Nsw Government

You get the feeling not much happens on a Saturday morning in Merriwa. The sleepy country town in the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales just hums along quietly. Except for its proud and tidy RSL, where the front bar opens at 10am, horse races flash across the television screens and tickets pump out of the Club Keno machine.

In a stuffy back hall, on neat rows of red vinyl chairs sit the Merriwa Healthy Environment Group; a group of local farmers and landowners who came together in February to unite against the coal seam gas companies as they rode into town.  Seven months later, they feel under attack. 

Their enemy? PEL 456, PEL 468, PEL 4 and PEL 433; coal seam gas exploration licences for Merriwa and its surrounding areas of cattle, sheep and cereal farming land, up for sale to the highest bidder.

Continue reading "Community is the real cost of coal seam gas" »

If you were to choose one place which symbolised the challenges facing the city of Sydney, it would be hard to go past the permanent disaster area that is the Kingsford Smith Airport.

With a continuing argument about whether the damn thing should even be there at all, Sydney Airport, like the city itself, is a disorganised work in progress, the subject of upgrades which no sooner finish than another one begins. It’s a stressful place. It’s expensive. It consistently ranks last in surveys of national airports, principally because it has been designed and redesigned without its human users in mind.

It is six months since NSW Labor was deservedly pummelled at the ballot box ushering in what was billed as a new era of accountability and renewal under the Coalition Government of Premier Barry O’Farrell. The one thing which has changed is an end to the constant procession of low-rent ministerial scandals which made the tail end of Labor’s rule seem like the last days of Rome. But in terms of the more pressing policy challenge of getting some life and direction into the place, it has been a bleakly disappointing start.

Continue reading "In NSW politics winning is more important than policy" »

Are we a nation of Akubra-wearing graziers? Of rough and ready carnival operators? Sponge cake bakers called Joan? Or a collection of young mothers pushing strollers festooned with Show bags ?

The truth is we are all these people and more. For the tens of thousands of people who arrive into Australia and settle in Sydney each year, the Sydney Royal Easter Show may be their first experience of the real Australia.

The Show is so big and diverse it is almost impossible to describe. But once you have experienced the Show, you know what it means - it gets under your skin.

Continue reading "Hooves, horns and helium - the Show must go on" »

The Russell Lea Infants School class of 2010 graduated yesterday and among my daughter’s collection of journals, exercise books and achievement certificates is an unusual piece of political memorabilia.

All the kids at this terrific K2 (kindergarten to grade two) public school have spent the past three years doing the Premiers Reading Challenge, introduced by Bob Carr as a literacy measure a few years ago. It’s a great program in that it introduces a sense of personal competition where the kids read as many books as they can from a set list, and receive a certificate at the end of the year.

The certificates for the past three years show how the NSW Labor Party has reduced the premiership to the status of cheap baseball swap cards, and my daughter has collected the whole set. In 2008 she got a certificate from Morris Iemma, in 2009 she got one from Nathan Rees, and this year she got one from Kristina Keneally, prompting her to ask the very sensible question a few months ago as to whether there was a different premier in NSW every year. The answer to which is obviously yes.

Continue reading "The election campaign framed around utter pity" »

News this morning that NSW Premier Kristina Keneally will add points NSW residents’ licenses, apparently in a bid to give drivers “a fair go.”

One can’t help but think it’s an attempt to give Kristina Keneally’s Government a fair go, although she may need to do more than add one point to everyone’s license. More exciting bribes will be necessary to save the NSW Government, and perhaps the Victorian Government who faces re-election this weekend can get in a few last minute sweeteners in as well.

Here’s a few suggestions:

- F3 Housing development: The Government will build a new 20,000 home development along the side of the F3 freeway, the home of the nine hour traffic jam. This will allow people to sleep where they now spend most of their time, and allow long standing F3 relationships to blossom into what are becoming known as “F3 families.”

Continue reading "What would make you vote for state Labor?" »

There is little doubt the people of NSW want change at the March State Election.

But recent polls and by-election results reveals that voters know that, to achieve real change, needs a decisive change of government. Only a strong government, with a decisive majority, can start to turn this State around.

The Federal election result provided two lessons: that a vote for The Greens or an Independent can be a vote for Labor and that a hung Parliament leads to instability, inaction and indecision.

