Another day, yet another premier, in the Premiers State.
There has been a not unexpected change of government in Macquarie Street following what seems like an eternity but, in fact, is twelve years of Liberal National rule. Last time Labor was in office, names such as Kristina Keneally and Eddie Obeid were making the papers. By 2011, Labor had been in office for sixteen even longer years, marked for the first decade by Bob Carr’s unimpressive though strangely lauded leadership, a Treasury-led obsession with the State’s triple A credit rating – who even talks about that now? – and an almost biblical belief in not building any new infrastructure, and marked in the final years by instability, revolving door premiers and ministers that would end up in prison.
Why the Premiers State? Regular readers will know that we in New South Wales have had (now) nine premiers since 2005. If you add the seven leaders of the opposition since 2005, that makes sixteen leaders of the major parties over the same period. Almost a change in leadership every year. Hardly major party self-confidence or voter confidence in the those at the top. Hardly evidence of stable, direction-ful governance. It is, rather an astonishing story of mayhem, strife and change without improvement. Of embarrassingly bad management. Of intra-party hatreds and factions. Of a succession of grifters being found to be not up to the job. And running a state isn’t that hard.
There is certainly a book-length treatment needed on why New South Wales gets such awful governance, decade in and decade out. Perhaps a PhD thesis. We produce champion cricketers with monotonous regularity but not champion politicians. Most prime ministers these days come from Sydney too. Apart from Howard, a star when compared with all the others, and Abbott, never really allowed to grow into the job before being knifed in the back, we are left with Turnbull, Morrison and Albo. Like I say, we produce damned fine cricketers.
The election decided this past weekend delivered a mere 72 per cent of the primary vote to the majors. Nearly a third of the NSW electorate doesn’t have a “voice”, still. At a time when having a “voice” is all the rage. There will be talk of mandates. There always is. Labor’s 37 per cent of the primary vote means that 63 per cent of the people didn’t want this Government. That is not a mandate for anything. Of course, even more people didn’t want the other mob. Perhaps this lack of enthusiasm among the voters for that which was on offer explains why there seemed to be so few signs up in front yards for the candidates. All the headlines about “landslides” are a bit of a joke. Labor will barely get a working majority. They were simply regarded as the least-worst option. (Of course, they also said that Gough Whitlam stormed to power in 1972. He did not. He just scraped home by the skin of his teeth).
Nor is there any joy likely among real liberals and conservatives that the recent lot have, mercifully, been sent packing. The Liberal Party of today has nil ability to reflect upon its many deficits. The old rule is, that if you haven’t got the capacity to be ideologically sound, at least be competent. The Coalition of four failed premiers couldn’t even get this minimalist rule right.
The governing class in New South Wales should be termed the Uniparty. Yes, the two major parties are that much alike; whoever said that when you change the government you change the country was talking about a place that is now unrecognisable. In a real sense, it doesn’t matter who is nominally in charge. On all the major issues, both Labor-lite and Liberal-lite disagree on few, if any. The PGGWC (progressive, green, global, woke, Covid) class wins. You wouldn’t know it, from all the breathless corporate media talk of “change”. There is no change.
A truly bizarre period of NSW politics is over. An era of gross mismanagement, minor corruption, scandal, self-confessed pork barrelling, huge incompetence and Covid fascism. Oh, and a few new toll roads and railway lines. The greatest achievement of the former Government was the construction of infrastructure, what was once simple core business for a state government and nothing especially to be commended. It was an era in which great social change occurred, for example the legalisation of infanticide on demand and mercy killing, all on the watch of a Party that was once committed to family values, tradition and social conservatism. Centrism. Common sense. The forgotten people of Menzies.
The Eunuch Premier is no more.
This was Dominic Perrottet, who recently admitted infamously to Ben Fordham on 2GB that he didn’t have the power to end vaccine mandates even though he admitted that Covid vaccines did not stop transmission of the virus. Instead, the mandates remained, on Perrottet’s watch.
Sky News reported last week:
NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet has been confronted by a man protesting vaccine mandates while campaigning in the key seat of Willoughby on the eve of the state election.
Mr Perrottet was visiting a pre-polling centre on the Lower North Shore on Friday morning, alongside his wife Helen and one of their children, when he was ambushed.
