I feel no sense of obligation to any politician who claims credit for a barely adequate service provided by underresourced people, let alone the sort of gratitude demanded by Labor.

Yep. NSW Labor act like the husband who expects a round of applause from his wife because he’s cooked tinned soup for the kid’s dinner one Saturday. ‘Waddaya mean it’s not brilliant ?’.

But how did it come to this pass ? How exactly did we end up with Tripodi as de-facto Premier of NSW for 14 months. To what extent was Carr complicit in the development of this Cabinet of self-interested trough-swillers ? To what extent did he mitigate it ? Same for Arbib. Did he leave because of the stench or the boredom? To what extent did Arbib build this gluttonous sloth that masquerades as a government? Will he help develop the same
monstrosity for Rudd ?

If you’re in the mood for writing an essay I’d like to read it.

If you work in state government offices, as I have, you’ll see the better public servants have Victorian government manuals on their desks. Why? Because Victorians have the closest thing this country has to joined-up government. NSW leads the nation in nothing for which the state government can take credit.

If you want to find examples of far-right tendencies in the NSW Liberals, you’ll find them (just like Liberal voters find evidence of “socialism” where socialists themselves find only despair. Relying on Hansard to judge a political party is like diagnosing someone’s health by taking their temperature. You’ll find the far-right being pushed to the margins, and in my experience they shriek loudest when they’re being screwed, so shriek away boys and fool people like Ginja.

If you remember Bannon, you’d also remember some of the … questionable … decisions Olsen made – the Motorola deal, the Southwestern Freeway, selling the electricity and water, … the list goes on.

Far be it from me to suggest there might have been a couple of really nice lunches involved.

I remember the Bannon years.
Incompetence come in Red and Blue and is not ideologically constrained.

They’re still streets ahead of the alternative.

I take your points. But this is a State Govt.
Making the choo-choos go round and so on. It’s all about Service Delivery Very run of the mill stuff, most of which will ne handled by bureacrats while the MPs travel around in shiny cars.

O’Farrell won’t invade Iraq.

And I doubt the NSW Right sings The Internationale except on fancy dress night. Is the ideological distance really very far ?

That’s why I vote Green.

The Libs are no longer banging on about NSW being a basket case economically. Why? Because it’s actually doing better than the other states.

Baraholka, many on the Left were so disgusted with the Keating government in ’96 they decided to give Labor a firm kicking. After all, John Howard was making all kinds of moderate noises and how bad could it be? After dogs and balaclavas on the waterfront, the cynical use of the Tampa incident and the co-opting of Hansonism, Iraq, indifference to global warming (indeed the active wrecking of international talks by Howard), and the most extreme IR laws ever introduced into a modern western democracy, many understood how bad it could be.

You’ll learn this the hard way if the Libs get in. Back in ’88 when Greiner won there still was a moderate faction in the Liberal Party – that faction no longer exists.