NSW Premier Nathan Rees insists his leadership is “solid as a rock”, as Twitter is abuzz with allegations of a NSW leadership spill. Mr Rees emerged from Tuesday’s caucus meeting saying there’s “no change at all” in the NSW leadership amid speculation he could be overthrown by Treasurer Eric Roozendaal or former minister and Rockdale MP Frank Sartor.

The rumor mill has continued to churn ever since Rees outmaneuvered the Labor right hard heads at the party’s annual state conference, dismissing cabinet ministers Joe Tripodi and Ian McDonald in the process.

A day may be all the time Rees has left.

Update: Looks like it’s on.

Update II: Via the ABC, Premier Rees has called a presser for 9AM.

Update III: There will be a special caucus meeting held at 6pm. A transcript of Rees statement can be found here.

Update IV (by AW): Once more, a Labor party hands power to a woman to let her clean up the mess.

Kristina Keneally has become the first female Premier of NSW after defeating incumbent Nathan Rees 47 to 21 votes in a Labor caucus meeting this evening.

The leadership ballot took place after Nathan Rees quit the NSW Labor leadership.

Mr Rees lost the spill motion 43 votes to 25.

Caucus then annointed Ms Keneally, the planning minister, as the state’s 42nd premier.

Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.

So what of the role of the media in all this?

With some exceptions, such as Laura Tingle on Lateline tonight (and, for that matter, Annabel Crabb the other night), the legacy media has intoned very predictable scripts (and as I’ve emphasised, forgotten an alternative one – “strong leader stands up to party dinosaurs and appeals over their heads to public” – which Malcolm Turnbull has been busily reinscribing).

Even in alternative media, such as Crikey, we’ve seen Bernard Keane (aside from his strange obsession with talking up virtues few others can see in Andrew Robb) swing from the standard “dead man walking” talk to “Turnbull is actually going to fight!”… why the latter was a surprise, I have no idea. I’d been suggesting some days earlier it was characteristic of his persona, and also politically rational. Yet the commentariat in their massed battalions seemed to anticipate his folding in the face of the Minchin putsch.

As Andrew Elder asked, could this be the week the journosphere failed?

Let’s not forget Turnbull may win on Tuesday.

What, then, of the frenzied expression of common press gallery wisdom?

Will the shorter Peter Van Onselen still be “Hockey can unify the party because he’s Minchin’s sock puppet”?

Perhaps the only “high level sources” they talk to are the ones who have an agenda. Like I said recently, it’s a bit like Imre Salusinszky having his fill of Chinese lunches at various eateries in and around Sussex Street and then retailing the latest goss on who’s going to overthrow Nathan Rees, only to find that Nathan Rees overthrew his detractors, and no journo saw it coming. Perhaps because something actually happened, as opposed to the endless non-event of leadership talk.

Sometimes politics doesn’t play to script.

Turning to Twitter, as Worst of Perth commented here, it’s been very interesting indeed. For anyone assiduously following this thing, it really has been the best real time news source, and quite amusing and fun too. It’s very well suited to these sorts of fast moving events, and the degree of inaccuracy and rumour is precisely the same as what makes it into the press and the telly. Not least because a fair bit of it is Sky News as it happens…

Interesting also to me has been the fact that a lot of the journos in Canberra who’ve been of greatest value are ones whose bylines are not well known. Maybe they’re working a bit harder than the tv stars and ubiquitous commentators?

On the other hand, as I’ve already alluded to, seasoned, intelligent and insightful commentators such as Laura Tingle prepared to buck the herd, whose work in the Fin Review is only available to those who spend 3 bucks on the paper, and who gets less air time than the show ponies, have shown their worth – as on Lateline tonight.

But, let’s get all this in perspective.

It’s also significant that while #spill is now the most popular tag on Australian Twitter, the fifth is #xmedialab – which is a discussion about a cross media conference that is on in Sydney at the moment. This medium doesn’t have much of a reach, and it has less of a reach than blogs, and slower moving media generally. And that may be because a lot of people are simply not interested in the scoop of the second (83 new tweets since you started searching).

At the same time, the core audience of political junkies, if Twitter is any indication, haven’t been clicking through to MSM stories at all. As Stephen Feneley commented at #spill, journos tweeting is a double edged sword.