“You said you don’t like the vaccine mandates what are you gonna actually do?" the man yelled.
"Are you gonna show some guts and actually give people back their jobs?
"Are you gonna compensate people... Do you even care?
“You said you don’t support the vaccine mandates, why are you not doing anything about it - direct question.”
All very good questions. To which there have only been mealy-mouthed replies, certainly from the NSW Premier.
One unvaccinated, unemployed NSW police officer, David Roberts, wrote to the Premier.
My name is Senior Constable David Roberts, and I am a former New South Wales Police Officer that was dismissed under a Section 181d of the Police Act for failing to comply with a direction to be vaccinated for Covid 19. For those that do not know, this is the police equivalent to a defence force dishonourable discharge. Such a dismissal is retained for the worst breaches of the NSW Police Force code of conduct, such as theft, assault, domestic violence, fraud and other such crimes. Real crimes. This prevents us from ever obtaining another government position and it has even restricted us from obtaining a simple security licence.
… When I heard you on 2gb announce that you want these mandates to end, as you stated, “There is no evidence that the vaccines stop transmission” it gave me and others a small glimmer of hope, that finally, after all this time, that someone will finally apply some basic common sense to this absurd situation that we are all living through and finally end this utter madness.
However, no. What occurred next was nothing short of a slap in the face to myself and my former colleagues. You said that you had no power to remove these mandates. Premier, this is utter rubbish and you should be embarrassed to pretend that you are the Premier of NSW.
Your government is responsible for these mandates being implemented. Your government held daily press conferences where it pushed the same repeated message of “Vaccines are our only way out of this.” And “Vaccines are the only way to get our freedoms back.” And “Vaccines are the only way to get everyone back to work.” So your predecessors, your government, along with the usual one sided media propaganda, pushed this mandate agenda, which you refused to change when you came into power. And you still refuse to change now.
Premier, you not only have the power to end this mandate madness, you have the obligation and the responsibility to! You need to do what you were put in this position for, to do your job! And your job is to run this state and to ensure that each and every one of its people get a fair deal and a fair opportunity and are treated equally.
… Ben Fordham rightly pointed out, how embarrassing it must be, to be in your position and not be able to actually have control of anything in NSW and to admit to the entire state that you are nothing more than a figure head, a politician poster boy to stand in front of the cameras, while others make the hard decisions for you.
https://www.reignitedemocracyaustralia.com.au/letter-perottet/
This is a disgrace, and points to the unseemly inaction of one who disowns a policy yet is complicit in its enforcement. And one who has the power to stop it. Some might (lightly) call it hypocrisy. Everyone would call it cowardly. More importantly, it reveals all you need to know about the NSW Liberal way.
Dominic Perrottet is a man whose best friends in politics seem to have been Paul Keating, Anthony Albanese, Chris Minns, Daniel Andrews and Matt Kean. The most left-wing of the lot was Perrottet’s own, apparent cherished, deputy! The unfortunately surviving Member for Hornsby. Kean has ruled out leading the Liberal Party in opposition, perhaps already packing his bags and getting someone in Canberra to measure out his Senate office for the prize that will, no doubt, be shortly coming his way. The under-performing Maryse Payne, a passenger for several decades, perhaps will finally be persuaded to vacate her seat and return home to comfort the now departed Member for Penrith and former State Liberal Deputy Leader, Stuart Ayres. Ayres is another, unlamented casualty of the wrath of the voters last Saturday. And a victim of Pork Barilaro’s failed New York push that caused so much grief for the flailing Government in 2022.
The Eunuch Premier never escaped his controllers. The puppet was never allowed to break free from his puppeteers. The NSW Liberal Party string-pullers. This is the Greenwich-Kean-Photios machine.
There are two words that you didn’t hear in the election campaign, and will not read in any of the post-election “analyses”. Covid and Photios.
It was interesting that just about the only seat that didn’t experience a huge swing against the Liberals (certainly in Sydney) was Badgery’s Creek (formerly Mulgoa, before the redistribution), in Western Sydney. This was, and is, held by Tanya Davies. Davies was a brave and staunch opponent of her own Government’s Covid totalitarianism, particularly its imposition of vaccine mandates and Western Sydney-specific lockdowns and curfews, enforced with the help of Army helicopters. She, almost alone among Liberals, prospered.
