Nsw Labor

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" »