You might think NSW Premier Kristina Keneally and Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell have a lot on their plates - like trying to come up with ways to get NSW out of the infrastructure black hole we’ve fallen into. After all, this week was Budget week in NSW.
But our two political leaders have developed a new hobby - taking pointless potshots at each other on Twitter. Is it dignified? No. Entertaining? Not really.
O’Farrell, whose Tweets you can see here, has taken to referring to his counterpart as KKK (geddit!). And Keneally, whose Tweets you can see here, uses it to flog dead political horses, like her assertion completing the Kokoda Track is no biggie.
In case you missed the Kokoda story, O’Farrell recently cited the fact he’d walked Kokoda when he was asked on radio if he had strength.
He said: “I don’t reckon I would have personally survived my Kokoda trek if I didn’t have something inside me that kept me going.”
Keneally, not once, but twice retorted with: “Well, so did Miss Australia - so congratulations, Barry.” The culturally inept dig was in reference to the fact Miss World Australia 2007 Caroline Pemberton trecked Kokoda last year.
Needless to say, the Premier caused a bit of a stink, and for a second looked terribly American (an appearance that was not helped by her Tweet last night that NSW had secured the “NFL” grandfinal - a iPhone typo apparently, but bad timing nonetheless).
Anyway, you would have thought Keneally would want the Kokoda thing to disappear but yesterday morning she was at it again.
Knowing when to let go can be a handy skill in politics. Looking back through the Premier’s Tweet stream from recent days, it’s apparent she spends a huge amount of time on Twitter, such is the profligacy of her posts.
Between last Monday morning and 2.30 yesterday afternoon the Premier tweeted a staggering 131 times. Seriously, when does she have time to run the state?
O’Farrell, by comparison, has posted a more modest 31 times in the same period.
After being chipped by fellow users he’s dropped one of the K’s from his KKK Keneally reference.
The whole thing feels very high school, and as a resident of NSW, it’s very irritating.
For my sins recently I volunteered to sit through a debate between the Premier and the Opposition leader. It’s an hour of my life I could have spent rearranging my sock drawer, which would have been a more fulfilling experience.
NSW needs serious people, with serious solutions. Not Twitter snipers with enough time on their hands to take pot shots at each other on a micro-blogging site.
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@VanillathunderV fair comeback. But seriously, if that was a try then I'll book my skiing in Queensland this year
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