Continue reading "Why you should not vote for independents" »

In any dispute involving the NSW Government, the temptation is to assume that the NSW Government is 100 per cent in the wrong. It just saves time.

The stand-off between Premier Kristina Keneally and Prime Minister Julia Gillard over industrial relations reform is a bit more complicated than that.

Keneally might be out of step with other Labor Governments and the Commonwealth in refusing to accept what are modest and sensible reforms to work safety laws. But Gillard has been found wanting both in terms of her capacity for effective and sincere negotiation. She also looks like she tricked the voters by claiming during the federal election campaign that a deal had been done with the states to wind back the excesses of work safety laws, saving business millions of dollars, when it is now quite obvious that no such deal had been done.

Continue reading "IR: Gillard fails on process, Keneally on policy" »

There is a squeamish message on the Cross City Tunnel website headed “Toll adjustment - 1st October 2010” which is notable for two reasons.

The first is that it reminds us how, in these jargon-addled times, things such as tolls never go up, jump or rise. They simply “adjust”. The second is that it demonstrates how the NSW Labor Government has abrogated much of its responsibility for protecting taxpayers from cost of living increases.

The construction of the Cross City Tunnel, as you may recall, finished behind schedule – but because of the contract between its operators and the NSW Government, where the price of the toll is linked to CPI, the toll actually went up before the road even opened.

Continue reading "Sydney pays a price for dysfunctional government" »

Editor’s note: This is an extract from Rodney Cavalier’s forthcoming book Power Crisis, an explosive account of the self-destruction of the NSW Labor government, which has seen a turnover of four premiers in five years. Former NSW Education Minister Cavalier (once described by a left-wing Teachers Federation official as “the rudest, most pugnacious individual to hold office”), provides a warts and all account of the downfall of Premiers Iemma and Rees as well as the best analysis so far of how NSW Labor’s inexorable decline.

Nathan Rees began the final day of his leadership with a press conference.

He and his staff thought long and hard about what he might say. The line taken came of the instant; wrapping it in words took a while longer. Having decided against a studied silence, the contents of what Rees felt compelled to say will enjoy a long afterlife:

“I will not hand the government of New South Wales over to Obeid, Tripodi or Sartor. Should I not be premier by the end of this day, let there be no doubt in the community’s mind, no doubt, that any challenger will be a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi. That is the reality. That is the choice at stake today. The decision now lies in the hands of my Caucus colleagues.”

Continue reading "Execution: How NSW Labor knocked off a Premier" »

I can still remember the hope and optimism of the delegates to the Carr Government’s 1999 Drug Summit.

People with widely divergent views came together to find better ways to deal with drug addiction and the problems it brings. On much there was agreement, but the resolution to trial a medically supervised injecting centre was the subject of heated debate.

It was of little surprise that yesterday’s announcement by the NSW Government to end the “trial” status of the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in Kings Cross again triggered serious discussion. Our decision was not taken lightly.

Continue reading "Why the safe injecting room is here to stay" »

There are more former ministers in the NSW Government than there are ministers. Fourteen of them to be exact.

One of them is in Long Bay for plying youths with heroin and having sex with them in his parliamentary office.

The other 13 aren’t bad people. They’re just guilty of a combination of hubris, sloth, incompetence and stupidity, and stand as examples of what can happen when a government has been in power for so long that it can’t remember what it was originally there for.

Continue reading "The nobility of public life, in a sea of squalor" »

Yet another member of the NSW Government has hit the wall over dodgy behaviour. Ports Minister Paul McLeay, son of the factional hack Leo, has been sacked for whiling away time in his ministerial office looking at pornographic websites.

You can’t really blame the bloke. If you were sitting on a primary vote of 25 per cent and facing imminent electoral death, you’ve got to pass the hours somehow. His appetites didn’t stop at nudie sites, he also had a bit of a thing for online gambling. But the punter has now been punted with Premier Kristina Keneally telling the freakshow also known as the NSW Parliament just now that she had sought and received his resignation.

There’s a great text message doing the rounds in Labor circles this afternoon which reads as follows. “This behaviour is not the stand I expect of a minister,” Ms Keneally said. Why??!!

Continue reading "NSW: more to do, but pulling in the wrong direction" »

First promised in 1823, today’s announcement by Labor that a $2.1 billion Parramatta to Epping rail link will be constructed within seven years is easily the most visionary transport blueprint for western Sydney since the last one, that other one, and the other one just before that.

