If you don’t live in NSW it’s hard to know where to start this story. But better to be explaining it in a comment piece than in a private conversation with your wife, Belinda Neal, as to how you came to wreck your political career and possibly your marriage by having a six-month affair with a 26-year-old woman.
That’s the situation which ALP factional giant, would-be NSW Premier and married father of two John Della Bosca finds himself in today - quitting as minister last night after admitting that he had started a relationship with a woman more than 20 years his junior.
Della Bosca’s spectacular fall confirms the standing of the NSW Labor Government as a cross between the last days of Rome, and Melrose Place for political hacks.
In the past year - aside from a string of orthodox high-level sackings, resignations and dismissals, including the former premier Morris Iemma, deputy premier John Watkins and treasurer Michael Costa - there’s been a rash of aberrant departures which have plunged this government into varying degrees of moral turpitude.
The former Aboriginal Affairs Minister Milton Orkopulous is in jail for procuring young men for sex and plying them with heroin in his parliamentary office.
Less than a week after Nathan Rees‘ elevation as Premier, Police Minister Matt Brown was forced aside after it emerged he’d got drunk at a party, stripped down to his green jocks, and mounted the chest of fellow Illawarra MP Noreen Hay while saying to her staffer daughter: “Look, I’m titty-f***ing your mum.”
The picture which has emerged of Della Bosca is neither criminal nor bizarre. It simply reads like textbook mid-life crisis stuff, with the 26-year-old object of his affections providing a statement to The Daily Telegraph saying he was missing meetings to be with her, telling the parliamentary guards to wave her through security, bragging to a colleague about his conquest, and confiding in her that he regarded Premier Rees as “a freckle-faced Latham”.
The woman - who is privately employed and believed to be a student - also said Della Bosca told her repeatedly that he loved her.
“I don’t know how he managed to do his job when he spent so much time with me,” she said.
Della Bosca conceded that he’d been a fool in his resignation statement last night.
“I regret some personal decisions I made and I am deeply sorry for the hurt I have caused my family,” he said.
The scandal makes for a shocking end to a controversy-laden 12 months for Della Bosca.
The man who served as NSW Labor secretary from 1990 to 1999 - a phenomenally smart tactician who helped secure improbable ALP wins in 1990 and 1993, and who was instrumental in Keating rolling Hawke - has latterly become more a figure of political comedy in a government that is well beyond a joke.
He lost his drivers licence last year after clocking up not one but seven speeding fines and, when he told a reporter to “Get a real job, you f…ing c..t” after being photographed riding his bicycle, he was chastised for setting a poor example as Education Minister by using foul language.
The bigger scandal came when he and Belinda “don’t you know who I am” Neal were revealed to have had an ugly dispute with young wait staff over the service at the Iguanas Restaurant on the NSW Central Coast, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd ordering Ms Neal to attend anger management classes.
Despite these setbacks Della Bosca was one of the strongest candidates to replace NSW Premier Nathan Rees, whose disapproval rating topped 50 per cent last month. He was certainly one of the biggest agitators for Rees’ removal. Now that he’s gone, Rees has found some rare breathing space. Perversely, so has the Right’s factional warlord, Della’s sworn enemy Joe Tripodi, probably the most disliked man in NSW politics and himself the subject of a sex scandal a decade ago when he put the moves on an Australian Democrat at a drunken parliamentary party.
If Nathan Rees is today feeling a bit more secure in himself, he should be reminded that most voters simply couldn’t give a rat’s anymore, and nor should they, as all the Della departure will do is bolster the dominant view that the biggest state in the federation is run by a bunch of world-class drongos.
Two different comic takes from Twitter last night provide competing analyses, both of them shocking for Labor.
Wil Anderson: “John Della Bosca does to his staffer what ALP have been doing to NSW.”
Julian Morrow: “Personally I’d prefer a competent premier who’s f***ing around than a f***ing incompetent premier.”
The joys of fixed four-year terms mean NSW has another 20 months of this garbage to put up with. NSW voters will go to the federal poll next year, well before the state poll in May 2011. Expect Kevin Rudd to take out an AVO against the NSW Government when campaigning in Sydney.
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