Similarly to other post-Covid Australian elections, it was as if the greatest attack on our citizens’ freedom simply never happened. Admittedly, The Australian has just now published a front page story on vaccine injuries, something that the estimable Adam Creighton has noted simply could not have occurred (in his own newspaper) two years ago. But, on the other hand, the same paper published an appalling attack on so-called anti-vaxxer Liberal candidates not a week ago. So, no Covid fascism to see here. Let us stick to the non-issues.
Then there is Michael Photios, the lobbyist’s lobbyist. A “curse word” for right-of-centre Australian publications and editors, apparently. You just do not mention him. The former Fahey Government minor minister who, single-handedly, erected the NSW Liberal model of governance, has, more than anyone, steered the Party to its seedy 2023 demise. He has, after all, embedded turbo-charged factionalism, left-wing policies, crony capitalism, mates-rates and race-to-the-bottom ministerial miscreance in the Rum Corps State. He is reputed to have picked Gladys’s first Cabinet. With 13 out of 17 Moderates in power. As Graham Richardson – who joined his firm, Premier State Consulting – once said, nothing happens in New South Wales without his permission. And no voter would have ever heard of him. Tony Abbott once tried to put him in his place. No luck there. Like Baudelaire’s Satan, Photios’s greatest trick was to convince the people that he did not exist.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/03/20/devil/
A year ago, the then recently demoted Liberal Senator, Concetta Fierraventi-Wells, spoke of the “putrid stench of corruption” emanating from NSW Liberal Politics.
Perhaps the undoubted stench finally reached Main Street. Chickens and roosts come readily to mind.
It will be said – has been said – that the resigning Premier wasn’t given enough time, nor a fair go from his own side. Someone even said that he had two hands tied behind his back. This is rubbish. Dominic Perrottet chose to be craven, chose to be impotent, chose to lead a rabble, chose to be the Eunuch Premier. It has also been said that he was a true conservative leading a leftie Government. This only means that his conservatism, to the extent that anyone, even with outsized glasses, could see it, was worse than meaningless.
Equally spurious is the claim that it was “fourth term blues”. They weren’t kicked out because they had governed for 12 years. They were kicked out because they had governed badly for 12 years. The miracle was that they won last time. They didn’t deserve to, then.
Hardly a soul, apart from the astonishingly loyal elder Liberal statesman, JWH, bothered to turn up at the Liberals’ election night “celebration” in downtown Sydney. Most of Dominic Perrottet’s ministers, like Stokes, Dominello and the Health Hazzard, had already scurried from a building that was collapsing like a Gerry-built Sydney apartment block, too embarrassed to remain for the “last drinks” call. Their seats (Pittwater, Ryde and Wakehurst) suffered especially ignominious swings (and possible losses in all three). Scurrying Gladys’s old seat (Willoughby) was in great danger as well, but the Libs may pull it off. The rats deserted. The ship sank.
Much of the post-election white noise has been a discussion of the future of the Liberal Party. The usual suspects (like the appalling Senator Andrew Bragg) are making their usual glib, broken-record-like explanations for the loss of government. Not being left-wing enough is particularly other-worldly.
Frankly, who on earth cares?
Paul Collits
27 March 2023
NSW could be termed the Sad State but so could every state and territory plus the federal government. When will the penny drop for the mug voters who persist in supporting the Uniparty regardless of prior or present performance?
And I consider the Greens to be part of the the Uniparty scourge as they are just a loony left faction of the ALP faction.
The fundamental problem is in the electorate.
I am astonished by politics today. However do we get so many functionaries in power who exercise no power for our good. Of course the premier can strike down the mandates! But don’t hold your breath for Minns to do it! Alan Jones gave him opportunities to speak against the mad covid policies and he offered mealy mouthed platitudes. The latest Dr John Campbell you tube piece shows that the TGA knew back in January 2021 that the mRNA vaccines were dangerous. A FOIA request finally resulted in the document being released. So if they knew so did CDC and the Brit’s knew.