This model cleverly synthesises the best of the past blueprints to take the passenger experience to dizzy new heights. The seats will be made entirely out of snuggly mohair. Neil Perry will serve canapes. Female commuters will receive back rubs from members of the Chippendales, while the men will be able to watch Foxsports, Top Gear and Wild On! Cancun via an on-demand passenger entertainment system. For the kids, every fourth carriage will be decorated under Walt Disney’s Fantasia theme, with those surly old ticket inspectors replaced by cheery elves.

If you vote Labor in any of five Sydney marginal electorates next Saturday it is expected that construction on the rail link will start one hour later and be completed by the following Tuesday. All aboard the Bullshit Express.

Continue reading "Labor’s rail blueprint: All aboard the bullshit express" »

‘It is in the best interests of children to have both a mother and a father’. In a society where marriage, heterosexuality and family are so closely intertwined, such a simple, albeit clichéd, statement would seem uncontroversial.

In fact, the idea of a mother and a father in a married relationship carries such political and cultural currency that it is hard to imagine having children in circumstances that do not fit neatly under the matrimonial rubric.

So how do we then manage to contemplate a family unit that is not only unmarried, but has two mums or two dads?

Continue reading "It’s time to allow gay couples to adopt children" »

David Campbell has a lesser right to privacy than an ordinary citizen, for a number of reasons.

The first is that as a politician his entire existence is underwritten by the taxpaying public – his salary, his car, his living arrangements, his ability to travel, all of it is fully or partially funded by the public, and to an extent which massively eclipses the average wage earner. The second is that as a politician he wields enormous and direct power over the way we live our lives, even own financial status. 

The third is that as a politician he has chosen to project an image of himself in order to win votes – the happily married father of two, who has used his wife and children as a visual backdrop for his campaigns for local and state government. The fourth is that he is part of a government which has been distracted, to say the least, by a series of scandals in which poor decisions, corrupt conduct and even criminal conduct have prevented a minister or member from doing his job.

Continue reading "Why David Campbell has a lesser right to privacy" »

The current debate over teaching ethics in NSW public schools would test the patience of Job. That phrase won’t make sense to most NSW pupils, and it is for that reason we need more time, not less, for teaching Scripture in our schools.

The Bible is clearly a central text for understanding Western (and not just Western) culture. And yet Bible literacy is in a woeful state, not only among students, but also among teachers and public figures. Recently, on the fabulous ABC TV music quiz show, Spicks and Specks, it took around a dozen pure guesses before any of the six panellists—all cultured people—could identify where a biblical character came from.

I remember super-smart Jewish doctor friends who asked me where in the Bible they could find the story of Noah. And don’t get me started on the biblical illiteracy of the current rock-star atheists, who can hardly tell their Scriptural right hand from their left (that’s from Jonah ch.4 verse 11).

Continue reading "Schools ethics debate is testing the patience of Job" »

News that New South Wales may soon pass laws to enable land seizures for private housing shouldn’t surprise us. 

It’s the latest in a series of alarming headlines about the state of urban development and planning in NSW.

Putting aside the benefits or otherwise of compulsory land acquisition – a tool for achieving public planning goals, already embedded within NSW legislation – it’s worth revisiting the core issues driving the latest proposal – and the range of options to address them.

Continue reading "Yes to housing affordability, but don’t take my home" »

In a state that dumps transport blueprints faster than premiers, it’s little surprise the NSW Government’s announcement of a multi-billion dollar infrastructure bonanza has been met with all the fanfare of Al Gore at a climate skeptics conference.

In what has become almost an annual spectacle for a government that has turned axing infrastructure projects into an art form, the last grand plan, a five billion dollar metro, has been unceremoniously tossed on the scrap-heap, with a new proposal cobbled together with little more than some blue-tac and sticky tape.

Back on the agenda after more comebacks than John Farnham are the north-west and south-west rail links, only now with increased price tags.

Continue reading "NSW Labor’s only hope of survival is to start digging" »

The debate over the abolition of the states is a non-debate. Aside from a few single-issue crazies who want to turn back the rivers to create an inland sea, or as a moot debating point for constitutional law enthusiasts, there is no clamour whatsoever to pursue such a complex and challenging reform.