That’ll be related to a shift where those who are most engaged around issues are finding their own spaces to interact, often private – lots of the old core of the web is shrinking as people highly attuned to particular communities of interest resort to discussing their own take on stories on social media sites such as Facebook without even looking at actual media reports, preferring to rely on others’ quick summaries of links through social distribution. Whether or not this becomes a wider trend is, at this stage, moot, but something is underway. But it replicates ancient social and cultural patterns – talking about stuff you’ve heard, which is different from silent reading, or even a more organised and structured discussion of what is read. The first is Twitter writ large.

Both practices have their value, but the assumption that reading and reflection is superior has had its day, unless it’s a normative pronouncement as opposed to a description of social reality.

So there may be a role for slow and fast in this fast moving media world. But slow needs to catch up, and fast needs to slow down and be more reflective if it’s to compete with the best of slow.

But that needs to be understood, and the limits of the publics who are both being invoked and created through these discourses have to be recognised too.

I will say that it is a bit of a worry that a heap of stuff that needs to have been factored in, including but not limited to the actual policy shift involved in the CPRS amendments, what’s happening elsewhere in the world in the lead up to Copenhagen, the new dimensions of climate change, and even what the government has at stake, has completely dropped off the radar. At LP, we’ve tried our best to keep that stuff in focus. But it’s been slim pickings anywhere else, with only a few distinguished exceptions such as New Matilda.

Some lessons need to be drawn from all this which transcend the tired dichotomies of legacy and social media, and I hope they will be.

Ps: LP can be followed on Twitter here.

Elsewhere: Axel Bruns at Gatewatching.

Update: The Newspoll results analysed tonight certainly suggest a disjunction between press commentary and voters’ sentiments, and indeed, the view from the Canberra political class and Liberal voters in the cities.

Ethics classes will be introduced in NSW schools, offering an alternative to religious studies for the first time in 100 years, the Premier, Nathan Rees, will announce today.

Beginning next year, and with the assistance of the the St James Ethics Centre, the trial will be held in 10 primary schools.

Judging by the rest of Clennell’s piece and discussion held this morning on Sydney’s ABC 702, it appears there is little real opposition to this idea from a battling Premier, who is clearly looking to (re)establish his ‘cleanskin’ credentials.

Update: Anglicans are taking issue with the plan.

Trialling special ethics classes was also a vote of “no confidence” in teachers, he said. Bishop Davis said the Government should realise that values of truth and honesty were modelled each day by teachers in the class room.

“Is there such an ethical hole in the current system?” Bishop Davis said.

“If so, then teach it as a part of the curriculum rather than allowing a non-religious group to enter the realm of the special religious education system.”

Bishop Davis said scripture had been taught in NSW schools for more than 120 years and provided a valuable link with local religious institutions.

“I can’t understand why the Premier doesn’t value that,” he said.

In handing down its report, the inquiry said it found no corrupt activity in relation to the land.

“It’s correct to say that we did not find any corrupt activity in that regard,” inquiry chair and Nationals MP Jenny Gardiner said.

However, the inquiry, which included two days of public hearings, more generally put the spotlight on the potential influence of property developers in the planning system.

As such, the report calls for wide-ranging reform of NSW election and campaign funding laws and in particular, tighter regulation of political donations.

This follows Premier Rees promises at the the eventful annual State Labor conference, held last week, to revamp how Government deals with lobbyists and developers.

The committee made eleven recommendations reinforcing the Premier’s earlier pledge to reform the system, and that, “….the Premier adopt the model for funding of the NSW electoral scheme proposed by the NSW Legislative Council Select Committee on Electoral and Political Party Funding, and implement the Committee’s recommendations in full.”

These include the banning of political donations by corporations and other organisations, a cap on individual donations and election spending, timely disclosures of donations and election spending, plus tougher policing and penalities for non-compliance.

In a dissenting opinion, Greens MLC Sylvia Hale singled out planning minister Kristina Keneally for having a fundamental misunderstanding of the Westminster system.

New South Wales, however, does not operate under a presidential system. Had the Minister been more conscious of this fact, she may have been more mindful in the execution of her parliamentary and legal responsibilities and less inclined to countenance the activities of developers and their lobbyists, activities that have undermined the integrity of, and public confidence in, the planning and development system of this State. Ministerial indifference to a department’s day-to-day affairs, its procedures and employment policies, may actually subvert the provision to ministers of “fearless and frank” advice.

However, this chapter isn’t entirely closed, with questions remaining to be answered by Labor Party mover and shaker and lobbyist Graham Richardson on his involvement.

