Nsw Labor

If you want an insight into the debased language of modern politics, look no further than the cheat sheet about the Craig Thomson credit card scandal which some silly sausage from the ALP left sitting on the benches during Question Time this week.

The document, swiped by the Opposition and subsequently released to the media, contains a series of war-roomed hypothetical questions which Labor MPs may face from the pesky press about Thomson’s use of a Health Services Union credit card to fund horizontal hijinks at some of Australia’s leading knock-shops.

The funniest thing about the cheat sheet is that it’s written in a confected conversational tone, a bit like those guides they give the staff at Indian call centres so they can use slang and vernacular when they pester you during dinner time.

Continue reading "Craig Thomson, another top idea from NSW Labor" »

Call me brave, or even stupid, but after David Penberthy’s piece last week, I’ve decided to launch a defence of NSW Labor leader John Robertson on The Punch. I expect pundits are already commenting below, calling me a union hack – or worse – as often occurs when I contribute to this site.

One of the reasons I feel compelled to launch this defence is because I find it curious that we endlessly search for people with convictions in politics, but end up bagging a bloke who was willing to stand up for his convictions.

Unpopular as it appears to the Labor elite, his convictions were shared by the majority of people in the community and by the workers that he was paid to represent.

Continue reading "Robbo’s no yobbo, he’s all guts and brains" »

Every man and his dog – and there are plenty of dogs involved in this story – has a reason the NSW Government went down so spectacularly at the weekend. But really there is only one: NSW Labor is simply excellent at what it does.

The NSW Right is – or at least was – such a supreme political and campaigning machine that it wins not only more often than the Liberals but more often than it should for its own good.

In the last 35 years in NSW Labor allowed only a hiccup of Liberal rule before it broke the back of the Greiner Government in 1991 after a truncated three-year term and then sent it to Coventry for 16 years at the next election.

Continue reading "NSW Labor governed not wisely, but too well" »

The man most likely to lead the NSW Labor Opposition is the man least equipped to bring the party together after the richly-deserved caning it endured on Saturday.

Former sparky John Robertson is a likeable knockabout who comes across as the embodiment of old-style Labor values. The fact that he is a decent person does not alter the fact that he’s been pivotal in some of the most politically indecent acts the state of News South Wales has ever seen, starting with the unprecedented dumping of a party leader, shortly after he’d been returned by the voters in a gutsy and unlikely election victory.

Whatever old-style Labor values he claims to represent were rendered transparent by this act of bastardry and the subsequent chaos it unleashed. 

Continue reading "Likely NSW Labor leader is the worst choice possible" »

When NSW Labor is wiped off the map tomorrow, it will partly be because, as Joe Hildebrand pointed out, the Labor government has rather impressively committed every sin known to mankind. But mostly, it’ll be because the government is widely viewed as having reduced this state to tatters. The question is: Is NSW really in such bad nick?

I have lived in NSW for about 30 of my 41 years. The sun still shines, the trains still crawl and the water still runs, except of course for that time in 1998 when it was full of nasty parasites.

In most respects, this state is nowhere near the basket case some make it out to be. Obviously, NSW would have benefited from something approaching a competent government for much of the last 16 years, but it’s not all gloom and doom in Woolloomooloo, and beyond. Let’s take a closer look.

Continue reading "NSW: It’s not actually that bad. No, really." »

It will be the political equivalent of a slasher movie, a bloody affair in which the bodies of sitting members pile up as NSW voters go on the rampage against a government which, now in its 16th year, has truly worn out its welcome. The latest polls suggest that NSW Labor, unassailable under the leadership of Bob Carr, could be left with as few as 15 seats in the 93-member Lower House. Some party figures say they might only just crack double figures.

For people not living in NSW, next Saturday’s election will only rate passing notice. It certainly isn’t being fought on federal issues, but looms simply as a plebiscite on the awesome unpopularity of a government which for the past six years has been beset by scandal and plagued by incompetence, so much so that voters don’t even care that the Opposition has a sketchy and unambitious policy agenda.

Despite being the ABL election – Anyone But Labor – there are a number of issues which will come from the result which will have implications for the rest of the nation.

Continue reading "Kissing another state Labor government goodbye" »

For too long now the NSW Government has been grossly attacked for not having achieved anything.

Even I myself was once part of the baying hordes who cruelly and unfairly accused the 16-year-old administration of leaving no great timeless accomplishments as a legacy for this great state.

But then this weekend I realised that NSW Labor had achieved something no other government of either persuasion has managed to do - not just in this state, nor the country, but the entire world.

