Which brings us to NSW.
Is it enough to run for election as Premier of NSW relying on a can of hairspray and a curling wand? Probably not. Jeff Kennett won a few elections in Victoria using industrial-strength hairspray (superglue?) but I’m not sure Kristina Keneally will be as lucky. Nor should she be.
I am mystified by the soft-shoe shuffle she gets from most of the press (male). It is the Sarah Palin factor: a whiff of perfume, a tight skirt and a well-turned calf and they lose all reason. The Australian’s Imre Salusinszky is positively tumescent and needs to get a room (by himself). Here's a few from the lovestruck fool http://goo.gl/jgXuw in which he stands up for Kristina against big bad bully Rudd and on March 10 last year he wrote in The Australian: “Kristina Keneally — the Premier of NSW and my future second wife — wrote to Rudd last week …”. Creepy
If Kristina were a bloke, she would be getting a kicking.
She is one of the magic NSW Right who thinks that just turning up is enough. Bob Carr did it for 10 years. When he realised people had sussed out that he was a totally useless phoney, he slid easily into a job at Macquarie Bank. What he does there is a mystery. He never did anything as premier. Why would he change the habits of a lifetime? I expect he is just on the door as a meeter and greeter, occasionally bringing the chairman’s car up from the car park.
No, that can’t be right. I just remembered he can’t drive. Helena has to cart him around, taking time out from her real job − running a printing company, I think it is.
It was amusing to see Bob was a member of the panel looking into where Labor went wrong last year. The answer that never surfaced is that the Labor Party is dominated by people like Carr who think just being in office is enough.
Whether you like it or not, the big issue for NSW during Bob’s reign was power privatisation but he powdered at the first whiff of grapeshot from the unions and retired to his Gore Vidal novels, convinced that he was right: don’t try to do anything; people might notice.`
So we have a state that is down the dunny. The only things that seem to have been introduced in the 10 years of Bob the Builder are toll roads and trains to the airport that are more expensive than a Tiger Air ticket to Melbourne.
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| The only place Kristina will be outrunning the voters |
Anyway, back to Kristina. We all know why she is there. The uglies of the NSW Right began to apprehend that maybe people didn’t like ’em and hoped they would be distracted by the sheila.
She has good set of pins, dresses well and has managed to get rid of the seppo accent – well, mostly. She is a bit like Westpac’s Gail Kelly who wrestles with her Jaapie accent in times of stress.
So Kristina “I’m nobody’s girl” wanders in, playing her best dress-up role yet: NSW Premier.
Who can forget Pope Youth Week in which she gave away millions of our hard-earned so the Pope could come down and be mobbed by a lot of kids wearing funny backpacks. And let’s not forget it was Kristina who tried to bring in that law about T-shirts and signs mocking his holiness, a law overthrown by the late Jeff Shaw, former NSW Attorney General, working pro bono.
Talk about Kristina’s version of sharia law.
She promised that millions would fall from the sky by way of tourist dollars but, as most of the “pilgrims” were penniless kids who lived on one Big Mac a day, this didn’t happen. The people of Sydney realised she was as believable as transubstantiation.
Hubby Ben is having some luck as well http://goo.gl/mOFm8 . I love the Labor family.
In these, the final days of her regime, she seems intent on throwing Julia Gillard under a bus. First, on the flood levy, she makes the typical Eastern Suburbs whiny complaint that “we pay so much for our mortgages, so give us a break”. Give me a break FFS. Then, on the health deal, she starts cutting up rough with another “we have to pay more to live in Sydney” whinge.
Lately, she has decided, let’s give Julia a kicking on the carbon tax. This is straight out of the NSW Right playbook titled Whatever it Takes, written by that giant of NSW politics, Richo. I know who JG would be voting for in a few weeks, if she had a vote, and it wouldn’t be that blonde bimbo.
Then we have Eric Roozendaal, the man who has sold us out on power, while helping the struggling jetty owners in Point Piper to secure tenure over the public land in front of their houses http://goo.gl/AqoAK . Eric the Smooth needs to hang around in parliament until June to qualify for his gold pass and $150,000 indexed pension for life. Some have cruelly claimed he has set himself up with a job in the private sector after he qualifies for Polly Lotto. Maybe it is down at Macquarie Bank. I understand he can drive, so he will be able to help Bob out and give Helena a break.
