It will be one of the greatest carve-ups the country has ever seen – an election which is nothing other than a plebiscite on the uselessness of a government which even its own members find embarrassing. The polls don’t suggest NSW Labor is in trouble. They suggest NSW is in so much trouble that it might lose seats which don’t even exist yet.
The galvanising effect of this seething dislike for NSW Labor is that third parties such as the Greens will be an irrelevance in the result. There will be no hung parliament after March 26. Even if people still don’t know much about Barry O’Farrell or his policies, they will vote in their droves for the Libs. This election is purely about knocking off the ALP.
There are just two seats where the Greens are expected to trouble Labor or triumph over Labor. They’re Marrickville, held by deputy premier and health minister Carmel Tebbutt, and Balmain, held by education minister Verity Firth.
Firth, you will recall, is married to political chief of staff Matthew Chesher, who was busted with an ecstasy tablet back in January. That unhappy incident sealed the Last Days of Rome vibe on Macquarie St. In a chirpy bit of glass-half-full analysis, one Labor figure quipped that hopefully Firth would be saved by the fact that most people in Balmain are either drug users or drug dealers. As a former Balmain resident I had a chuckle at this. His giggly gallows humour wasn’t shared elsewhere in the party; many are writing off the seat of Balmain, and are also worried about holding Marrickville.
The fact that the Greens will not wield any policy influence over the O’Farrell Government does not mean they should be ignored. At a time when our PM has been forced to reverse her position on a carbon tax and is under pressure to do the same over gay marriage, as a result of federal Labor’s alliance with the Greens in minority government, the policies and personnel of this powerful third force deserves more attention than ever.
It’s also relevant from the perspective of voter complacency. There would be a lot of voters in Marrickville and Balmain who are voting for the Greens because they know the candidates and like their policies. Good luck to them. But there are also a lot of habitual ALP voters who are fed up with this government, but baulk at backing the Libs, so will opt instead for the Greens.
This second category of voter should examine the record of both the Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne, running against Tebbutt, and Leichhardt Mayor Jamie Parker, running against Firth, as both these candidates suggest that Bob Brown’s lot have a bit of a problem with what could be loosely called quality control in terms of pre-selections.
Fiona Byrne is one of the more unpleasant personages kicking around in NSW politics. She’s been busy advocating a polite modern rendering of Kristallnacht in the inner west, campaigning for a ban on all Israeli products in the Marrickville Council area. As Labor MP Michael Danby told the Jewish online news service J-Wire last week: “What is next for the Marrickville Council? Are they now going to paint the Star of David on shops selling Israeli products?”
Byrne has also made a fool of herself by suggesting a similar ban on all Chinese products – because, you know, what good could ever come from this resource-rich nation trading with the Chinese? - and then laughably denying that she had made such a suggestion. She did. It was during a candidates’ forum last month, her quote was “If the local Tibetan community came to us and asked us to look at boycotting China, I’m sure council would do that.” Despite being lumbered with a verbatim transcript of her remark, Byrne has claimed to be a victim of a Labor Party and media conspiracy. Maybe those pesky Jews were involved in that too.
The more galling aspect of Byrne’s crusade - especially for the ratepayers of Marrickville, a council area not without its potholes - is that 25 council staff have been working on the Israeli boycott and have so far spent 86 hours nutting out a strategy to keep products such as Jaffa oranges out of the inner west. The oranges have blood on their hands.
Head over to the northern side of Parramatta Road and you’ll find Jamie Parker, the Mayor of Leichhardt, a council that’s been a byword for low-level political dysfunction since the awesome documentary Rats in the Ranks. That film chronicled the heady and hilarious reign of Larry Hand, who had a certain charm to him, permanently perched outside Bar Italia with his B&H special filters, dividing and conquering fellow councillors to extend his term.
Parker on the other hand is the epitome of the whiny inner-city NIMBY, a master of cloaking middle class self-interest in the language of the little people’s campaign. He’s led the charge on everything from the occasional arrival of cruise ships at Ballast Point (how dare those bogans use the Darling St shops!) to the modest redevelopment of Callan Park (which is not a park anyway, but a hospital site occupied by Radio National listeners).
All this makes Parker a good local politician but he’s had a more chequered past as a businessman. His marketing company Cat Media the subject of 41 upheld complaints by the Therapeutic Goods Association over its spruiking for snake-oil products including Horny Goat Weed and the Fat Blaster. Targetting obese women and blokes who can’t get it up seems an odd line of work, given the Greens’ long-standing claim to being consumer rights purists in this unscrupulous capitalist world.
The federal Greens under the guiding hand of the newly-respectable Bob Brown don’t seem to be devoting masses of time and energy to the NSW campaign. Their attempt to remain arms-length is undermined by the fact the party’s federal community relations officer Max Phillips is himself a Marrickville councillor, and doing his bit for community relations by keeping Jewish fruit out of Illawarra Rd.
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