The NSW election is heating up with the official start only a few weeks away. On the Labor side, today’s SMH ran an article on how controls put in place by the Carr government to limit water front development have been removed:
A new draft landowners consent policy has dumped the NSW Maritime Authority’s environmental controls, public access requirements and provisions guarding against unsightly over-development of marinas, jetties, boatsheds, slipways, mooring pens, swimming pools, and club premises.
“The owner of Sydney Harbour is ditching its own environment management,” one long-serving Maritime Authority manager, Ivan Patrick, has warned.
After the draft policy was quietly released just before Christmas, about 40 authority staff wrote through their union to the Independent Commission Against Corruption complaining about “a campaign of intimidation” as powerful interests tried to pressure the Government for waterfront change.
If anyone is wondering how much it would cost to pressure the government for change, $13,000 at least gets you ministerial intervention in disputes with the NSW Maritime Authority.
The SMH also detailed how Joe Tripodi, the Waterways Minister, helped out a businessman in a stoush over a slipway. Said businessman had donated $13 000 to Tripodi’s last campaign.
Voters are all equal in NSW. But the good cash money son helps you jump the queue.
On the other side the NSW parliament, it seems that Opposition Leader Peter Debnam has signalled that even he doesn’t think he has a chance of being the next Premier. Otherwise he wouldn’t be promising to freeze all fares on NSW public transport for his first term.
The fare freeze, across all public buses, trains, ferries and CountryLink services, will come at a cost of $110 million over four years, Mr Debnam said.
“That will come out of consolidated revenue and it will be funded by the savings from the bureaucracy,” he said.
What commuters would like to hear about is how Debnam will improve public transport in NSW and especially Sydney. Debnam isn’t even trying with this one.
In other NSW election news, Antony Green’s election guide for Indifference 2007 is now online.
See, the Libs are all about their waterfront views and their greedy developer mates, and that’s why you join the workers’ party ‘cos it’s all about soul. Or so Tripodi and Richo always said.
In yet other NSW election news, my election guide is now online, far less accomplished or well-informed than Antony Green’s and not nearly so well written. To compensate for that it includes not only specific seats to be won but inaccurate and badly-informed forecasts of repercussions up to four years hence.
Is this what they mean they talk about flipping the switch to vaudeville?
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Zee goggles. Dey do nuttink.
Of course, ’savings from the bureaucracy’ is codeword for running the razor gang over the public service, not to mention cutting back the very services that said fare freeze is supposed to aid. (These are the same rebuttals trotted out in the Victorian election when Budgie-Smuggler Baillieu proposed free travel for school students.) And, as always, while public (State Transit) buses, which serve the Eastern Suburbs, Inner West, North Shore and Northern Beaches, will benefit from the freeze, it looks as though private buses, which are the dominant PT mode in Western Sydney, will still suffer from fare hikes.
Good thinking from the Member for Vaucluse and Shadow Minister for Western Sydney, again…
Just read the Smadge article on Speedo Pete, and picked up on this at the end:
Ladies and gentlemen, that’s the second most sensible thing Yeah-Ma has said since becoming Premier (after, of course, calling the head of Cross City Motorways a “f*ckwit”).
Did you see the news tonight, hwere Iemma began talking about the need to secure Sydney’s water supply with a desalination plant with the phrase ‘no premier worth his salt’?
It was pretty funny.