You gotta wonder what sort of currency he and Bob will have. I mean, even Macquarie have probably worked out that Bob is as useful as a pocket in a singlet and Eric can’t even sell a bloody power station without stuffing it up.
With the Libs in power in NSW for the foreseeable future, how many doors, except in the Macquarie Bank reception area, are these two clowns going to be able to open? I reckon Bob is on his final warning. “You bloody mention some arcane, useless piece of information about American politics again and you’re outta here.”
We have an eviction coming up in a few weeks. Meanwhile, the Labor mob seem intent on trashing the joint and are not worried about getting their bond back.
It is all very exciting and we are counting the number of sleeps before we can vote. Some of us are planning to go to the pre-polls so we can say we did it first. But, as my mum used to say, “It’s all very well having fun until someone loses an eye.”
On the Sunday, we will have a Liberal Government, led by a man who makes Barrie Unsworth look as though he may have a pulse. Barry O’Farrell is going to be premier because he is the last man standing. He comes after Peter Debnam, my local member, who was probably the most self-important nong I ever came across.
Pete and I had a few fruity exchanges from time to time. He seemed unfazed by my free character references, including the one about him having his nose firmly in the public trough. (He wins Polly Lotto after the election.) Though he does live with the knowledge that there is someone more unpopular than the NSW Labor Government … him.
Barry has no policies except “I am not Kristina Keneally”. He seems to have decided already that he will be Tony Abbott’s poodle and that his role in government will be to reject anything the Commonwealth wants to do for NSW, from health reform to a price on carbon.
Barry, that is not why you are there.
The only thing in his favour is a person called Ms Gladys Berejiklian, BA, DIntS, MCom, MP, who will be transport minister. Now I know it sounds shallow but I have been waiting all my life to have someone called Gladys rise to a position of power in public life. And her surname is wonderful. I look forward to seeing Gladys all over the headlines and to seeing the many spellings of her name. First prize goes to the news outlet that gets it in print without any vowels.
Of all the people in Barry’s oppo, she is the only one who has a cogent policy position, which involves fixing public transport. I am sure Gladys, who lives in Willoughby, catches public transport to work and has spent many days of her life in an un-airconditioned train carriage, her nose pressed into someone’s smelly armpit, with the gallons of Lynx failing to block out the more unpleasant odours, thinking: “One day I will change all this.”
Go Gladys!
As for the rest of the Libs, Mike Baird will be treasurer but never premier. I sorta know his dad and he is one of the better eggs around. Mike seems to have his sense of decency and fairness. A bit like John Brogden without the unfortunate sexist jokes. This means he will be overlooked for some gibbering god-botherer from the Tony Abbott wing, of whom there are far too many lurking among the Libs. Once Barry has them over the line, the next noise you hear will be the Liberal lunatic right white ants chewing away at his legs.
If you are tempted to vote for the Libs, don’t. Vote Green or Independent. We can’t have this mob with unfettered power. It will only take them a short while to become as lazy as the incumbents. Cronyism and nepotism are not the sole preserve of the Labor Party but of any political party that has unfettered power and stays too long.
With pollies, you gotta keep them on their toes. Look at Julia; she is really hitting her straps these days. She has decided to govern and do things, even though she can feel the hot breath of the voters on her neck. She knows that Rudd nearly lost them government because people saw he was all talk. Julia is now action and I think people respect that.
During the election, the PM made that stupid announcement about the real Julia. She was uncertain and strangely muted because she was listening too much to the sort of people who brought you Bob Carr and Kristina Keneally.
Over Chrissie, she has reset herself and I think this is the real Julia. She is a fearsome weapon when on full noise, a great communicator and formidable negotiator. Suddenly, she has things she believes in, from multiculturalism (remember how Labor used to curl up in a ball when that came up?) to carbon price.
She has a great agenda for next three years. It doesn’t matter if she loses office; she will have got things done. Politics should always be about walking the high wire without a safety net. It is better to be in office for three years and do things than 16 years and do stuff all.
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