Have you seen Nathan Rees? He’s been the Premier of NSW for – oh, almost a year now – and he’s vanished. Upped stumps and gone on a week-long holiday to an undisclosed location. Not even his colleagues know where he is.
Some of them are trying to organise a spill. Others are denying that a spill will take place. The only clear thing is that NSW has officially slipped into a state of happy anarchism, where incompetent government has made way for no government at all.
Radio 2GB is currently giving callers the chance to win a romantic dinner for two at Le Sands Pavilion, down at Brighton Le Sands on Botany Bay, if they can call in with a confirmed sighting of the Premier.
I just had a chat to 2GB’s Chris Smith and several listeners rang in. Two said they had seen the Premier at DBs, a coffee shop in Double Bay, while a labourer who had just knocked off work claimed to have had a chat over a middie with him in the front bar of a Rose Bay hotel.
One caller from Mr Rees’ electorate in western Sydney said he’d seen Mr Rees’ car outside his Toongabbie office, and believed he was there at work.
But a Labor backbencher told The Punch that Rees was believed to be in western NSW, but no-one knew where.
Asked whether a spill was on, the MP said he didn’t think so. Asked who, in the event of a spill, would win the leadership, the MP said:
“You’d have to be f…ing mad to want it.”
The theories on who may or may not want it are growing by the day.
The latest is Kristine Kenneally, a very capable American-born woman whose accent is being held against her as a potential negative in assuming the leadership.
Ms Kenneally is the latest left-field inclusion to a shortlist of perennial alternative candidates.
NSW Deputy Premier Carmel Tebbutt is the most popular choice but has ruled out running. We asked her husband about it on Punch TV last week, federal Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese, and he rightly said she could speak for herself, but that Nathan Rees was doing a good job.
Belinda Neal gave a much different answer last week with Helen McCabe on Playing Politics, where she said her husband, John Della Bosca, would make a very good Premier and could at some stage move from the Upper House to the Lower House.
Della further fuelled the fire when he said this week that it would be constitutionally possible to serve as Premier from the Upper House.
So in short – NSW is an ungoverned mess. Nobody knows where the Premier is, if the spill is off or on, and if so, who is or isn’t running.
But it’s about 25 degrees and the people are happy without a functioning government – sort of like Italy on the Pacific. So if you’ve seen the Premier and feel like a romantic dinner, give 2GB a call.
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