It’s a similar style of proceeding to Imre Salusinszky’s; who, incidentally, looked almost disappointed that Nathan Rees had actually put a bomb under the endless round of destabilisation at NSW Labor conference. All those Chinese lunches and hot tips over yum cha about Della or Kristina Keneally, or someone, being Premier before the month or year is out or whenevs, gone to waste.

Much more astute was the commentary in today’s Fin Review and Crikey – Turnbull is being squeezed by a pincer movement – Minchin within and Rudd without. The commentariat should wake up to the fact that the truth is Labor would like to see Mal go – because he’s actually the most plausible opponent (and who knows what he could have done had he not been forced to lead such a rabble – including the Coalition’s false friends in the media among the troops in constant revolt).

No one else the Libs could put up against Rudd would have even a ghost of a chance.

… which leads me to the “honeymoon is over” theme. If indeed it is true that there has been a bit of a shift in the electorate’s mood (and as I’ve said recently, I think it’s too early to call that), the so-called return to normalcy is much more likely to be a result of relief that the effects of the GFC are finally past us, rather than any supposed “doubts” about Rudd or concerns about asylum seekers. Anyone who’s ever run a focus group can readily imagine how such “doubts” could come up, without having any massive significance. In fact, if you’re doing your job, you’d be asking the same questions about Turnbull. I smell a big rat on this particular media leak. And on the latter, I think it’s much more probable that it’s the messiness of Rudd’s message, and the sheer volume of ‘crisis’ rhetoric that’s likely to account for the blip, if that’s it at all.

The biggest failing of the public polls, unlike the parties’ tracking polls, is that they don’t ask any questions which would disclose the salience of issues and events to vote shifts. That’s why a lot of the hackneyed commentary is just that. If they did, of course, it would cost a bit more, and they’d need to know a bit more about stats to interpret them, and it would also forever destroy the myth that there’s some privileged insight political journos have.

But in the absence of access to such data, the more prosaic hypothesis is that voters want to see the government act on what it promised to do – bread and butter improvements in service delivery, primarily. The Rudd government, if not the commentariat, will be aware of this, and I’d expect a switch in the rhetoric very quickly after parliament rises for the year and the political shenanigans around the CPRS wear out their use by date as political fodder for beating up the opposition.

So – does this mean that Labor’s support is “soft” in the absence of something the government portrayed as a national emergency? Well, yes, sort of. But what needs to be recalled here is that Rudd has always been determined to maintain a large lead in the polls, and thus prepared to lose a few points during a campaign. In part that’s a reflection that his own campaigning skills (as opposed to political skills) aren’t the best ever. It also builds up a cushion for all sorts of fires to burst out, compensates for regional and state based weaknesses (and drag by unpopular Labor administrations).

It’s a classic State Labor strategy.

It may not – in the different environment of federal politics – lead to a landslide 2nd term victory (though it might). It does rest on keeping the opposition irrelevant, and making them bear all the brunt of looking political and petty. So far it’s working. It works in part because most of the parliamentary theatre – of so much interest to Liberals and media alike – is perceived negatively by the electorate, if not ignored entirely. Rudd’s victory was a victory for a strategy which recognised that people were sick of John Howard, in part because he got too political. That strategy is still in place. If Turnbull is toppled, it’ll only reinforce its success.

In other words, the obsessive focus of the media on the minutiae of the political cycle, and the constant reporting and inciting of leadership divisions and rumblings in Liberal ranks, plays into Rudd’s hands, rather than “putting the government under scrutiny”. If you actually wanted to go looking for some real political problems the Rudd government would not want people to read about, you wouldn’t have to look too far.

A ministerial re-shuffle could be on the cards in New South Wales, with the Premier Nathan Rees yesterday given the power to sack ministers. Nathan Rees had the backing of both the left and the right factions at yesterday’s Labor Party conference in Sydney.

The ALP’s General Secretary, Matt Thistlethwaite, said it was important to give the Premier the power to choose his team. “In my view delegates, if we are going to be a modern Labor Party the time has come for us to back the Premier,” he said.

The speculation of a reshuffle, was spot on with Ports Minister Joe Tripodi and Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald immediately shown the door – both controversial figures in NSW politics.

There has been a shake-up in the New South Wales Government, with two senior ministers sacked. Finance minister Joe Tripodi is gone, as is the primary industries minister Ian Macdonald. Coming into the ministry is the MP for Heathcote Paul McLeay, and the Upper House MP Peter Primrose.