Continue reading "Congrats NSW Govt, you’ve bagged the full set of sins" »

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" »

A couple of years ago in one of his excellent machine-gun sprays Paul Keating lamented the emergence of a new class of political leaders who wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning unless they had focus group research telling them to do so.

The jibe was aimed at the thinness and timidity of what was then the Kevin07 juggernaut. This new political glibness was again in evidence during this year’s campaign, reaching a low point with Julia Gillard’s “moving forward” slogan, a catchline so dead in meaning that The Real Julia had it euthanased.

The debate over the rise of focus groups, spin and message management in modern politics is now being conducted vigorously within the ALP.  Labor heavyweight John Faulkner used this week’s launch of the excellent book by former NSW Minister Rodney Cavalier on the shambles that is NSW Labor to take aim at what has been called “the NSW disease‟.

Continue reading "Public pays the price as politics spins out of control" »

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" »

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" »

Let’s face it: What Paul McLeay’s done isn’t the worst thing in the world. It isn’t even the worst thing in the NSW Government.

The now former minister was summarily shafted—an activity with which he is apparently familiar—by Premier Kristina Keneally after being busted looking at porn and gambling on his parliamentary computer.

There is no question that his behaviour was stratospherically stupid, but again, these days that is more a pre-requisite for getting into Cabinet than being booted out of it.

Continue reading "Watching them do it online, as Labor did it to the nation" »

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" »

Many words have been used to describe this election campaign and none of them are particularly flattering. From doyens of journalism such as Paul Kelly down to giggly and uninformed disc-jockeys on commercial FM, the consensus has been that it’s been superficial, unambitious, contrived, with both leaders often pretending to be something which they are not in order to win votes.

Without wishing to drift into the kind of mindless nihilism which Mark Latham displayed on 60 Minutes, it has been hard to get too excited about the policy debates, to the extent that there have really been any detailed or meaningful policy debates. Both sides have run relentlessly negative campaigns against their opponents. The end result of this can only be an erosion in our collective faith in politics and a further diminishment, if that indeed is possible, of the standing of politicians in the eyes of the community.

This election campaign is one which we should remind our politicians of in future when they start complaining about the rougher than usual treatment they receive for making the selfless decision to go into public life, and endure the slings and arrows it entails, on salaries which are easily eclipsed by what is on offer in the private sector.

Continue reading "Politicians complain about cynicism, but they drive it" »

Writing more in sorrow than anger, a web reader going by the pseudonym Denny Crane, after the politically incorrect anti-hero of the brilliant program Boston Legal, posted a comment this week which epitomised the sense of despair which many in Sydney feel about the management of this town.

“You know, ten years ago we had the 2000 Olympics. The best Olympics ever. A world class performance by a State at the top of its game. Sydney in that first week was magic and the second was not far behind. The world looked at Sydney and NSW and applauded. And who gave it to us, apart from ourselves? NSW State Labor. And now look at NSW Labor. If you want to know how far NSW Labor and the infrastructure of this State have destructed, just compare 2000 with 2010. God, we were good then, but now… “

This fair and balanced comment rung true with me, having moved to Sydney in 1999 to cover NSW state politics, and still being able to feel a buzz at remembering the euphoria and joy and pride of being a resident of one the greatest cities on earth, at one of the greatest moments in its history.

Continue reading "Fed-up voters have every right to “confuse” the issues" »

“The voters always get it right” was a regular refrain of former prime minister John Howard. He used it to bat away suggestions that election results could somehow be accidental, such as federal Labor’s victory in the 1993 Fightback! election, his own re-election with less than half the popular vote in 1998 when promising to introduce a GST, or the unexpected defeat of the Kennett Government in Victoria in 1999.

One of Howard’s strengths as a politician was his innate respect for the collective wisdom of the voters. It’s the primary reason he didn’t get bent out of shape by defeat in 2007, both at a general election and in his own seat, and helps explain why he’s provided none of the embittered theatrics and revisionist commentary of other past PMs.

Australian voters are not only smart, they’re often smarter than people such as us who write about politics. Writing about politics, especially amid the stage-management of an election campaign, is a bit like pressing your face up against a tapestry. You can become so immersed in the minutiae that you lose a sense of context and fail to appreciate the broader issues which are exercising the public mind.

Continue reading "Voters have a keener, more critical eye than us journos" »

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" »

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" »

Waiting for Labor to sort itself out or Waiting for Rail Corp is not perhaps as catchy a phrase as Waiting for Godot, but recently I found myself an actor in a Beckett-like universe, waiting for a train.

