“Dear friends,” the invitation email to the Greens campaign launch from Richard Di Natale began. “I don’t know about you, but 12 days out and I am a mixture of excited, exhausted and so, so proud.”

So, so exhausted might have been more accurate. It gave the date as, um, last Sunday when in fact it’s next weekend.

The launch being held at TwoTonMax “a sensitively transformed, beautifully detailed industrial warehouse located in North Melbourne,” according to the venue’s website.

“Hidden behind an anonymous street front, it is a blank canvas you can quickly and easily transform,” the blurb continues.

In other words the venue is rather like the Greens themselves, who have evolved as a flag of convenience for a disparate range of hard-left groupings who otherwise would have buckley’s of reaching parliament to sail under.

However, in choosing TwoTonMax for their big day that “so, so exhausted” is showing again.

The Greens are staging their launch in the middle of territory they already hold, not territory they want to win.

There must be dozens of halls and clubrooms belonging all sorts of different ethnic organisations or other community groups within less than 30 minutes brisk pedalling of North Melbourne in their target seats of Batman and Wills. Why on earth didn’t the Greens chose one of them – one in Batman in particular?

Labor’s David Feeney is now getting Liberal preferences, but a Morgan poll released on Monday puts his primary vote at just 34.5 per cent compared to the Greens on 40 and the Liberals down on just 17, with 8.5 per cent going elsewhere. If there’s even just more than a little leakage from the Liberal ticket the seat could change hands.

It’s not as if there are no venues that cater to Greens voters in the electorate. Virtually all of High Street in Thornbury and Northcote is devoted to them.

Surely they weren’t too tired to scout one out for their launch?