Nsw

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" »

“Sometimes you just can’t account for champions.”

With these words, uttered after Queensland’s first try, Nine commentator and rugby league ego-in-chief Phil Gould summed up why Queensland won State of Origin III, and with it, an unprecedented sixth straight series

That first try was so classy. Billy Slater slipped the ball away when held by two players, Johnathan Thurston held the ball just long enough to create confusion, then poked through a beautifully-weighted grubber for Greg Inglis. There wasn’t much room in the corner. Inglis never needs much room.

Continue reading "Champion team sends a champion bloke out in style" »

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" »

Arriving at the Randwick Labor Club for Saturday night’s ALP election function, the staff at the desk were joking about having voted Liberal. This was obviously going to be a bad night for the Labor Party. 

Like residents waiting for a massive cyclone, the Labor faithful knew when it was coming and where from; the only thing for it now was to buckle down together and wait. Needless to say, it was weird.

One benefit of this particular bunker was the open bar, which was probably the most useful bit of campaign spending the NSW ALP had made in the last six weeks.

Continue reading "The Party at the End of the Party" »

Tomorrow Barry O’Farrell assumes the mantle of the Premier of NSW. That’s not a prediction from a well-informed insider, by the way. It’s a stone-cold fact, hewn from the knowledge that there hasn’t been a conclusion this foregone since Ricky Martin turned out to be a bit light in the loafers.

Which leads us to the question - what could Fatty possibly do to balls up this one horse race? With one day left on the campaign trail shot clock, what catastrophic cock-ups could the man cook up to fall short of the biggest sure thing since hipster douchebags queuing up for Apple products? You know it, I know it, and you can be sure as shit old Barry knows it.

So with that, Barry, we dare ya. We double dare you to take The Punch Policy Pepsi Challenge, and pepper a few of these zingers into the ears of your electorates. We honestly doubt it’ll make one iota of difference…

Continue reading "There’s no way Barry can lose this election. Or is there?" »

The NSW election was limping along with numbing predictability, like a circus missing one of its three rings, when the most persistent name in politics emerged to make the spectacle complete.

Pauline Hanson has decided not to emigrate to Britain as she declared last year, to not abandon bids for election as she had vowed several times.

She has decided instead to ignore her total absence from political debate in NSW and run with a bunch of buddies for the State Upper House.

Pauline is back, and finally that missing clown ring has been restored to the campaign circus.

Continue reading "Hanson is back, and the circus is complete" »

When voters hit the polling booths in NSW on March 26, many will have no memory of a time before Labor. Such has been the party’s success in the Premier state, that it had come to regard government as its birthright. It’s a conceit that comes from ruling for the last 16 years straight and for all but 18 of the last 70 years.

But now the jig is up.

In fact, it has been up for quite a while but the state’s fixed four-year term has delayed the day of reckoning. Labor fell over the line in 2007, thanks mostly to a hopeless Opposition, but the diseases of hubris, of fatigue, of abuse of trust, had already begun.

Continue reading "Everyone wants Keneally to go down…" »

The basic thrust of the strategy for Labor to escape the March 26 NSW election with a respectable loss is to put the focus on the Opposition and away from the Government.

Well, that’s coming along nicely, isn’t it?

On the day that MLC Tony Catanzariti revealed he would be the 22nd Labor MP to quit at the coming poll, and news reports rehashed charges against a senior public servant and minister’s husband for allegedly buying an illegal drug, it remained an academic exercise.

Continue reading "O’Farrell presents a small target, Keneally flounders" »

This week, we have seen two incredible women on television who have both made us feel proud to be Australian.

One is Anna Bligh, with her outpouring of emotion, reminding Queenslanders and the rest of the nation that people from the sunshine state are “the people they breed tough, north of the border.”  The other is Oprah.Yes, Oprah.

In Sydney, we are struggling to harness a sense of pride.

Continue reading "How Oprah could salvage Sydney’s pride" »

Tonight, the City of Sydney will squeeze into its glad rags and put on the pyrotechnic razzle dazzle that has become the standard way to see in the New Year.

As always, event organisers have promised this year it’ll be bigger, bolder and with added bang for our $5 million bucks. 

In recent years, they city’s grandiose flair for making stuff explode and decorating the Harbour Bridge has given Sydney a cocky strut.

Continue reading "Sydney sparkles to hide the rot beneath" »

Many Australians will be welcoming yesterday’s High Court decision in the case of The State of South Australia v. Totani & Another HCA 39 (2010). This is the second legal defeat of this unjust and draconian piece of South Australian legislation.