Perhaps the argument should be recast, with a proposal that if we aren’t prepared to abolish the states, we should at least abolish New South Wales.

Under the baton-passing stewardship of NSW Labor, with the top job having been hand-balled from Morris Iemma to Nathan Rees to Kristina Keneally in just over 12 months, NSW has cemented itself as a failed state, if not a rogue state, on the national stage.

Continue reading "With friends like NSW who needs enemies" »

Impartiality is everything in journalism but at the risk of sounding slightly biased it’s fair to say that if the NSW Government were a dog you would take it down to the bottom of the yard and shoot it.

Discussing the innate and irreversible badness of the NSW Government is about the most banal thing you can do these days. If anything this may be its most evil legacy – the cruelling of casual political discussion.

It’s like the inspired Gary Larson cartoon featuring nerds in hell - “Hot enough for ya?” – where remarking that NSW seems to be in political strife is as profound and insightful as noting that Germany has a bit of a chequered history, the Cuban economy could probably be doing better, or that Afghanistan has historically under-invested in infrastructure.

Continue reading "Moral lectures from the ethically challenged" »

UPDATE 7.37pm: Rees gawn. Kristina Keneally won the ballot 47 to 21 and becomes the first female Premier of NSW.

JUST two days after Malcolm Turnbull’s tenacious and gutsy last stand as Liberal Leader, NSW Labor Premier Nathan Rees is turning in the performance of his political life as he doggedly slugs it out with the factions in a seemingly doomed bid to save his leadership.

Rees gave one of the best speeches by any Australian politician today. It may well be his last - when the Party Room meets at 6pm he is expected to lose his job. 17 MPs have signed a petition demanding his resignation. They include the hated factional heavyweights Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid, the domestically troubled John Della Bosca and former Police Minister Matt Brown, dumped just a week into the job after it emerged he’d stripped to his green undies at a parliamentary office party, mounted the chest of backbencher Noreen Hay, and shouted at her staffer daughter: “Look, I’m titty-f***ing your Mum!”

Nathan Rees has told these ornaments to public service that they can basically get stuffed. Have a read of what he said:

Continue reading "Rees the new star in festival of heroic losers" »

Nathan Rees’s move to ambush the Labor factions and go directly to his Party Conference for the power to appoint his Cabinet was audacious. In my 30 years as an ALP member I can barely recall a gutsier attempt to reclaim the high ground. It will at least temporarily stop the rot for NSW Labor – and if he follows on with more unilateral displays of strength it may actually start turning things around.

By taking control of Cabinet appointments Rees did more than achieve a short term political objective – he made a critically important long-term reform to culture of the ALP in NSW.

For too long factionalism has stunted Labor’s ability to nurture and develop the best talent the Party has to offer.

Continue reading "The mouse that roared may have changed Labor forever" »

UPDATE: Nathan Rees has sacked Joe Tripodi and Ian Macdonald from Cabinet.

In political terms the equivalent of a nuclear bomb has just gone off in Sydney. It has immediate ramifications for some of the most hated figures in the deeply unpopular NSW Government.

But it has massive national long-term implications, as it will determine whether Labor leaders have the right to choose their own ministry, rather than have their frontbench foisted upon them by the factions.

In a gutsy gamble, NSW Premier Nathan Rees has gone for the doomsday scenario revealed on The Punch some weeks ago by taking on the factions and winning rank-and-file party approval to form his own Cabinet by dumping unpopular or treacherous ministers. And Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just strongly backed Rees in her speech to the NSW ALP, and Kevin Rudd has done so in a press conference at APEC.

Continue reading "Rees’ gutsy gamble rewrites the rules of Labor politics" »

So, “butter would not melt in his mouth”, Kevin apparently has a robust vocabulary when it comes to privately berating his factional colleagues including females.

Last week he and his cohorts used question time to plead the higher moral ground when it comes to allowing women parliamentarians to speak.

They complained mightily when the Leader of Opposition Business moved that “the speaker be no longer heard” when a female minister was droning on.  But no such criticism for Kevin’s letting fly with the F word with female factional foes that had the temerity to disagree with his point of view.

Continue reading "Our potty-mouthed PM" »

It sounds impossible, but NSW politics could be about to get a whole lot more interesting.