I stood waiting not with Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett’s famous protagonists, but with my five year old son Luke and his best mate, Tom. I’d promised the two train enthusiasts a short trip to North Sydney.

In Waiting for Godot, Godot never appears. In my play the train did come but only after a series of events that could have been scripted for the Theatre of the Absurd, or Fawlty Towers.

Continue reading "Meanwhile, back at the station" »

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" »

The least functional and least popular division of the Australian Labor Party is about to tell Kevin Rudd to get stuffed, Julia Gillard to butt out, and embark on a wild spree to install some of the most disliked people in Australia back in a position of power.

Less than one month after Premier Nathan Rees blindsided the factions by declaring that he alone would determine the composition of Cabinet - and using his new presidential-style powers to dump the spectacularly unpopular Joe Tripodi and the disloyal Ian Macdonald from Cabinet - the factions have now regrouped and are moving to roll Rees.

This is a big story in NSW but it’s a bigger story nationally as it involves a very pointed snub to the Prime Minister. When Nathan Rees moved against the factions last month, he did so with the backing of Kevin Rudd. And Julia Gillard even went so far as to attend the NSW Labor conference and deliver a speech in support of Nathan Rees.

Continue reading "Labor’s NSW degenerates ready to embarrass Rudd" »

You have to hand it to the Labor spin machine.

While it runs around the Federal press gallery highlighting various views among the Coalition on climate change, it is preparing a desperate bid for re-election in NSW by dividing itself.

According to a weekend news report, the Liberal Party is preparing for a re-election campaign in which local ALP members of Parliament actually turn on the Government.

Continue reading "NSW Labor ready to campaign against itself" »

JUST five days ago I sat down and wrote an imagined piece of writing outlining the next 521 days (count ‘em) in the life of this most excellent NSW Labor Government.

It outlined how, just one month after the John Della Bosca sex scandal, two MPs were busted running a gin distillery out of their offices, Matt Brown was recalled to the frontbench and promptly sacked again for performing a strip tease during his swearing in, NSW was stripped of its AAA rating by Moodys but awarded a XXX rating by the Eros Foundation – on and on, at the rate of one scandal a month, until the March 2011 poll. But in NSW truth is stranger than fiction. If I’d really been doing my job I would have written this:

Just five days after the John Della Bosca sex scandal, the State Government is rocked by claims that a notorious property developer, shot execution-style in his driveway with a single bullet to the head, had made a secret tape recording in the days before his death where he implicated senior Labor figures in a corruption and bribery scandal.

Continue reading "Gunshot that paralysed our biggest state government" »

October 2009: Exactly one month after the John Della Bosca sex scandal, the NSW Labor Government is plunged intro fresh crisis with revelations that two members of Parliament’s Economic and Finance Committee have been running a “speak-easy” out of their Macquarie St office.

A gin distillery and $100,000 in illegal casino chips are seized, and a dozen 18-year-old girls, wearing the traditional “flapper” garb of the day, and two elderly black men with a banjo and clarinet are frogmarched into police vans in The Domain. “Look, I’m as disappointed as anyone,” Premier Nathan Rees tells reporters. “But I’ve made it clear to my team that it’s back to work. No more gin stills, no more jug bands. We’ve got a state to run.”

November 2009: Due to a shortfall of personnel former Police Minister Matt Brown - dumped last year for dancing in his green underpants and mounting the chest of a female MP - is recalled to the frontbench in the junior portfolio of Regional Development.

Continue reading "Revealed: the next 521 days of the NSW Government" »

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.

Continue reading "Della’s sex shame: NSW Labor is now Melrose Place" »

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.

Continue reading "Find the Premier and win a romantic dinner for two" »

IF NSW Labor MP Matt Brown keeps a perverse Mr Hyde buried deep in his psyche, then his borderline-nerd Dr Jekyll has kept the monster tightly wrapped for the past year.

It seems incongruous such an earnestly decent bloke achieved notoriety for the grossly bizarre accusation of stripping to his underpants to ``titty-f..k’’ an older female colleague, calling on the woman’s adult daughter to watch during a drunken party in his parliamentary office.

In the aftermath, Brown stepped down as Police Minister after a record-setting three days. In the year he’s had to reflect on perhaps the biggest party he ever hosted, Brown has only one regret: that he ever invited colleagues back to his office for a drink.

Continue reading "How my ministerial career was destroyed" »