While most Australians will see the decision as a big win for the bike clubs against the money-wasting, selfish and bloody-minded South Australian Labor Government, from the United Motorcycle Council NSW stand-point it‘s just one more step in the right direction. We have to continue to fight until these hastily enacted and unworkable laws are defeated in our state as well.

There’s no doubt though that we are off to a very promising start. Mike Rann backed himself in the South Australian Supreme Court and lost, then with significant egg on his face took his war to the High Court using taxpayer funds only to lose there as well.

Continue reading "High Court ruling just the beginning for bikies rights" »

NSW has today lost yet another former minister - but this time he didn’t get caught with his pants down or his hand in the cookie jar.

Phil Koperberg, the former NSW rural fire commissioner who was drafted into the ALP at the last state election, said he just can’t take the factional infighting anymore and was surprised how hard it was to get anything done in government.

“I might be naive but I’m not stupid,” Koperberg said, as he announced he wouldn’t contest the next poll in March 2011.

Continue reading "Is Phil Koperberg right about the nature of politics?" »

You might think NSW Premier Kristina Keneally and Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell have a lot on their plates - like trying to come up with ways to get NSW out of the infrastructure black hole we’ve fallen into. After all, this week was Budget week in NSW.

But our two political leaders have developed a new hobby - taking pointless potshots at each other on Twitter. Is it dignified? No. Entertaining? Not really.

O’Farrell, whose Tweets you can see here, has taken to referring to his counterpart as KKK (geddit!). And Keneally, whose Tweets you can see here, uses it to flog dead political horses, like her assertion completing the Kokoda Track is no biggie.

Continue reading "As a state crumbles our leaders turn into Twits" »

In any decision to invest, wise investors look at three things – the quality of the management of the company you are investing in, their track record, and the underlying numbers.

I also believe it’s the right way to judge a government on its economic performance.  What are the values, culture and philosophy of the team?  What is their record of implementation? And how reliable are the assumptions that underpin the forecasts?

The importance of these questions is that a Budget is only as strong as the team that will implement it.  I’m sure investment analysts would be very suspicious of any company that have had four CEOs in five years and over 200 changes in its senior management team in the same period.  Yet this is the management turnover of the NSW Government.

Continue reading "Would you invest in New South Wales Inc?" »

You can understand why Kevin Rudd wanted to take out a virtual restraining order against the NSW Labor Government.

But despite his long-standing and open contempt for the NSW ALP, it has now emerged that Kevin Rudd was still prepared to insert himself in the biggest and most important policy battle in the party’s recent history – and then squib it when he was most required.

Rudd’s ambivalence towards this motley government is easy to comprehend. “Young Labor twenty years on” is how one party figure from NSW characterises the drift into personality politics, petty bickering and abuse, aberrant conduct and, most of all, policy paralysis which has marred the past few years of Labor rule in NSW.

Continue reading "NSW was the loser in Rudd’s betrayal of Morris Iemma" »

Updated 7.25am: Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reports it was known inside cabinet for years that Campbell had been visiting gay clubs and saunas. There’s analysis here and you can watch a video report including the Channel 7 footage here.

NSW transport minister David Campbell has just resigned after being sprung using his taxpayer-funded car to visit a gay sex club (funny how it’s always the car that does them in).

Seven News showed footage of the married father, who has actively campaigned as a family man, leaving the club where you pay $22 to spend time with like-minded blokes.

On Tuesday night just gone he’d ditched his driver, and driven himself to the establishment known as Kens at Kensington. The Kens website says: “Ken’s is the spacious, clean and safe place to meet sexy guys. Ken’s has everything you want in a venue — ideal for a short lunch-break, a long hard evening or day, or meeting up with (or finding!) someone special!”

Continue reading "Just another day in the swill that is NSW politics" »

WHEN Abraham Lincoln famously said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, he didn’t have the Liberal Party in mind. But had he been born 250 years later, he may well have.

Although, in the case of the Libs it’s more of a church than a house. Tony Abbott and Barry O’Farrell may be breathing a sigh of relief after the party’s NSW upper house preselection vote on Friday which saw David Clarke, the so called head of the party’s “religious right” fend off a challenge from the less religious right.

But what will concern them is that Clarke won by only 14 votes, which means in real terms that 7 more people voted for him than David Elliot, the former Australian Hotels Association executive being backed by Clarke’s former staffer Alex Hawke.

Continue reading "Backroom politics crash the party" »

What a great moment in history - NSW now has a woman premier and a woman deputy. How inspiring for the young women of NSW, who last night were told by Kristina Keneally “you can do anything.”

