the Liberals camp about what has become of his voter appeal in the past four years.

A sudden change of tack in the opposition's advertising message during this campaign tells us the Liberals strategists know what a serious problem they have with Gallagher's popularity.

Years of effort to portray her as out of her depth have given way to a TV ad featuring a female voter saying: ''I like Katy Gallagher but …''

Another problem is that since Gallagher's ascent to the top job in May last year, Seselja's Liberals have proven just as controversy-prone as the 11-year old government.

In July 2011 $10,000 the party had claimed from a fund for the poor had to be repaid. Then, early this year, there was the debacle of Seselja's management of his office and the failure to account for the activities of his taxpayer funded staff.

The issue robbed the opposition of momentum at the beginning of an election year, just after they had enjoyed a solid win in forcing Gallagher and her Treasurer, Andrew Barr, to dump, more or less, plans for a massive multi-million dollar government office building in Civic.

And the Liberals haven't exactly had a smooth run on the campaign trail either.

Mixed messages over the role of federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in ACT electioneering, for example, gave Labor ammunition at a particularly delicate time.

But Seselja caught a significant break when Andrew Barr introduced his tax-reform agenda without the sales blitz that usually accompanies such significant, far-reaching changes.

If Seselja defies the polls and the bookies and comes out on top today, Barr will be at the centre of a storm of Labor recriminations.

The ''Labor will triple your rates'' campaign caught the government off guard and had Labor rattled for while, even amid accusations that the Liberals had over-egged the pudding.

When the economist who designed the key piece of economic modelling that underpins the Liberals' claim, and that had been letterboxed into tens of thousands of Canberra homes, declared in the pages of this newspaper on Monday that his work was being misrepresented by the opposition, it was a big moment in the campaign.

But of the problems Zed Seselja faces at the ballot box today, Katy Gallagher is the only one he hasn't created for himself.

And while the polls are predicting a Labor win, and four more years of a Labor-Greens minority government, the Opposition Leader says he is still in the game, and that undecided voters will decide it. That's politics.