The Punch’s David Penberthy has written a lively account of the Rees coup that’s well worth a read.

Other important developments at the conference was the banning of developer donations and new rules on the conduct and role of lobbyists in how they do business with government.

Political donations from developers will be banned in NSW under sweeping changes to campaign funding announced by Premier Nathan Rees yesterday.

And lobbyists will be stopped from meeting departmental officials in coffee shops, with all meetings to be held on official premises or on the sites of proposed developments.

Mr Rees said lobbyists had a role to play, but contacts with government should be formal, with full minutes of meetings taken and retained.

Putting aside the possibility of a challenge to Rees leadership from the disaffected, what is clear from these moves is that the state party belongs to the Premier. He has successfully cleared the deck of two issues that negatively impact voter intentions, solidified his position and taken control.

It’s his team and rules and this is what he will be taking to the next election. Only time will tell if this conference was a turning point for Labor in NSW or if this was just another rearranging of the deck chairs.

Update: Imre Salusinszky gives his take on Tripodi and the Rees dumping.

Update II: Damien Murphy and Brian Robbins in the Sydney Morning Herald also explain Tripodi.

Update III: A good narrative of the weekend from the Sydney Morning Herald’s Andrew Clennell.

Final update: Quentin Demster on Rees stand against developers.

But in the parallel world where the fixed four year term is decried as the fountain of all evil, it seems to me something odd is going on. Paul Kelly traces the constitutional change back to the Greiner regime, but downplays the fact that the movement towards fixed terms in the early 90s was part of a range of managerialist measures and an overarching approach to governance which argued – reasonably explicitly – that political accountability was an annoying obstacle to “reform”. This was an era when all manner of measures – privatisation, purchaser/provider splits, downsizing the public service, closing schools and hospitals and competition policy – were trumpeted by elites as necessary but largely rejected by public opinion.

Indeed, there’s a residue of this managerialist politics apparent in the Rees government’s fetishisation of the state’s AAA credit rating.

However, the managerialists of yesterday are the populists of today. But I’m completely puzzled by Paul Kelly’s logic here:

He means a device to enable an election to be held mid-term to save NSW from a truly disastrous government, such as the present administration. The point is that in a globalised world, guaranteed political tenure is a fatal flaw. The NSW experience shows that the fixed four-year term model is a fraud on the public interest.

We are losing the political culture that surrounds the Westminster model. Its flexibility, depicted as a problem, is a virtue. It means that pressure can mount on bad governments for an election and that strong governments, when they need a new mandate to confront a crisis, can seek that mandate.

The inability to procure an election in NSW at present does not help the people of NSW. It assists only the Labor machine that tries to run the state in its own interest.

Just as I’m not surprised that a state government should resist calls to “sack itself”, I’m completely at a loss to understand how – if the Greiner era constitutional changes had never happened – the Rees government would be wanting to rush to an election where it would probably be wiped off the electoral planet in short order. Whether or not NSW is now some apocalyptic wasteland, I can’t say. I haven’t been to Sydney since February (and strangely I found it quite easy and convenient to get around by train then.) But I can’t see how some sort of constitutional recall provision (presumably administered more independently than by the tabloid press) is at all consistent with the Westminister model, or that governments under the Westminster model are constantly attempting to engineer their own defeat and that NSW Labor is being prevented from doing that by a pesky constitutional provision. I’m forced, rather, to conclude that certain elites thought populism was a horrible thing last decade but now think it’s all the rage. Because, after all, newspaper columnists are the voice of the people, aren’t they?

Elsewhere: Some interesting reflections from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion on these newspaper crusades and their implications:

Is it a newspaper or some kind of uber citizen? The will of the paper is the big story of the day. Could they be more self-referential? Would it have been more appropriate for the editor to publish a letter to himself?

Update: Andrew Bartlett on the case for three year terms.

So what’s Australia’s most incompetent state government decide to do? Raise taxes, cut services, and cut back planned infrastructure spending. You’d swear Rees, and NSW Treasurer Eric Roozendaal, are taking their tax policies from Herbert Hoover.

To be fair, there are some good ideas, most notably peak-hour congestion tolling on the Harbour Bridge. But in the large, this is pushing NSW into recession, not out of it. And it’s probably going to be the Federal Government’s job to tip more money into NSW to make up the difference. Thanks, Nathan, for helping to make Malcolm Turnbull look prescient.