Eight year old girls can now listen to Ms Keneally’s story about how when she was their age she rang a radio station to put the local bishop on the spot about altar servers and think to themselves “wow, girls really can make a difference.”

“I’m a 40-year-old working mum,” Ms Keneally said last night. Oh blah ... I can’t even pretend to be excited about this.

Continue reading "NSW’s first woman premier - a defeat for feminism" »

As NSW Labor once again bury and dig up another leader in their pet cemetery of a cabinet to lead its army of walking dead, we see that Malcolm Turnbull has begun a bit of haunting of his own.

Yesterday’s cracking yarn by Annabel Crabb revealing angry emails sent by Malcolm Turnbull to Julie Bishop, accusing the deputy opposition leader of being hypocritical in her support for Tony Abbott, is evidence of the dangers of having an angry Malcolm Turnbull on the backbench. Combined with blogs and newsletters arguing that Abbott’s stand on the ETS is unworkable, one gets the feeling that Malcolm Turnbull could be dropping political cluster bombs from the backbench for a while yet.

So here’s a proposal that some NSW Liberals are seriously beginning to talk about: make Malcolm Turnbull the next Liberal Premier of NSW.

Continue reading "Cut the crap and make Malcolm the NSW Premier" »

If Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he said: “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” then the Australian Greens must hold the bragging rights to having the biggest brains.

For no other political Party has the ability to be so inconsistent when it comes to public policy than the Greens.

Two recent incidents, which received huge media attention, demonstrated this perfectly.

Continue reading "Making me Green in the gills" »

It is a year since Frank Ernest Sartor was perhaps the most despised man in NSW.

His enemies were massed along Sydney’s north side, from riverside Putney to leafy Roseville, with a rear battalion up in the seaside mining village of Catherine Hill Bay.He considers the year since Premier Nathan Rees dumped him to hand the poisoned chalice of NSW planning to a youthful Kristina Keneally as a well-deserved sabbatical.

But on October 19 he is back in the hot seat, facing a NSW parliamentary inquiry into rezoning plans by developers Ron and Roy Medich, called in the wake of myriad allegations after the murder of their associate Michael McGurk.

Continue reading "Profile: Frank Sartor on being NSW’s most hated man" »

The NSW Labor Party has taken advantage of the confusion caused by the impending end of the world to install its new preferred candidate as Premier. Upon taking office Godzilla told a press conference this afternoon he was committed to “EAT, KILL , DESTROY” as well as holding underperforming ministers to account.

The Punch received this from some creative individual this morning following Sydney’s freak dust storm. It’s amazing how quickly the viral pictures get made and circulated following a news event with any visual appeal today.

Not being in Sydney this morning I can only assume that the dust storm is in fact real, and not some hoax manufactured for the good of bored web designers.

Update:

Thanks for the photo then Ante, while fellow reader James has since alerted us to this contribution to the Sydney dust storm http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanaclinton/3945420235/

When The Punch woke up this morning it got a little scared. Sydney looks like it’s about to be swallowed into the bowels of the Earth.

Twitter has gone off with people filing their own pics here.

And News.com.au have an amazing gallery running here. There’s no point asking if you’ve seen anything like this before, as apparently the last time it happened was between the Wars.

Is it a sign? Are we being punished for our pre-GFC greed? Or is it a pre-Copenhagen message - a little taste of what’s to come if we don’t act on climate change now?

Those plotting the demise of the latest NSW Premier - along with those of us simply looking on in resigned bemusement – could do well to tune into the free-to-air premiere of ‘The Wire’ on ABC-2 tonight.

David Simon’s masterpiece, rightly dubbed the ‘greatest TV show ever made’, is ostensibly about the drug trade in Baltimore. While first-time viewers will think they have stumbled upon just another cop show, as they become addicted they will be drawn into the workings of a post-industrial city.

‘The Wire’ is about the connections that bind a city – from the projects to the ports, from politics to education, to the crumbling power of the media. It shows how systems now rule and render good men and women powerless.

Continue reading "We are all Nathan Rees" »

To put it kindly, Nathan Rees’ Premiership has been a rocky ride.

His own inexperience has been exacerbated by a decaying Labor Government, no shortage of scandals and a selfish bunch of incompetent Ministers who were focused on personal gain rather than the public good.

To make matters worse, he is about to fall victim to the very same process of which he was once a beneficiary.

Continue reading "Rees should do the decent thing and call the Governor" »