“More interesting” in the NSW context currently comes with a high degree of difficulty. It’s hard to imagine how you could top the recent combo of the John Della Bosca sex scandal and, three days later, the murky claims that slain property developer Michael McGurk recorded a “tape from the grave” before his execution implicating up to three Labor MPs in a corruption scandal.

But what might be about to happen will be spectacular never the less. It will only happen, however, if Nathan Rees acts with a combination of courage and abandon, in standing up to those elements within the party who are regarded by voters as a permanent stain on the government, doing so in the knowledge that he’s got nothing to lose as he’s doomed anyway.

Continue reading "Hit self-destruct: NSW Labor’s doomsday solution" »

Like a used nappy, is it time to toss out Blocker and Liberal Lite?

In another era, Malcolm Turnbull would have been Liberal premier of NSW. He would have been a good one, very possibly exceptional. He would have combined the reforming zeal of the last decent premier, Nick Greiner, with a studied expertise around complex urban issues which successive Labor premiers have so spectacularly failed to grasp.

Anyone who has heard Turnbull speak passionately and with vision about the future of Sydney will understand that Australia’s only global city and the country’s economic engine room demands knowledge and leadership of that quality.

Instead, Malcolm’s in the middle of the federal Liberal party muddle that has contrived to comprehensively stuff up what should have been an orderly transition to Peter Costello.  Turnbull has quickly been found wanting in Canberra, his flaws and foibles stripped bare by Utegate.

Continue reading "Australia needs Turnbull to be elected ... as Premier" »

Some twenty years ago the clamour among reformers of our democratic institutions was for fixed parliamentary terms, the argument going that they would provide greater certainty and prevent the expedient manipulation of the political process.

What has happened instead is that fixed terms have become a protection order for mediocrity and incompetence, where dud governments have been shielded from the voters‘ wrath, premierships have been passed on like a baton with no direct and immediate input from voters, and policy cynicism has been entrenched as the political cycle is loaded at the front with harsh decisions and back-ended with decadent cash splurges and reckless pork-barrelling.

NSW is the most compelling case study - a dysfunctional basket case, the state that by rights should be the powerhouse of federation, now resembling some kind of anarcho-syndicalist commune whereby the elected representatives on both sides of the chamber are so incapable of achieving anything that the Speaker recently lost control of the House and had to ring a long bell to shut the joint down, saving a government which, if it were a dog, would have been taken down the back of the yard and shot some time ago.

Continue reading "Scrap fixed terms and give the voters a mercy rule" »

Who needs Pauline Hanson when you’ve got Nathan Rees and Eric Roozendaal?

If you’re reading this article, it means that the Rees Government has done its bit to murder Australia’s reputation as a modern, sensible, civilised trading partner, a mature open economy which understands that while some jobs have gone offshore, many thousands of new ones have been created by pulling down our trade barriers.

These pre-Whitlamite drongos on Macquarie Street have effectively trashed Australia’s reputation by pandering to prejudice and an unsophisticated grasp of how modern economies work.

Continue reading "Labor’s new Hansonites - and your cheap Chinese shirts" »

You know things are bad in New South Wales when its government led by left-wing Premier, Nathan Rees, is trying to find ways to blame the Red Menace for its economic woes.

Today’s State budget includes protectionist measures to give priority for nearly $4 billion in goods and services to be purchased from Aussie companies, mostly at the expense of China.

It’s an idea with the intellectual depth of a children’s cartoon. Admittedly, by the end of the clip I am not really sure whether NSW Treasurer, Eric Roozendaal, is the scarecrow or the lion. But I know the NSW public is represented by the tin man who ultimately gets a punch in the face.

Continue reading "Labor finds red herrings under Chinese-made beds" »

There’s a favourite pastime in Sydney aside from complaining about Generation Y and no longer talking about the value of your house – it’s whingeing about speed cameras and how close you are to losing your licence because of a string of minor offences.

Thousands of people a year cry foul when they rack up so many demerits the Roads and Traffic Authority cuts them off. They get no sympathy from me. If you go over the speed limit you risk getting caught. If you get caught enough times you risk losing your licence.

But now the NSW Government is considering mechanically speed limiting all new cars and is on the hunt for 100 vehicles to take part in a trial.

Continue reading "Speed limiting drivers is a human rights breach" »